cindy's world

I can tell by the past few posts that this diet is killing my brain function. My posts are syntactically uncreative and unexpressive. So of course I couldn’t figure out my camera in taking the photo for the last post. The only thing I was excited about all week was purchasing the Ultimate Cat Litter Box, which is shaped like one of those old-fashioned claw-footed bathtubs. Let’s see Dodo kick his litter out of THIS baby. I’m tired of sweeping litter crystals off the floor in the kitty corner all the time, and even having a litter mat (which you can see in the photo) which is supposed to keep litter from rolling everywhere doesn’t help all that much. Unfortunately, I left before Dodo even discovered the new litter box, so I hope he’s doing well with it at home. I better not go home and find cat pee and poo all around the box cuz Dodo couldn’t bring himself to enter something so odd and foreign. But I’m excited to see how he did with it. It’s huuuge.

It’s awfully nice of you guys to bear with me through photos of my cat’s toilet, so tomorrow I’m gonna reward you with photos of our new home. We’re doing a home inspection in the afternoon.

I was processing divorce cases last week when I came across three files in a row where the couple was married for 19 years and now requesting divorce. “What is this? They were married for 19 years and then suddenly realized that the marriage was sooo bad that they HAVE to be divorced before their 20th anniversary?”
My courtroom assistant said simply, “Their kids are grown.”
Oh! I’d never thought about that, and that makes perfect sense. They probably had a kid within a year of the wedding and 19 years later, when the child is now a legal adult at age 18, divorce is simple without issues of child support, legal and physical custody, and visitation.

Since I don’t have kids, I didn’t think about it in that kind of perspective, the whole counting backwards to see when the kid was born thing. I remember the first time it occurred to me to count backwards with respect to other child things. It was 1999 and I was in a computer lab as part of my training for this job. I was chatting with a big butch lesbian, another member of my class, about how growing up, all my friends and cousins with siblings had birthdays really close to their siblings. For example, my cousins Diana and Jennifer have a 3 year age difference, but their birthdays are about 2 weeks apart. MOH Vicky’s sister Karen is 3 years younger, but their birthdays are about a week apart in the same month. When I met a girl in grade school whose birthday was 3-4 months away from her younger sister’s, I refused to believe that they were sisters because their birthdays were too far apart. I laughed at the conclusions my childhood self drew at all the coincidental close birthdays of siblings. The classmate said, “It’s probably not a coincidence. It means that your friends’ parents kept having sex at the same time in the years.” I remember going quiet as I processed this new thought. Imagining friends’ parents having sex was new to me, even in such practical parameters. I only mention this classmate’s sexual orientation because it discredits me to not have thought of this obvious explanation before, when someone who wouldn’t be having child-making sex with a spouse was aware of this like it was nothing.

So of course now I always count backwards 9 months. My cousins were both born in late October/early November? What’s so special about 9 months before that spurred the sexual celebration? (ew.) Maybe Valentine’s Day. Maybe cold weather. MOH Vicky and her sister were both born in May? What was 9 months ago? (ew.) August. I don’t know of any special holidays in August. Maybe it was a wedding anniversary. (ew.) I was born at the end of June. What was 9 months before that? My parents’ October honeymoon. (ew ew ew!) This might be a curse.

Today is my birthday and it started off odd. I’d forgotten to turn my phone back on sound after the dance concert last night, so when I crawled out of bed at 11am, I saw I’d missed 5 calls already. After listening to 5 voice mails, turned out only 2 of them (from MOH Vicky and Busykitty Vanessa) had called to wish me a happy birthday. The other 3 called for random other reasons. I did get a text message from my friend Erin wishing me a happy birthday, though. And then my college best friend Edgar called. I never hear from him anymore and he used to make a point of paging me at midnight to be the first to wish me a happy birthday in years past, so I expected it to be one of those phone calls. Instead, he’d called to ask if it’s okay to bring his RSVP for our wedding to my parents’ house directly since he’d be late mailing it, and we caught up about his recent family vacation. He never mentioned my birthday. Weird.

Around 1:45 p.m. Mr. W’s daughter came by to meet me as we’d agreed upon and we went to the qipao dressmaker’s shop to get her measured for her dress. I’d told her that she’s part of the wedding party as singer for our wedding and that she could wear whatever she wanted, but that my bridesmaids were all wearing traditional Chinese dresses. She eagerly said she’d like to wear one, too. So we went to the shop and she flipped through the fabric sample books. She found a great deep teal colored silk with bamboo leaf embroidery, then decided on a dress design she liked. We had her try on a sample dress in that design and she looked beautiful. She customized it by asking for a shorter skirt and changed some of the trim colors, got measured, and half an hour later we were off. I’m really excited about her dress. It’s Chinese-inspired but not traditional with a deep open V-neck collar with a mesh covering over the V. She wants to wear the dress for a school dance next year. I got a great deal, too; since this is my sixth dress order from this seamstress, she gave it to me for $80 under current pricing. I think I like Daughter’s dress most out of all the dresses that I’ve ordered. I probably couldn’t pull off a cut like that myself, tho.

After the dress shop we had a quick meal at Downtown Disney. She needed to get a replacement Jack Skellington antenna ball for her dad for a belated Father’s Day present. Unlike Mr. W’s rant claimed, these suckers are not collector’s items, are not $25 each, are not out of circulation. There was a giant tub of them for $4 each. We laughed about how we ought to tell Mr. W that it was impossible to find and that we had to beg the Disney Store manager to open the vault to release this rare collectable antenna topper for us and that when he did, it cost an arm and a leg to purchase. And she did tell him that story, right before breaking the news to Mr. W that his precious antenna ball isn’t valuable to anyone else but him. He was nevertheless happy as he nervously installed this new Jack onto his car antenna, and I had a great one-on-one time with Daughter, as always.

We had reservations for a joint birthday dinner at Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse. Mr. W’s son turned 19 on Friday, and of course I turn 32 today. I hadn’t had fine dining like that in years, Mr. W never used to appreciate fine dining because he’d just considered it rip-off overpriced food for stupid rich people, and the kids had never even heard of this restaurant. It was a really fun dinner. Both kids participated in the dinner conversation, we laughed a lot, made fun of the rich people around us (a large table behind us caught our attention as they sang “happy birthday”, and we turned to see that they were celebrating a 2 year old’s birthday. Son and Daughter cracked up and said how sad it was that the kid probably *really* wants to have her birthday at Chuck E. Cheese but was forced to sit here and gnaw on $60 steak instead.), had a great delicious dinner where both kids ordered their steaks medium and said it was the best filet mignon they’ve ever had in their lives despite never wanting to eat “bloody meat” before. Mr. W declared the dinner a great success and said he hadn’t had such long conversations with his kids in a long time. Hope this is a predecessor of great things to come.

To balance the karma between this post and the last, which I’ve had to do with increasing frequency, I’m gonna post something sweet and sappy tonite.

Mr. W invited me to an impromptu lunch yesterday, since I’ve not been working out lately anyway. We decided to go to a nearby park and walk around and enjoy the slightly cooler sunlight. On the way to his car, I forgot what the topic of our casual chat was, but I said something jokingly about him leaving me. “That’ll make it easy for you to leave me,” or something.
He put his arm around me, pulled me against his side and kissed the top of my head, and said, “I’ll never leave you.”
“Really? What if I go crazy?”
“Nope.”
“And I don’t mean the cute kind of crazy.”
He laughed. “You’re already that.”
“What if I’m so crazy I have to be institutionalized?”
“Then I’ll go with you. I’ll probably be more comfortable there with you, anyway.”

Awww. I think it was just last year or maybe a couple of years ago when we had a conversation that started the exact same way, except it went somewhere different. That conversation:
“I’ll never leave you.”
“Really? What if I go crazy?”
“If you let me drive you crazy then you and I aren’t supposed to be together.”
“What if I didn’t LET YOU, I just went crazy?”
“Same thing. If you’re crazy then we’re not meant to be together.”

But that was before he loved me enough to propose. See, men can change.

I need to make up for the quality of my posts lately which, I admit, have been about as interesting as a strange kid coming up to you and telling you about his current 2nd grade science project, and you don’t like kids, and you flunked Science, and you don’t understand English. So here’s something kinda “wrong” that I did a couple weekends ago. (What, you thought I’d make up for bad writing with GOOD writing? Ptthh.)

Last Sunday when Mr. W and I were at my parents’ having dinner, my mom asked when our appointment for engagement photos were, and she said she wanted to come along. I don’t know why she wanted to be there, but as I’m trying to be charitable to my mother, I said optimistically that if she comes, she could decide whether she likes the way this lady does hair and makeup, and see if she wants to book a hair/makeup appointment with her on the day of our wedding. My entire bridal party is going to. But really I was imagining my mom being a total backseat driver when she’s there. “Can you make her makeup lighter? How do we make this look natural? I don’t think her hair should be that high. Can you block off her face a little bit with hair on the side so her face looks smaller? I think she’s wearing too much eye makeup. Can you do something about her skin? I tell her to eat more fruit so that she wouldn’t have all these pimples but kids these days *sigh* never listen to their parents.” And then during the photo shoot, “I think her arm looks too big like that. Can you make her look thinner? Cindy, don’t lean forward like that, you look so unspirited. I don’t think that’s a good pose. Hey, do the peace sign!”
My mom snapped me out of my daydream grimace by asking whether we need to bring anything, like changes of clothing or my bridal gown. I told her that no, the studio will have everything. And I’m not going to wear the bridal gown until the wedding. She asked, “They’ll have men’s clothes, too?”
“I’m sure they do, cuz they told me all he needs to have with him are black socks.”
“JUST black socks?” my mom said jokingly.
Mr. W joined in. “So I’ll just be naked with black socks on? That might be weird.”
And here’s the wrong part. I said thoughtfully and yet without thinking, “Hmm, that’s true. Maybe you should have three black socks.”
Mr. W laughed. One of my parents laughed, and I don’t remember which one. But because the other one didn’t laugh that much, it hit me that I’ve now directly inferred to, AND produced a mental image of, the penis attached to the man who is doing their daughter.

Wrong!!

The phrase meaning “to pant” is “sucking wind,” right? How come when I typed that in the title, I suddenly got the mental image of some big strange man bending over, my face behind his butt, and breathing deeply in with my mouth while he farts?

I was feeling better last nite after speaking to my realtor, but of course after the fight I was wheezing again. I went to the gym at lunch, did heavy weights which impressed a judge that happened to be at the gym, noted my slow recovery time in between sets as I gasped to get air into my lungs, and then when I got back to work, I staggered to a bailiff who used to be a paramedic before she became a sheriff. I asked her the symptoms of asthma, and she said she has her stethoscope in her courtroom so we went there and she listened to all 4 quadrants of my lungs and to my heart. She said altho my pulse is fast, it’s strong and clean, and my lungs sound clear. If it’s allergen-induced asthma, it’s still very mild. If it doesn’t clear up in a week, she said to see the doctor.

Then she asked if I was stressed or having panic attacks. I said I wasn’t stressed and how could I be panicking for 5 days straight? She said I may not be aware of my panic or stress, but my body knows. After all, I have a lot going on right now. Wedding’s coming up, there’s the house thing so of course finances are an issue. I shrugged.

When we got to Mr. W’s house earlier, I beelined for his laptop and got on my blog. Mr. W suddenly said, “OOOOH, I know what your panic attacks and stress is over! Internet withdrawal!” I said that Vanessa had already said that. She commented in the post about my breathing problems that my body is having stress attacks out of boredom since I can’t go online during work. Turned out Mr. W meant something slightly different. “You go right for the computer when you get home. You’re anxious from not being able to blog and write when you’re at work.” That’s true. Blogging has been a major source of therapy for me, and not being able to blog forces me to keep thoughts and emotions bottled up inside with no pressure release for HOURS. I also haven’t been sleeping much cuz what am I doing in the evenings at home? Getting my online time in! Maybe I should start writing blog posts at work to email to myself.

Reading a post about anny’s amazing day that must’ve been colored with crapola crayons, I was reminded of something that happened to Mr. W in Vegas after his niece’s wedding on Saturday.

Mr. W, his daughter, and I walked to his car in the parking lot of the hotel where the niece’s reception was held to find that the Jack Skellington antenna ball that he’d had on his car for the past 2 years was gone. Mr. W noticed it first and just about lost his mind. Jack Skellington is his all-time favorite character, and for the next 5 minutes his mouth was ablaze spewing forth hexes and curses of violent car accident deaths for the Nevada delinquents who had the failed social skills and the absolute lack of respect as to steal someone’s antenna ball. He ranted about how he’d had the antenna ball a year before he put it on his car because he was afraid someone would steal it but that it had remained in place for 2 years as his car identifier but one day in Vegas and this expensive irreplaceable collectible is gone forevermore. More wishes of grisly deaths for the perpetrators.
I suppose I wasn’t very supportive when I said, “So to you the proper punishment for stealing a styrofoam antenna ball is death?”
I got an earful about how it’s a rare high-quality, plastic antenna ball and not one of those abundant cheapy styro ones.
So I decided to be more supportive. I offered my and Daughter’s services, promising “We’ll jack up the jackass who jacked your Jack!”
Daughter’s laughter ended Mr. W’s rant.

Today was almost a bad day, but my supervisor stuck his neck out and saved me from being floated to Long Beach. Altho in retrospect that may not have ended badly cuz then I can visit bridesmaid Sandy and see the teeny little 1-pound kittens she’s currently fostering. What made it a rather unpleasant day, was my finding a CD-Rom of my old diary entries from some years ago and deciding to peek through those entries. I thought it was so long ago that it wouldn’t really affect me. Well, that was a stupid assumption. If you think my blog posts are overly detailed, you should see my diary entries. I read about my dreams, my conversations, my fears, and from my now older, wiser and future perspective, wanted to reach into those words in the past and smack the girl writing them for being too nice and giving, and wanted to strangle the people she wrote about for the games they were playing and red flags that are so obvious now. I’d kept reading because I’d kept hoping that the next day’s entry would lead to her standing up for herself and putting the smack down, that she would get the answers to the questions eating her alive, that she would rise up, shake off the self-doubt and know, know that it’s not her. There’s nothing wrong with her. But I just watched her give more and get emptiness in return, just like I knew the story would go, because she would not wake up for another couple of years.

The only good things I found was that I love my (old) sense of humor which made me laugh out loud, and I love how artistically I was able to write due to the overload of emotions. For example, this was apparently my old AFK message for when I was sleeping:
I’m chasing butterflies while the lilies wave me closer and the weeping willows dip their tendrils into silver to swing by my hair and baptize me…

I was in a crappy mood driving home, and spoke to Dwaine on my cell phone. (Mr. W was busy.) He agreed that it was a dumb thing to do, reliving my past through my diary, and said half-jokingly that if God had meant for us to remember painful past details, he wouldn’t have made us forgetful with time. He said he has days when he’d be driving or something and his thoughts would drift to remember something he’d said in the past that would make him cringe now. I said I’ve had those moments. There are things I’ve said or done that in retrospect I can’t believe I’d said or done, and remembering those totally made me cringe. Dwaine said that the cringing is God’s electric shock teaching us a lesson that we shouldn’t be going around remembering stuff. The laughter made me feel much better. On a more serious note, Dwaine said that the reason I’m upset and cringe is that I’m a different person now from who I was before, and the growth ensures that I don’t let myself be in that past situation again. Amen to that.

Tuesday evening was wonderful. I’d decided it was time to get a trim since I was spending entirely too much time peeling split ends when I was supposed to be working, so after I got home after work, I rifled through my coupon box in search of local haircut discounts. I’m not loyal to any particular hairstylist or salon, so I usually just go to what I can get cheap, be it Supercuts, Fantastic Sam’s, Great Clips. This time I dug out a promotional coupon for a free haircut at a local salon (not a chain) which was in a “welcome to the neighborhood!” coupon book the City mailed me when I bought this house 7.5 years ago. No expiration date was printed on the coupon, so I called the salon and asked if they still honored it. The receptionist was amused at this coupon, since it apparently wasn’t in circulation anymore the past 6 years, and checked with the owner of the salon. The owner, Donna, said she’d honor it and asked me to be in at 6:45p. That gives me a couple of hours to feed/water my coworker’s cats (I’m cat-sitting since she’s in Vegas for a few days) and I decided to go shopping for my own dress to wear to Mr. W’s niece’s wedding this Saturday.

After shopping at a few local discount clothing stores, I decided that the problem with today’s trend is that they all look like maternity wear. Everything is high-waisted (or empire-waisted) with tons of fabric floating underneath, so that all the shirts and dresses look like babydolls. I’m short and curvy, so if you take the widest part of my chest and just drape fabric down to the widest part of my hips, I become a giant rectangle. Mr. W’s daughter is very tall and slender, so the current fashion is pretty flattering on her, making her look more fluid and less gangly. And then a thought: should I be stocking up on this unflattering fashion right now for future use AS maternity wear? Cuz with my luck, when I actually am pregnant it’ll only be hip-huggers or high-waisted bottoms and form-fitting tops in style. After trying on many many dresses that looked cute hanging there but terrible on my frame, I found myself in the discounted department store Ross. I grabbed a ton of dresses I thought might have potential and the first one I tried on was a fitted dress so amazing on me that I had to step out of the dressing room to see myself in the 3-angled mirror, in case the dressing room mirror was a freak circus elongating one. I still looked shockingly nice. I tried on the other 3 dresses I had in there, and none of them looked decent, so I was pretty sure it wasn’t the mirror. I tried on the first dress again, admired its tiny cap sleeves that surprisingly didn’t make my arms look huge, the form-fitting body that surprisingly hid my fat due to the dark brown and maroon print, the asymmetrical V-shaped skirt hem and upper-body-elongating deep V-neck, and bought it. $9.99. Even if it dissolved after I wore it it’d still be worth it. Despite the fact that Ross is notorious for its long slow lines which I did observe as I walked in, when I was ready to pay there was nobody in line. I quickly got out and made it to my hair appointment exactly on time.

Donna, the salon owner, did my hair because the other stylists working there were independent contractors renting space so she did not make them honor an outdated coupon for a free haircut. Donna asked me what I was looking for in the haircut, and I explained that my hair was entirely too long and shapeless now, and I needed a trim. Maybe about 3 inches, my wedding makeup artist had told me, so that she could still do a messy up-do for the wedding in a few months. Donna started snipping away and since we were on the topic of weddings, she mentioned that her daughter (whom she’d dragged in there to work the receptionist desk for her that day) is also engaged and was looking for a venue. So the three of us, since all the other stylists had left by this time, had a nice talk about weddings and experiences and venues. Her daughter Alison and I appeared to share the exact same brain when it came to weddings, practical and thrifty to a fault, totally non-girly, so our chat was very productive. I mentioned I happened to have my wedding binder in the car (passed on to me from Anny’s wedding), so after the shampoo I ran out to the car to grab it for Alison to examine. As Alison made photocopies of useful information in there, we talked about what a great coincidence it was that I was there, since I happened to find the coupon, Donna happened to be working, she happened to have forced Alison in to keep her company, and I happen to have the wedding binder with me. At the end of my free haircut, I tipped Donna $5 and she gave me a “new customer kit,” a mug, pencil, and coupon for $5 off my next appointment. She ended up lopping off about 5 inches, I’m a little nervous about it being up-do-able, but I love it. It’ll grow another inch and a half by the wedding.

Figure-flattering dress: $9.99
Complimentary haircut: $0.00
Looking cute, younger, and feeling like I helped someone with something she was stressed and lost about: Priceless.

Oh, and the chipmunk cheeks seem unnoticeable now, too. My original theory was that it wasn’t that my cheeks got rounder, it was that my neck got skinnier, but now I think it was the hair.

Bridal alterations: My mom had nothing bad to say about the dress. She was charmed by its simplicity. She even went so far as to state that my arms actually DON’T look big in this particular dress. She tried to call my dad to have him come to the dressing area to see me in the dress, and I overheard her tell him it looks very good, but he didn’t want to go thru the hassle and opted to wait outside in the store area. The alteration lady had to bring up my skirt a lot at the hem, and bring in the attached petticoat a lot. I tried the dress on first with that bustier that gave me nice push-up cleavage but also pushed fat up everywhere else, and remarked how I hated the bubble of fat that rises above my bodice due to the bustier. The alteration lady (who was not the lady I spoke to on the phone who forbade me to NOT wear a bustier) suggested that if I’m more comfortable without the bustier, that she can simply stitch in bra cups inside the dress. Really? Off the bustier came and instantly the dress was so incredibly more comfortable, it felt like jammies. Sure I look flatter in the dress now and I had to pay for the cups, but it is worth the smoother silhouette. Due to the loss of excess fabric from the bustier, my dress has to be taken in half an inch on either side of my ribs along the vertical seams. Then they said if I have my veil, they’ll steam it for me and smooth out the wrinkles along with the dress cleaning after alterations. So I just said screw it, I’ll buy my veil right then and there. My mom called my dad in for his opinion, I walked out to the store area in my pinned up dress, and when my dad saw my dress he exclaimed, “So plain?!” My mom said almost defensively, “I like plain and simple.” My parents helped me pick out a veil, and I ended up with a simple single-layer short veil that cost less than the one I was gonna order online, anyway. I was content with that purchase. What I am NOT content with, and grow increasingly salty about, is the fact that my alterations cost more than my bridal gown. I seriously think they ripped me off. I noticed that instead of marking the spot on the alterations ticket that said “Take in or let out sides,” which the price chart in the dressing room listed as “$35 and up,” after some Spanish instruction from another lady, my alteration lady marked “Take in zipper” and wrote $95. I know zippers probably take more work, but they didn’t touch my zipper! Also, the price chart listed hemming the skirt as $75 and up or something like that, and they charged me $150! WTF! I could tell the lady had written $120 and then the other lady babbled something to her in Spanish so this lady then changed it to $150. When the alteration ticket was rung up at the register by the front cashier, the amount for each item was so much that they had to break it down and ring it up as separate items. “Take in zipper” was rung up twice, once with $65 and another with $30. “Alter skirt – hem” was rung up once for $120, then itemized again as “Alter skirt – take in or let out” for another $30. Clearly they’re overcharging beyond what their computer is programmed to charge cuz they did not take in the skirt, they merely shortened the hem which apparently had a maximum charge on the register program as $120. I’m so pissed off right now even tho it’s so many hours later, cuz the more I examine the alteration ticket, the more I feel they deliberately ripped me off. I didn’t even need a bustle done and the price is outrageous. When I went with Mr. W’s niece to a Vegas branch of this same bridal shop, she had the hems done, inches taken out (she’d gained some weight since the dress purchase), and bustles put in, and it came out to about this much or less. I’m so gonna call them tomorrow and have a fit.

Dad’s tuxedo: Mr. W came by my house and picked me and my parents up after we got back from the bridal alteration appointment, and drove us to his tux guy. I can’t believe how suave a man looks in a nice tuxedo. My dad looked instantly younger, slimmer, classier, and richer. He opted for the same Chaps (by Ralph Lauren) tux and vest set that Mr. W and his groomsmen got. He also picked up some nice onyx cuff links/buttons set as well as second set of unique blue stone cufflinks. My mom was so charmed by my dad, in a tux for the first time in his life, that she got this giant smile on her face and pranced over to him, hugged his arm, and said, “I wanna marry you again!” My mom’s gonna look pretty swanky herself in her custom-made mother’s dress, so they’ll make a handsome couple at the wedding.

Mr. W treated us to dinner at some fish restaurant near the tux place, and it was expensive food. My parents split their plate cuz the waitress misunderstood them when they placed their order, but it worked out cuz we were all ridiculously stuffed. I was pretty salty by this time about the alterations cost, so I didn’t even protest Mr. W paying for everyone. Tomorrow is a Chinese festival holiday where we get to eat one of my favorite foods, glutinous rice steamed in long banana (?) leaves, and we’re gonna have a great meal at my grandma’s for lunch, then we’re all going to deliver invitations to the older generation of relatives and family friends to whom mailing an invitation would be an insult. I’m gonna find some time in there to call the bridal place and ask arbitrary alteration cost questions to see how they price me.