cindy's world

…it pours.

I had an appointment this afternoon for a 2nd roof appraiser (one recommended by my Association treasurer) to come out and look at my roof, but it’s POURING RAIN so hard that he called me to cancel, saying it’s raining too hard to get to where he needs to get to and see on the roof. It’s supposed to be pouring ALL WEEK so we’re gonna reschedule when we see the rain die down. :'( All the cups, bowls, and buckets are back up inside my bedrooms under the original leaks. Yes, I live in Southern California. Land of surfers and sunshine.

On the emotional issues front, I’m trying really hard to not be affected by Mr. W’s stressors. I’m trying to see his current upheaval with his ex (kids’ mom) as nothing more than an irksome dog barking away outside my home, angry but not really involving me or putting me in direct danger. Even with that, I wasn’t able to fall asleep very readily last nite.

Oh, and I haven’t worked out in 4 days. Because today, at lunch, I chose to have lunch with my new courtroom assistant and my floating court reporter (my regular court reporter is off surfing in Costa Rica) at a Japanese restaurant in Cerritos called “Kabuki”. I had 6 pieces of sushi, 6 pieces of spicy tuna roll, miso soup, and way too much unfiltered Nigori sake.

I was telling my floating reporter today about a food revelation I had last week. Our floor does birthday celebrations. The courtroom that the birthday person works in sponsors this cookie/pie/cake/coffee/dessert/snacks/cheese-n-crackers/cupcakes feast for the day, and invites everyone else on the floor to come and sing happy birthday and pig out. Last week, I attended one such shindig, and for the first time ever, looked the free lemon cake, strawberry-topped cheesecake, coconut cake, and chocolate chip cookies in the eye(s), and reached for a cup of coffee. That was it. I hung out, wished the birthday girl well, chatted with some coworkers, drank my coffee and left. I felt so good about that.

The unexpected thing is that the “good” I felt at walking away was better than the “good” I feel eating yummy desserts. I usually eat the food just cuz it’s there and it’s festive to participate, but I have to deal with the guilt of the excessive calories and that really kills the enjoyment of the food. Plus, sometimes it doesn’t even taste good enough to be worth the subsequent guilt. So why eat the crap?

I don’t know why that’s never occurred to me before. Why I robotically eat the fat-loaded desserts just because that’s what everyone else is there for. My floating court reporter agreed with my revelation/theory. She said that yesterday, she wolfed down a leftover donut and not only did she not enjoy it because she ate it so fast, but it was too sweet and made her sick to her stomach. AND she had to deal with the guilt that night and didn’t eat much when she was out with her family for dinner.

Yesterday, Mr. W and I met up with commenter ‘a’ at The Curry House in Irvine for dinner, and I brought my leftover curried rice with me for lunch, which I ate at my desk before leaving for the gym. A reputedly tactless coworker came in, saw my food, and said, as if astounded, “You eat rice?”
I didn’t know how to take that, cuz do I not look Asian? “What do you mean?” I asked her.
She said, “I didn’t think you ate any carbs because, you know,” she pointed to my body up and down. I guess it’s a compliment.

I’m so lame. I forgot the major nail-biter item in my last post, entitled “*Biting Nails*”.

The roofer is set to start work on replacing the flat part of my roof in the middle of next week, BUT it’s tentative because THERE’S RAIN PREDICTED NEXT WEEK!!! Waaaahhh!!! If it rains again my roof and ceilings may collapse! And the workers can’t work on a wet roof and they certainly can’t demolish the existing roof while it’s pouring down rain.

Also, I haven’t presented my association with the roof replacement estimate yet (which predicts costs so high I expect them to balk), and I still need to present my case for why they should pay for my ceiling damage repairs, too.

*biting nails*

I can’t sleep. (Duh.) I’m in a pattern of falling asleep in front of the TV, waking up once at around 2am and deliberating whether I ought to go up to bed, and if I’m able to fall asleep again after that, then I wake up a second time at around 4am, perhaps have the same deliberation if I’m still on the couch. It’s hardest to go back to sleep if the remotest bothersome thing crawls into my consciousness. In the fragile silence and unvisibility of the night, troubles dance loudly and vividly, caught in a disturbed repetitive loop in my head.

Tonight, I’m feeling disappointed and kind of miffed. I’m not the type to make anyone do anything for me. I’d like the person to voluntarily, out of personal desire or even a sense of responsibility/obligation, to do “the right thing.” For the sake of friendship or duty, someone close enough to me for me to give her a special label on the most special of days should give me the time of day. Oh sure, I know if I insisted on it, she’d come through — but I shouldn’t have to insist on it. It just kinda sucks. Just because she said “If you really want, I can rearrange some things and go” doesn’t mean it’s not flaking, right? It’s like daring me to pull rank and order her to attend something that’s clearly unimportant and inconvenient to her, but the event had been in place, with her prior agreement, for weeks if not a month; it’s to make decisions for her things, not mine; it’s not going to cost her anything except a little time, and I’m clearly not worth that. I have a sneaking suspicion that she’s choosing to hang out with her boyfriend over me even though she’s with him all the time I haven’t seen her or heard from her in months except a few lines on an email here and there.

I’m just disappointed.

Hellos to everyone from the Courthouse! Yup, we’re here for one day, off for Christmas day tomorrow, then back on Wednesday. Same thing next week for New Year’s Day which falls on Tuesday. I’m not complaining though…things are slow around here so it’s pretty painless, and hey, I’m happy I’m employed. I’m also glad I have these two consecutive Tuesdays off. And I’m glad I’m not in pain from my procedure last week, and I’m glad they found the abnormal stuff early so that they’re doing cancer prevention by removing the potentially bad stuff. When I get my results back from the doctor, I hope to be glad then that they got it all and that it’s confirmed to not be full-blown cancer. I’m glad my cold is going away (except for the occasional cough), that I can work out soon, that my loved ones are still around and not terminally ill (despite what my mom thinks), that my fiance gets along with my family, that I get along with my fiance’s family, that I’m not mentally or emotionally hurt right now. PMS is doing a number and every little thing steps on my nerves, but I’m glad I’m with someone super tolerant. Crazy tolerant. Sainthood tolerant. I’d hate to be with me at this time of month.

Over the weekend, I felt a small spark of inspiration to write a post counting my blessings, but since I have that new policy of not accessing my blog from Mr. W’s laptop, and I was there most of the time, I didn’t write the post and have since then forgotten what I was going to write. But this forward, which I saw on email today, probably says it better than I would’ve:
~ * ~
I hired a plumber to help me restore an old farmhouse, and after he had just finished a rough first day on the job: a flat tire made him lose an hour of work, his electric drill quit and his ancient one ton truck refused to start.
While I drove him home, he sat in stony silence. On arriving, he invited me in to meet his family. As we walked toward the front door, he paused briefly at a small tree, touching the tips of the branches with both hands.
When opening the door he underwent an amazing transformation. His face was wreathed in smiles and he hugged his two small children and gave his wife a kiss.
Afterward he walked me to the car. We passed the tree and my curiosity got the better of me. I asked him about what I had seen him do earlier.
“Oh, that’s my trouble tree,” he replied. “I know I can’t help having troubles on the job, but one thing’s for sure, those troubles don’t belong in the house with my wife and the children. So I just hang them up on the tree every night when I come home and ask God to take care of them. Then in the morning I pick them up again. Funny thing is,” he smiled, “when I come out in the morning to pick ’em up, there aren’t nearly as many as I remember hanging up the night before.”

It’s the weekend! Finally! This has been an exhausting week work-wise, health-wise and personal-life-wise. I kinda absorbed Mr. W’s stress earlier in the week so since he didn’t sleep more than a few hours the first few nights, I didn’t, either. The coughing keeps me up anyway. I was so mentally exhausted at work yesterday that I forgot to charge two trial attorneys trial fees, but luckily they were really good about it when I called them and told them they each owe me $450 big ones.

Aside from the Tuesday I worked through lunch and couldn’t hit the gym, I’ve been hitting it hard at the gym. The strength-training program I’ve put myself and my gym trainee on is working. She’s moving some major weights around, and on body parts like hamstrings, she’s stronger than me. The new thing in this routine that I’m not used to doing is bench pressing, cuz to me it’s a stupid guy competitive thing. I just do my other chest machines. But now that we are benching, I find myself trying to remember what an impressive barbell weight is. If a guy can bench his own body weight, that’s a big deal, is that it? I don’t think there’s any way I can bench MY body weight, but I do barbell reps of 10 with 60-70 lbs. When guys say they bench their own body weight, that doesn’t mean they do reps with it, right? They just have to push it up once?

4 more days until I’m not “allowed” to work out anymore for 6 weeks. You know something REALLY concerns you when you dream about it. Earlier in the week, I had a nightmare that some doctors looked at a chest x-ray/MRI of mine and saw a strange spot in my left shoulder area, and then told me that it was a problem that they’ll have to fix, but that doing so would add another 12 weeks of no-exercise recuperation time. I panicked in that dream. I wasn’t even concerned about what could be wrong with me or about the procedure, I was scared to get fat.

Just thinking about toting around excessive fat makes me sad and tired. I want to go home and sleep. But Mr. W’s parents drove down from Vegas today to see us so I need to go over tonite. They’re so nice — they’re visiting because we’re unable to join them for the big family Christmas this year. Christmas falls on a Tuesday this year, which means we’re working the day before and the rest of the week after. Same with New Year’s. Suck-olas, man.

My mom has been really down recently because of the liver cirrhosis diagnosis (which I still insist is preliminary but which she still insists is a death sentence), and she and my dad appear to have the exact same sickness I have. We all got sick at the same time with similar symptoms, and like me, they kept getting re-sick instead of feeling better. I’m re-coughing, too. My mom took the long recovery as a sign that her immune system is shot, something else she added to her growing list of signs that she’s headed to an early grave, but I pointed out that I’m still sick, too, and I’m darn healthy otherwise. She wouldn’t let us visit for the past 2-3 weekends in a row as she and my dad are “hiding out” from any and all visitors in fear that they’d infect others with their apparent plague. Every time I’ve called her and asked if she was feeling better, the response was a very moody, “No.” She started talking last week about how she was going to die before she saw me off on my wedding since we hadn’t set a date yet. So I pulled out the big guns.
“You can’t die yet. [Mr. W] said he wants you and dad to teach the baby Chinese and that way he could learn some Chinese on the side, too.”
“What baby?”
“Oh, he wants to have a baby.”
“YOUR baby? OH!” After that it was all sunshine and rainbows and she sounded exponentially better.

Some days after that conversation, my mom lapsed into depression again over her health. In an email conversation in which she offered to help out financially with the wedding, I told her it was unnecessary as she’d paid for so much for me already in raising me and beyond. She wrote back that she wants to help pay for the wedding because it’d likely be the last thing she could help me with, what with her early grave thing and all. I wrote back, “The wedding would NOT be the last thing you’d have the opportunity to help me out with, because I’m not going to be paying you for babysitting.” She wrote back something changing the subject, so I took that as a good sign. Yesterday, walking on the Japanese Garden grounds, she made a comment about the wedding date and said something about how if she’s going to babysit, I need to get married sooner rather than later so she’d have the strength to pick up and tug around a kid. It was great to see her and my dad in such high spirits yesterday when we finally dropped them off at home at night.

I hope I’m not just in denial about her health concerns. Ideally, it’d be just an early diagnosis of liver problems that modern medicine can halt and she’d live out the rest of her natural life just fine. But I understand that to her, having watched her father waste away and die from the same disease, it’s one of the scariest things she could be diagnosed with, especially as a non-smoker and non-drinker who has no lifestyle vices to change to help her situation. She’s also concerned about my dad’s little health issues here and there (not little to her, of course), deteriorations and ailments that come with age.

Which is why I did not tell her about my surgical procedure on the 19th this month, next Wednesday. I found out that my judge is taking vacation that Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, so since our courtroom will be “dark” those days, my supervisor offered me all those days off to recover from surgery. I hope to be “recovering” at Disneyland. Hey, when life gives you hot water, make tea and heal yourself, right?

Email convo between me and Moms this morning:

Mom: “Maybe was the tea, I couldn’t sleep all night!”
Me: “I couldn’t sleep last night either, but that was because I was coughing.
If I don’t get better by August, I’ll sound like this:
Judge: Do you, Cindy, take [Mr. W] to be your lawful wedded –
Cindy: *COUGH COUGH!!*
Judge: Uh, to be your lawful wedded husband, to have and to hold –
Cindy: *COUGH COUGH COUGH COUGH HACK HAAAACK!!*
Judge: Is that a no?”

A week without a post. I think that may be some sort of a record for me. Except for, wait…when I was on vacation and didn’t have internet access. That’s sort of what happened here, too. I went to Vegas for Thanksgiving and had the entire following week off for vacation. Since I didn’t have my own laptop with me, I haven’t been at work to use my work desktop, and I’ve stopped accessing this blog from Mr. W’s computer, you have this week-long gap. (The post in Vegas was written on Mr. W’s dad’s computer.)

We left for Vegas after work the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, got there wee early Thanksgiving morning, and our plan was to hang out there for 4 days and leave for Yosemite (where Mr. W has never been) on Sunday or Monday, hang out there for two days, and spend the rest of the week at home running errands, Christmas shopping and watching “Buffy” and “Angel” on DVD. But what actually happened was that after arriving to Vegas, we discovered that Mr. W’s gamer brother (as opposed to Rocker Brother who’s a guitarist in a band, and Chicago Brother whom I’ve never met cuz he’s in, duh, New York — I mean, Chicago) had the same week off work that we did. So Mr. W nixed the Yosemite plans and we instead hung out in Vegas with his family until Wednesday. That was great for me, as I was hacking and dying from my ailment and I think a few days in the very cold climate of Yosemite would’ve killed me.

Vegas: We walked the Strip, watched “The Mentalist” show, went to my first hockey game at The Orleans (totally thought about Flat Coke and Bat, the hockey freaks that they are), checked out the fairly-recently opened Hooters Casino (not impressive), hung out with Mr. W’s parents, played Wii and other games at Gamer Bro’s house, hung out with Gamer Bro and Wife, attended Rocker Bro’s band performance at a local restaurant bar. Ooh, I have a picture of that:

Sorry about the grainy photo; all I had was my cameraphone. I also got to see Mr. W and bros when they were little pesky children as Mr. W’s mom shared boxes of old family photos with me. It was only slightly disturbing to gloss over formal professional photos of Mr. W cuddling with his psycho ex #2 (the one after his kids’ mom) and her kids, if “slightly disturbing” means I want to reach back in time by reaching into those photos and squishing her obnoxious little head with my fingertips until her brain pops like a bubble of caviar, or that may be the monthly hormones talking. It is liberating to know he doesn’t read my blog anymore, tho. It is comforting to be able to write that I winced inside when his mom, showing me old photos of her other sons’ weddings while talking about preparing to make a separate album just of everyone’s wedding photos, said none of her kids had big weddings, except for Mr. W, who had two of them. Grrr.

Well, on to brighter things, like MY goddamned wedding. See next post.

I’m in Vegas doing the same Thanksgiving I’ve done in the past 2 years. Mr. W’s brother came to Thanksgiving dinner this time with the XBox360 game “Rock Band” in tow. Remember how hooked I got on “Guitar Hero” last year? Well, this is two guitars (one bass guitar), a microphone for karaoke AND a drum set. The drums even have a foot pedal. Man, this game is harder! It demands more precision on when you hit the notes on the guitar parts; a millisecond off and you don’t get the point. The drums are tricky because you have to hit in the center of each drum and there are 4 drums, plus foot, and you’ve got 2 hands and 2 drumsticks. I’ve always secretly thought I could be a drummer cuz I have rhythm, and it turns out that’s not nearly enough for this game. Oh well. Needless to say, the house was noisy that night.

The day after Thanksgiving (Friday), I was enjoying a leftover turkey leg, and commenting on how meat just tastes better on a stick. It’s good fun to pull chunks of turkey off a bone to eat. And then I had an idea. Christmas should be on a stick! We can have candlesticks lit, roast marshmallows on a stick in the fireplace or a firepit, have candied apples on a stick, eat shish-kabobs, popsicles, lollipops, celebrate our savior-on-a-stick (I know, eternal hellfire). Even the Christmas tree: needles on a stick. Maybe I can expand on the stick thing and pour leftover candied apple caramel on myself and make things stick to me. I can refuse to stick to a diet but yap at everyone else’s diets like I had a stick up my butt. And when I get attacked for that, I’d have to stick up for myself all by myself. The stress would make me lose weight and get sick all over again, and I’d become a stick figure.

Stick holidays. Could happen.

Obviously Mr. W’s thinking and the way he handled things at Cirque didn’t and doesn’t sit well with me. So I’ve been analyzing him and his actions in some still-unsuccessful attempt to force things to make sense, as if a Looney Tunes light bulb would suddenly light on top of my head and all the pieces would fit properly again and we’d be back to the happy picture we were just days ago.

So far I’ve had two theories going…
1) He doesn’t understand and therefore doesn’t respond to cultural social cues.
He did say on more than one occasion that he’s “antisocial” because he doesn’t know how to act in a public environment and prefers to be “a loner” and is a “social retard.” So maybe he didn’t get just HOW some guy confronting a strange girl with “is that a PROBLEM?” or pointing at the girl while saying “shut up” repeatedly is offensive, so he didn’t respond the way everyone else instantly did upon reading about it. In other words, others may see the actions and hear the words and say, “Them’s fightin’ words!” whereas he just sees them as neutral responses from some guy. He also doesn’t understand how shushing your girl is condescending in general, and when that shushing is done in front of strangers who are verbally attacking her when she’s just holding her own, it becomes — yes, I’ll say it — a public betrayal. (I just got a mental picture of him rolling his eyes at the dramatic way I characterized it.)

This theory was making sense, until I asked him some questions about it in a roundabout way yesterday when he called me after work to ask me to go over for the weekend. Turned out, he DOES know when a stranger may be silently, on body language alone, challenging him to a fight, stuff like that. But he says those societal cues are stupid and if some guy eyed him down trying to trigger a fight, he’d just ignore the guy and break eye contact. He said it’s stupid to go along with some stranger’s challenge because he broke a guy’s nose at a bar once and has since regretted it. Except when he’s at work, he says, and people challenge him or get difficult and bickerish, he’d verbally and sternly nip it in the bud right away and if the challenger refuses to be nipped, “then I’d jack him up.” Okay, so he DOES know, and he IS willing to get on the defensive to a challenger. Then why doesn’t he do it to protect ME? Which brings me to theory #2:

2) He has to do it so much at work as part of his job in a type of work environment that’s aggressive and bickerish, where he may constantly have his authority challenged, that he’s just sick of having to put out fires when he’s NOT at work. So he’d prefer to sink into the extreme side of complacent and low-key when he’s among strangers outside of his job.

I guess I can see #2 making sense. But I haven’t had the opportunity to run #2 by him so I don’t know for sure. Even if I did run #2 by him, he likely wouldn’t know cuz he doesn’t analyze himself or his actions much, and okay, NOBODY analyzes people like ME unless they’re getting paid or are writing research papers.

When I was running #1 by him on the phone last nite, altho he played along for a little bit, he did get irritated again because he said he didn’t want to go over the Cirque episode yet again. I told him I’m not trying to rehash, I’m just trying to understand elements of his behaviors. He said fine, if I really want to talk about that, then “we can talk about it tomorrow.” So to thank him for agreeing to open up the discussion forum, I finally agreed to see “Beowulf” in 3-D with him at the Imax this morning. He’s been on my ass to see it with him for awhile, and I’d refused to because I don’t want a cent of my hard-earned money to go toward supporting the posterchild for dysfunction, angelina jolie.

So anyway, this morning, we dropped my car off at the dealer for an oil change (I’m used to my cousin, a Honda specialist, doing the oil changes for my Accord for $24. So when I picked up my Lexus at the dealership an hour ago and $170+ later, I decided to never get servicing done at the dealer again. Now I know, and at least I got a free carwash out of it.), had breakfast at an early-opening sportsbar/restaurant, watched “Beowulf,” went to Costco so he could buy groceries, came back, watched “1407” on DVD, I picked up my car, and he still didn’t bring up talking, and I was sullen the whole day. I found myself wondering, “Am I just deliberately hanging onto this anger? And if I am, then why am I? Why can’t I just see it as, he did something that pissed me off, he didn’t piss me off on purpose and was trying to do what he felt was the right thing, I let him have it about how crappily I felt he handled the situation, and he has since then agreed to ‘try to consider my feelings over his training and instinct’ the next time, so what else am I to expect? What else is there to talk about?” Should I just let it go at this point? Oh, I forgot to mention, that earlier he tried to drag me into his bed to nap with him, and I asked if he was really sleepy, he said yes. I got up and said I’d let him sleep, and then he offered, “Fine. Talk.” I said I learned never to have “a talk” with a man when he’s either hungry or sleepy, and that being said, I left him to his nap and came up here to blog.

Man, it’s too bad you guys don’t read my blog much on the weekends. *waiting by the computer for comments*

P.S. It’s been a long time since I’ve been a little crazy, thanks for indulging me. But I am nowhere near as crazy as I or another girl out there could be…