cindy's world

Mel posted a reference to a Newsweek article that cites a study finding that exercise actually promotes neurogenesis. You can read her inspiring post here. I’ve been on this personal mission to get people around me to get healthy, eat better, exercise more, and a lot of people have taken me up on it. It’s not just about longevity, it’s about have a better quality of life while still alive. And now we find that exercise actually makes you SMARTER, too! Okay, I admit that my “mission” isn’t all charity — it’s selfish, too. I want my friends and loved ones around longer so they’d be around to hear me bitch and moan when I’m having a bad day. And take me out for some fun. And sushi. And for that, they get to live longer and healthier. We all win.

This study, of course, supports the theory that the gym is a great place to pick up. Not just weights, but dates. It also shoots down at least in part the stereotype that gym rats are meatheads who go around grunting because that’s all their tiny over-muscled heads are capable of processing in the way of social interaction and conscious thought.

Last weekend, Mr. W and I had dim sum with his friend. We’ll call him John because that’s a totally generic name and because that’s actually his name. John brought his new girlfriend whom neither Mr. W nor I had met until that day, and the four of us had some interesting conversations over brunch. Monday or Tuesday, I got a call at work from Mr. W. “John was just here,” he said, “And he told me, ‘Cindy’s really smart! You can tell by just 5 minutes of talking to her! I bet she keeps you on your toes!’ And I told him, ‘Yeah, she is really smart, and in spite of my many years of living and life experience over hers, I still learn new things from her every day.’ ” Awwww, isn’t that sweet? And here I thought I was being acknowledged and complimented on about my cognitive functions, when in actuality, I was being praised for my dedication toward exercise!

P.S. Today is a court holiday – Caesar (thanks Wilco) Chavez Day. I’m not able to list his accomplishments off the top of my head, but if the County says he’s important, who am I to dispute? So to all you non-County workers, *putting fingers behind ears and waving them at you* Nyanny nyanny nyah nyah!! Pttthhhh!!!

I managed to shove a 3.75 mile hills run into my evening before Vanessa came by my house to meet me before leaving for James’ house. I would’ve liked to go 4 miles, but as it was I was already late. When Vanessa got to my house I had just emerged from the shower. Rushing out (with 5 minutes to make a 15-minute drive to James’), I grabbed my purse and thought, “Oh, it’s empty in here. That’s cuz I still need to put my cell phone in.” The cell had died earlier and was charging upstairs. Right after thinking that, I closed up the purse and LEFT. Without the phone. (I did say I was insanely absent-minded this week, right?)

I offered to drive so Vanessa can drink. We hopped in my car, and I called James via its bluetooth as I pulled out of the garage. “You know what happens when you have GIRLS pick you up, right?” I said, about to apologize for being late. “What? You’re breaking up,” James was able to get out before we lost connection. I figured I’d try again later, but later, I couldn’t pick up the connection again via the car. It kept saying to check phone. And then I realized…I’d left the phone upstairs! The only reason I was able to call from the garage was because my car was able to pick up the connection via bluetooth through the ceiling, which is the floor of where the phone laid. “Screw it,” I said. And then Vanessa reminded me that I’d given everyone on the evite list my cell # for a contact number. CRAP. We were so late I drove to James’, picked him up, dropped them both off at Taps, and then I went back home to get the phone.

…to be continued when Vanessa sends me the photos from the evening. (How’s that for pressure?)

I had a cRaZy day! I’m taking a break from 5 very complicated sentencings to say hello out there to my blogger friends. I’ve got 2 more civil harassment cases to finish up.

Tonight is James’ belated birthday shindig. The weather turned unexpectedly very nice in Southern California today, so we’re gonna grab seats in the giant outdoors patio at Taps Brewery. (It was blue skies and sunshine when I left for the gym at lunch yesterday, but by the time we left the gym, there was a hurricane alert, it was dark and gray and pouring rain sideways in the wind. Leaves, twigs, and pine needles were flying sideways like a brown blizzard. My gym trainee had to throw her body weight against the gym door to open it into the wind, and we almost got blown over when we stepped out. Rain pelted me sideways in the wind so hard that I felt each individual drop, and I was drenched on the right side but not on the left. “Dang! Are we in Oz?” my trainee exclaimed.) The patio has heat lamps and 2 oversized fireplaces, so even if it gets cold we should be fine. Vanessa and I are gonna pick James up at 7:40p for meeting everyone at 8p. That way he can drink to his little heart’s delight. Actually, I can, too. Vanessa can’t, though. Haha. That’s the price of being a good friend, I guess. After we present him with his basket o’ loot, I’ll let you guys guess as to what you think each of the clues referred to, and I’ll give the answers.

I didn’t get to work out at lunch today since I attended a coworker’s retirement banquet instead. Great food! I got to bring Mr. W along as a guest date. That was fun. Obviously I can’t work out late tonight, either, so I’m busting my hump to finish my work and go straight to the gym. The most effective workout I can think of in a small amount of time is running the treadmill, so I’m gonna aim for at least a 3-mile run. As long as I can grab a treadmill, it doesn’t matter how busy the gym is after work hours today. *crossing fingers*

I seem to be insanely absent-minded lately. Earlier in the week, I forgot to put my earrings on after the gym at lunch, and they were dangling on some mesh outside of my gym bag, and by the time I remembered and went to look for the earrings, one was gone. The next day I asked the gym lost-and-found, but no one had turned them in. 🙁 It’s one of my favorite pairs. Actually, I think it IS my favorite pair. It’s a cone-shaped silver dangle with the Celtic trinity knot all over and under it. *sniffle* On the same day I lost the earring, I’d also lost my ID badge, which I wear clipped to the outside of my suit. I know I had it on when I walked from the parking structure to the courthouse, but somehow it disappeared after that. I luckily found it later on the floor of the parking structure. This morning, after stepping out of the shower, I realized I should cut my nails. As I was pressed for time, I cut my right index fingernail first since that’s the finger I use to put on my liquid foundation. I was gonna let the foundation set for 60 seconds (it’s the Revlon Colorstay sets-in-60-seconds foundation) as I was clipping my other fingernails, but after I applied the foundation, I totally forgot to finish clipping my nails so right now I have 9 longish fingernails and 1 short one. Seriously, what is WRONG with me lately? I hope I remember to pick up James tonight.

But no matter how “off” I am this week, at least I didn’t make the dumb decision that one of our defendants was sentenced for today. He went to a salon and got a haircut, asked for recommendations on hair products, brought those to the counter, and instead of paying for the haircut and products, he pulled a gun and stole them as well as the lady’s purse. He probably “saved” about $50 on that spree, but because this is his 2nd strike and he’d used a gun, he was sentenced to 21 years in state prison for that conviction. Score! (Gun enhancements by California law adds 10 years, and 2nd strike doubles the sentence he would’ve gotten for the original count.) He’s only 28, so he’d be in his late 40s when he gets out. My bailiff pointed out to him, “Hey, you’ll be about my age when you get out. There’s still a lot of life left at that age.” The defendant asked my bailiff, really concerned-like, “Do you still have sex?” My bailiff laughed and exclaimed, “ALL the time!” The guy looked relieved.

Okay, back to work. That was a nice little 20 minute break.

When I was a lot younger (like in junior high), my mom told me that the human mind is a remarkable thing. “Have you noticed,” she said, “When you’re asleep and you really have to pee, in your dreams you will run into all kinds of problems in finding a toilet, so you CAN’T pee? Like you can’t find a bathroom. Or when you finally could, all the stalls are taken and there’s a huge line. When you finally find a stall that’s empty, turns out the door’s jammed and you can’t get in. And then the toilet seat cover won’t come up. All sorts of bizarre things will happen to prevent you from peeing because your brain, on some level, knows that you are really asleep so it won’t let you pee.”

I told her that I’d never dreamt I had to pee urgently, because if I had to pee that badly, I’d wake up and run to the bathroom and pee. She said, “Watch, one day you’re gonna have a dream like that and notice that.”

Very soon thereafter, I was indeed asleep when I had to pee. But my dream immediately opened up with me already ON the toilet seat, pants down, ready to pee. I thought, “I shouldn’t pee, I should wake up.” And then I remembered what my mom said. “Oh, wait. I’m not gonna be ABLE to pee. Let’s see what happens in the dream if I’m not able to pee.” So I relaxed and pushed a little.

And wet my bed.

I woke up in a huff as soon as the first drops hit and angrily stormed off into the bathroom to clean myself. And to pee. My mom lost some credibility that night.

Vanessa had written a post entitled “Lucid Dreams,” and through my comments on there, I was told that lucid dreams are not common and that I’m “special,” which suddenly made my own experiences more interesting to me, so I decided to blog about that.

Lucid Dream (as defined by Wikipedia): Lucid dreaming (lucid from Latin, lux “light”) is the conscious perception of one’s state while dreaming, resulting in a much clearer experience and sometimes enabling direct control over the content of the dream, a realistic world that is to some degree in the control of the dreamer. The complete experience from start to finish is called a lucid dream. Stephen LaBerge, a popular author and experimenter on the subject, has defined it as “dreaming while knowing that you are dreaming.”
LaBerge and his associates have called people who purposely explore the possibilities of lucid dreaming oneironauts (literally from the Greek ονειροναύτες, meaning “dream sailors”).

In 5th grade, I participated in a program called GATE (Gifted And Talented Education), which in one lesson taught us that most or all blind people dream in color, whereas only a percentage of normal-sighted people dream in color. Fascinated, I decided to check my own dream that night. In a dream, I found myself alone in the house I lived in at the time. Remembering the fact I wanted to explore, Dream Cindy walked down the hall to the living room wood coffee table. It was dark in the dream, nighttime, and I couldn’t see very much. I put my hands down on the surface of the coffee table and leaned my face down really close to its surface, trying to see whether the wood grain was in color or black and white. I could not tell, but I didn’t know whether things were colorless because it was dark, or because I was dreaming in black and white. Frustrated, I woke up.

The answer came later as I became nearsighted at the end of junior high. The more my eyeglass prescription increased (hence the worse my eyesight), the more frequently in color I dreamt. I think now, I dream almost exclusively in color.

I’ve had other lucid dreams, mostly in childhood or the early teen days, in which I didn’t like the dream I was in, or I didn’t like the way events were leading in the dream such that the dream was fast becoming a nightmare, so I’ve changed the sequence of events in the dream or lifted myself out of that dream environment into a different dream environment, or simply told myself to wake up out of it. But it seemed that as I did that more and more, I was soon less able to distinguish whether something was a dream. I found myself actually in the dream wondering if I am dreaming. Sometimes I would want to do something in a dream, but then I’d second-guess myself and think, “What if this isn’t a dream, and I end up doing some irreparable damage?” (This quandary was commonly in the form of *really* wanting to kiss some hot celebrity boy who was coming on to me.) And I would err on the side of caution and act conservatively in the dream, turn him down, tell him our worlds could never permanently merge, and then I’d wake up, realize it was all a dream and be pissed that I wasn’t more adventurous. So I developed a rule of thumb. “This is a dream,” I’d tell myself in the dream, “If I can’t remember how I got here, to this point. If I was just plopped into this situation and have no recollection of the process of getting here, then I’m dreaming.” Cuz in real life, I always have clear memories of so-and-so picked me up at my house, we drove down this street, came by this restaurant, and that’s how I’m here chatting and having a burrito. In a dream, you’re just there having the burrito suddenly when the last thing you remember is that you were hanging upside-down from some apple tree petting a sheep. That rule of thumb worked for awhile, and then my dream self started developing fake memories. Dream Cindy would sit there and consider how she got to that situation, to test for memories, and then snapshots of “memories” would appear, and she’d go, “Oh yeah!” when those things never happened to begin with, or they were intermingled with real memories from the day before. And I’d be fooled again.

I think the new rule of thumb should be, “When in doubt, you’re dreaming.” Cuz when I’m awake I never actually wonder if I’m really dreaming.

On my walk to get the mail this morning, my stream of consciousness thoughts led me to a memory of a story a teacher told us (her class) in Chinese School when I was in elementary school.

Chinese School is an extracurricular program run by a Chinese association to provide classes in the Mandarin language to any child who is interested in (or forced to) learn reading and writing in Mandarin Chinese, with some mild cultural exposure in the form of field trips and class lessons. During the school year these classes are on Saturdays, and in the summers classes are held in the mornings and there is an optional afternoon session children can be enrolled in that’s more physical and less classroom, e.g. swimming classes and Chinese arts and crafts, and performance. The classes are taught by Chinese volunteers, perhaps parents, perhaps teachers in their old hometowns in Taiwan or China. Either way, I don’t think these teachers are credentialized.

Like many Americanized Chinese kids, I was sent to these classes for years, primarily for day care purposes I suspect. And like the other kids, I retained very little of what I’d learned. (You should see it, we’re banned from speaking English in the classrooms, so it’s all quiet, and as soon as the bell rings, everyone explodes into English conversations that we’d been holding in.) But one thing I did walk away with, apparently, is this “fable.”

There was a little boy who was loved very much by his mother. She loved him so much that she let him do whatever he wanted. If he saw a toy his neighbor had and wanted it, he would take it and his mother would laugh at his cleverness. When he got older, he went from taking candy and toys that didn’t belong to him, to taking larger possessions from adults, such as watches and books. His mother supported him and praised him through all of this. One day, the boy stole a purse from a woman on the street. The woman screamed, and to shut her up, he killed her by hitting her on her head with a big stick. A policeman was nearby, and the boy was caught and arrested. Soon, the boy was in jail awaiting execution. The mother came to visit the boy in jail. “Oh, my good boy!” she cried. “How could this have happened? How could they do this to you?!”
The son asked, “Am I still your good boy?”
His mother replied, “Of course, you have always been and will always be my good angel boy.”
The boy asked, “Can I make one request of you, then?”
“Of course, anything,” his mother answered.
“Can I be your good little boy again like I was when I was smaller, and suck from your breast?”

~ Let me break from the story reverie for a moment. At this point in the storytelling, I am almost as uncomfortable as I was when I was, oh, EIGHT years old listening to this for the first time IN CLASS with about thirty other students ranging from ages seven to ten. I had a sense that this isn’t appropriate, and as I squirmed uncomfortably, I saw other students looking at each other, and some boys sunk into their seats. Back to the story. ~

The mother answered, “Of course you may!” and pulled the front of her shirt up and pulled a breast from her bra. She stuck her breast in through the bars.

~ Squirm, squirm! Some kids blush and look down at the tops of their desks. ~

The boy grabbed hold of his mother’s nipple

~ Yes, she said NIPPLE in Chinese, “nai toe”. Gaaaack!!! ~

with his mouth and suckled. He suckled for awhile, he sucked and sucked, and then all of a sudden, with a lot of strength, he clamped down and bit his mother’s nipple right off!

~ Methinks she enjoyed telling the sucking part a little too much, but it did have the proper effect, the second part was totally unexpected and there were audible gasps from the kids. ~

So now the mother was bleeding, and she held her injured breast

~ The teacher was actually pantomining clutching one breast with her hand in front of the class at this point. ~

and she asked her son, “What did you do? Why did you bite me?” And you know what the son said?
He said, “I bit you because this is all your fault. The only time I was a good boy was when I was an infant and still sucking at your breast. After that, I was never good, and you allowed me to be bad, and now I am to be executed.”

~ At this point, we were confused because as good little Chinese kids, we were taught to always respect our elders, so the son blaming his own bad actions on his mother seemed further proof of how bad he was. That must be the moral. ~

And was he right?

~ Some kids in the class shake their heads and utter “no”, the answer we thought she wanted, but most of the kids just stared at her wide-eyed, apparently in traumatic shock. She saw fit to confuse us more. ~

Of course he was right. It WAS all his mother’s fault, for not teaching him right from wrong. That’s the moral of this story.

I think my parents should get their money back for all they’d spent for me to attend Chinese School. What do you guys think?

My previous post, Barbershop Duet, touched on a chord with Bat because he saw my question to Mr. W asking whether he’d still be attracted to me if I shaved my head as one of those girlie “trap” questions. His girlfriend, Flat Coke & Flies, reveals in the comment section of that post that Bat refuses to answer questions that he perceives to be “trap” questions that lead to fights. Her perspective is that sometimes it’s just a hypothetical question. Here’s my take on questions like that.

Bat, I hear you, I understand what you’re saying, but see, here’s the difference. When I ask a question like that, it’s just a random quirky question in which the answer doesn’t matter. The question itself is a joke. The thought of me with a shaved head is stupid and ridiculous, and it (hopefully) wouldn’t happen. It’s like when I asked, “If I grew a third breast in the middle of my chest, would you see me as a freak or as a gifted woman?” (I don’t even remember Mr. W’s answer. He may not have answered, he was too busy fantasizing.) He knows it really doesn’t matter HOW he answers the question.

I don’t really ask what I call “girl questions,” which I define as a question in which there is one “right” answer and one “wrong” answer and the “wrong” answer would piss us off and create a fight even tho the question itself doesn’t matter to begin with, i.e. it has no consequence to the relationship. If there’s a possible answer to a question that would make me upset, I wouldn’t ask it. If I ask something, then I’ve already considered the possible answers and would be okay with any answer. For example, I’m not gonna ask “Does this dress make me look fat?” if I would be devastated if he said “Yes.” But if I need a real answer because I’m on the fence about a dress before I spend money on it, and he tells me “Yeah, it does make your ass look wide,” I WANT to know that so I would put the dress back.

So to summarize, questions that are not important to the relationship but have an acceptable and UNacceptable answer, I don’t ask. It’s asking for trouble, it’s like testing your man when your man has a 50% chance of failing the test. If I ask something, it’s because all of the answers are acceptable. (This is NOT the same as asking a question for which you hope for a “right” answer, that IS important to the relationship, such as “Do you think we can afford to have another child right now?” and “Will you marry me?”.)

I now need to qualify the girl questions. Girl questions are asked not because girls want to pick a fight, because as much as it’s convenient for guys to assume we LIKE fighting, that’s simply not the case. Girls ask girl questions because they figure it’s such a “gimme” to the “right” answer that it’d make them feel good. They want to hear, “No, you’re not fat.” “Of course I love you.” “Of course you’re the hottest lay I’ve ever had in my life.” This is a big billboard that the girl needs more positive reinforcement in the relationship, i.e. they need something from YOU, the man, to make them feel good because they’re not feeling so great right now for whatever reason.

In the last relationship, I didn’t ask girl questions because I couldn’t bear the impact of a “wrong” answer, so I just avoided them altogether. In my current relationship, I don’t ask girl questions because I don’t question where Mr. W’s head is in this relationship, so I don’t need the reassurance that girl questions are designed to give.

I can tell, too, that Mr. W used to get girl questions from other people, cuz his old response was just like what Flat Coke says Bat’s response is. “I’m not going to answer a hypothetical that’s never going to happen. I refuse to participate in this question.” Now he answers cuz he knows it’s okay, I’m just being goofy, and it’s not going to lead to a fight. And that’s as much to his credit for making me feel secure, as it is to me for not habitually asking girl questions.

** Addendum: I just went back and read the previous post. I figured it went without saying, but then realized it doesn’t go without saying because not everyone who may come across my blog knows me. The conversation described was entirely playful. The post is written tongue-in-cheek. If you had been in the room with us, you would’ve heard the silliness in my tone, and heard us laugh in between his answers.

** Addendum #2: Here is a related post about picking your battles, and about “girl questions”‘ role in that.

After work on Monday evening, I watched Mr. W cut his own hair with an electric hair trimmer razor thingie. He cuts his son’s hair with that trimmer, too, but had always turned down my half-joking request for him to cut my hair, claiming he didn’t know how to work with long hair. “If I had a boy-cut, would you cut my hair with that thing?” I asked him now.
Between the buzzing of the trimmer, he said, “Yes.”
I leaned farther out against the chairback I was resting my chin and hands on, crouched on the seat facing backwards like a little dog looking out a window. “Would you still be attracted to me if I had a boy-cut?”
Bzzzz. Bzzzz. “Yes.”
I peered at him, watching him stroke the blade methodically from the base of his skull up the back of his head. “Are you lying?” I asked.
Bzzzz. Bzzzz. “Yes.”
The chair creaked. I watched him work, observed his concentration as he examined his head from all angles between a hand-held mirror and the wall mirror that covered his bathroom closet doors. His eyes never left his reflections, which from my angle looked like a startling row of Mr. W Rockettes reflected over and over between two large opposing wall mirrors. The opposite mirror farther away from the light source reflected a darker Mr. W, so that the row of boyfriends seemed an M.C. Escher rendering of opposing and alternating pale and tan Mr. Ws.
“But what if it’s not my fault that I don’t have hair? What if I’m a cancer patient and the chemo made me lose my hair?” It didn’t seem very fair in my hypothetical that I’d have to endure cancer, its harsh treatments, and the loss of my boyfriend’s attraction to me.
I received a quick side glance. “If you had cancer and got chemo treatments, then we’d both have our heads shaved. And I’d still be attracted to you.”
For awhile, nothing in the room could be heard except the buzzing of the hair clipper and the distant churning of laundry whirling in the washing machine — the only signs of ordinariness in the extraordinary conversation I was having. His last words shimmered between us in the air in a way that was less surreal than the meaning of the words itself. I was no longer there. I was now back years and years ago, reading a newspaper article about the NFL football player who shaved his head in solidarity with his wife, who was undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer at the time. I heard my past self say wistfully, “Do guys like this really exist?”

Have patience, I wanted to tell her. They do. They really do.

On the freeway on Sunday, I spotted a white semi beat-up late 80s-to-early 90s model Chevy Pontiac Grand Prix to my right. Thinking it may be, on the off-chance, a coworker of mine, I looked into the driver’s window as we passed and saw a very content looking man in his late 40s or early 50s, a stranger to me. It struck me that he may have had this car for decades, he may have purchased it used, but the expression was of someone having a great time in this old car. I instantly thought at him admiringly, “You’re a better person than me.”

James asked me a few nights ago that knowing what I know now, if I had the chance to make a different decision regarding my last relationship, would I? Would I enter once again what was undoubtedly the hardest segment of my life to date, harder than all the difficulties I had ever faced in the rest of my life combined? I really didn’t know.

I know that there are a lot of things that weren’t all good that I definitely would go through again, because what those things did for me were well worth the few struggles. College, for example, wasn’t easy, but it is something I would never take back. But the last relationship? I don’t know that the ends justified the means. Even when I was going through the hell and people told me it won’t make sense until later why it was necessary for me to experience such pain and violations, I wanted to believe them and look forward to the day it’d all be clear. But at the time all I could see was, “Like I didn’t know that being lied to and cheated on and treated like crap wouldn’t feel good? I don’t need to experience all this to get this lesson!” And now, it’s been a couple of years. I guess if forced to examine how it changed me positively, it gave me a depth that I didn’t have before. It’s like growing pains, you’re being stretched beyond what you can handle and it hurts, but afterwards, you’re more, uh, stretchy.

I was talking to Mr. W about this last nite. I didn’t know when I was in the relationship that salvaging it would be an impossible goal to attain. The relationship was set up from day 1 to fail (the day after we got together, he went to a girl he’d been seeing behind my back when we were just “dating” and started what would become the “affair”). But the beauty of a situation in which the goal is impossible, is that it forces you to reach beyond where you’d ever reached in the past, it forces you to try everything within your power, make up new powers, combine old knowledge, test new concepts, attempt new combinations in the struggle to reach what you will never reach. If the goal were a hop, skip and a jump away, I would’ve reached it and not gone any farther. But an impossible goal that you don’t know is impossible forces you to keep reaching.

In addition to the depth I earned, I also gained perspective, and what Mr. W calls my “level-headed, loving communication style”. I think the depth makes me more able to relate to people and to be more relateable. I can counsel people with more heart in addition to the logic now. People have always gravitated to me for counseling, and I’ve always done what I could to offer them a new perspective. I was talking to a bailiff about this at work the other day and I think his orthodox Christian lifestyle made him a bit scared by what he thought I was saying. He asked if it was witchcraft or voodoo. I told him it’s not the occult; it’s just being able to get in someone’s head. He looked alarmed. I reassured him that I don’t do it to manipulate people; I look and see what’s in there, but I don’t move anything. All I do is add some flowers on the counters, and then I walk out. And I explained my opinion that tampering with someone’s free will is an absolute violation to me. He insisted that I could manipulate people and I gave my usual joking line of, “But I use my powers for good, not evil.” I could, but I don’t. Everyone is here on their own journey, and I can illuminate things for them, but no one is anyone else’s puppets. He still thinks it’s trippy that I can just sit there at a bar and strangers will tell me secrets and life struggles that they’ve not told their closest friends about. He thought it was trippy, at least, until he realized he’d just told me stuff about his relationship with his ex-wife and things he’d done in the past that he normally does not ever bring up, and that I’d talked him through that until he had a look of relief on his face. And then he walked out wide-eyed in a daze. “But don’t you feel better? And you don’t feel manipulated, right?” I called after him. “I fold,” he said, “All in.”

I told Mr. W in our conversation about this that if it came to just me, the last relationship wasn’t worth it. It challenged me in a trial by fire, and I’d almost died three times. So it gave me a depth, so what? But if that’s what I had to go through to help people around me, to use my experience to help lift their lives, sort of in a share-the-wealth type of way, then it would have been worthwhile. And that happened almost immediately after the breakup. People came to me really early to ask for help and advice on how to survive the aftermath, and I did what I could for everyone that was open to me. In a self-serving way, what I went though made me recognize Mr. W for who he is, whereas before, I wouldn’t have and actually did not give him a chance, and before, I was wrong.

I’d told James in another conversation some time ago that what I want to do with my life is to leave a mark of some sort, to know that my life made a difference somewhere. He told me that he just wanted to live well and be happy. I guess that’s a constitutional right in this country, the pursuit of the American Dream, of happiness. He asked, if I know that I’ve made a difference, would I gain “happiness” from that knowledge alone even without riches or the “perfect” material life? I think I would be satisfied.