cindy's world

When I was younger, I thought Adult Cindy would…

1.) never tire of running to a ringing phone to see who might be calling;
2.) never be boring like Mom and Dad and order duck designs on checks;
3.) not be one of those meanie grownups who dislike children.

I think I may be wrong on all three accounts. The first, because I find myself laying listless sometimes as the phone rings, and I’m thinking, “There can’t be anyone calling who’s important or interesting enough that’ll make it worthwhile for me to get up right now.” The second, because I just wrote a standard designless checkered background check to pay my cell phone bill and not only is this the first set of checks I’ve had (since the first book of free checks you get for opening the account) that’s not some cool or cute personalized design, but I don’t even care that this check is boring and doesn’t say a thing about me, because it’s free. (I had a bad experience with ordering specialty checks that has now convinced me to be content with the bank’s free and hassle-free ones, boring as they are. You can read about the bad experience here and the update here.) The third, I’m not really sure about; people like Jordan, Dwaine and my gym trainee have said that it’s not that I don’t like kids per se, I just dislike unruly undisciplined kids in public. That may be true, because this past weekend I met a little toddler girl who’s well-behaved, quiet, and happy. She melted my heart. Mr. W and I had gone over to his kids’ mom’s house to pick the kids up, and mom’s sister was there with her toddler. The little girl was playing on the stairs, so Mr. W walked up and picked her up lest she fall to her death. Bringing her down, he walked toward me and I reached out a finger to the little curly-haired girl and said, “Hi!” She actually stretched out her open hands and arms toward me, and leaned toward me. “Awww!” I said as I took her from him. She giggled at me.

So what kind of expectations did you guys have of your grownup selves when you were kids? Did they come true?

I had a really crappy evening. Not because anything went wrong, or because something expectedly good didn’t come through, nothing so legitimate like that. I guess I just let someone get to me that didn’t deserve to have such an “in.” It surprises me that the mood is not more connected or responsive to the intellect, because this person is on the waaay peripheral of my life, doesn’t physically affect me or my loved ones, and I keep telling myself that I know I didn’t do anything wrong to this person, I’d in fact always tried to be supportive, and if for some wacked out reason this person suddenly decides to be rude during these holiday seasons, well, that’s really not my problem. I know I didn’t wrong anyone and frankly, it’s not like this is some great person whose favor says anything about me. Besides, this person is more than busy with self-created, self-induced problems due to this person’s own stupidity and poor past decisions. Everyone who is important, whom I respect, admire and love, are just fine, and are interrelationally fine with me.

Hmmph. Time to cross this person off my list. Coincidentally, all yesterday I wore some Happy Bunny socks inside my boots, and Happy Bunny is saying, “Like I Need YOUR Approval.” Yeah!

I had the radio on this morning while I was getting ready for work, and it played Christina Aguilera’s song “Hurt.” Since then, this song has been stuck in my head in all its pop and her falsetto glory with all instruments intact.

I want to jam my pen into my ear and swish it around. I want to vomit the nasty sound out of my head. I want to punch that song in the face for wearing out its welcome. I want to pull it out like a musical staff scarf and smack a certain person in the face with it, over and over and over.

Instead I think I am going to go lie down in the dark.

This would’ve been the day to call in sick. There’s a throbbing pain behind my left eyeball in my head, and I’m pissed as hell from being unable to reach Mr. W since 5:30p yesterday despite calling his cell, house, and leaving messages. I also didn’t sleep well last nite because I still had my summer sateen sheets on the bed and was freezing to death. I really need to change to one of my flannel sheets. I actually had to duck my face inside the covers so my nose and face could thaw out, and then I was scared of falling asleep and suffocating. Even now my fingers are frozen, stiff and painful. I suppose I can skip a workout today at lunch, since I got to go to jujitsu yesterday evening. It was just a 45 minute workout then a potluck/movie (we saw Kung Fu Hustle, which I did not know was entirely a Mandarin-speaking movie), but we ate healthy and I managed to sweat during the workout despite its minute duration and the freezing temperatures. Besides, I did run yesterday at lunch, a little over 3 miles.

Or maybe I just want to go shop or something, I dunno. I hate crowds, tho.

Where’s a pissy, cold antisocial girl to go?

** Addendum: We’re on a break right now and I just went to get some coffee and brought it back to my desk. It’s so cold that I gave a big shudder and almost spilt the half-full cup on myself. Good lord.

Thanksgiving weekend was really fun. Mr. W and I had planned to fit in at least one day of gym time, he even looked up the nearby 24 Hr Fitness gyms in Vegas, and we thought we’d take in a show on the Vegas Strip. We didn’t end up doing either because we couldn’t fit it in between the family dinners, hanging out with his parents, having dinner with his brother’s family. The only time we hit the Strip was before meeting up with his relatives for Chicago pizza dinner, when Mr. W and I parked in the Harrah’s parking structure, walked through it to get out on the Strip and get to the Venetian to catch Flat Coke & Flies before she and her boyfriend Bat entered their Blue Man Group show. We only got to hang out while they were in the will-call ticket line, but it was fun to hear about all her Vegas birthday surprises. (On the way there, Flat Coke and I were text-messaging each other on our whereabouts, trying to coordinate, and I told Mr. W that I felt like I was going to a BBS user meet that I hadn’t gone to since I was 17. He’d never gone to a user meet before, so the he likened it to a blind date. Which got me thinking — I’m okay with showing up to a blind date and getting disappointed, but it would really suck if the person who was meeting ME was disappointed, ya know?)

We did go to the Red Rocks with Mr. W’s parents on Saturday before we left. He climbed it alone; I stayed behind and took pictures, and hung out with his parents. It was freezing, but all the red stripes on the gigantic rocky cliffs made for some mesmerizing photos.

This Thanksgiving, I was and remain grateful for a great boyfriend who opens up his life and his family to me, and offers me the most stress-free relationship I’ve ever known. In the other direction, I’m also grateful he opens himself up to my family, culture, and greets things new and strange to him with excitement and wide-spread arms. I love that he spoils me sick with all the little and some not-s0-little things he does for me without so much as thinking twice, and he in turn appears surprised that I appreciate the automatic things he does so much to think I’m being spoiled. Last but not least, I appreciate that his brother left behind his Playstation 2 and Guitar Hero 1 and 2 games with the guitar controllers for us last weekend, which is the reason that I have lost much sensation in my left fingertips. (On Friday nite Mr. W and I were up till almost 3am playing!)

I was standing in the shower this morning sudsing up, and then I suddenly found myself staring at the bar of soap in my hand with awe.

Bar soap is so neato. It’s this wad of semi-solid stuff that, with just a little water, lathers up into bubbles that cleanse you, and then the slippery bubbly film just simply rinses clean away. And the bar doesn’t dissolve completely, only what you need, which you get by rubbing the bar on your skin, and the bar’s so smooth that this rubbing doesn’t even hurt! When you’re done with it for the day (or half-day, depending on your hygiene habits), you simply put the bar aside and it’ll dry off and resolidify, all by itself. You can leave it there, exposed for days, and it doesn’t evaporate, doesn’t harden into something unuseable next time. Plus it smells good, too!

I wish I could’ve seen people’s faces and heard their impressed comments at the advent of bar soap. “You mean we don’t have to bring a rock with us to pound soaproot anymore for some suds? YAY!”

I think I’m burned out on my rec classes. I started jujitsu in late June last year, and then belly dancing 2 semesters ago. This year, on a good week I’ve been attending about half the jujitsu I used to, and this last semester I’ve attended 5 out of 8 belly dancing classes. I don’t even feel bad about ditching, despite the fact that the belly dancing is a paid class. I really thought that after returning from Hawaii, I’d be much better about attending jujitsu, especially after noticing in the clinics how behind I am in skills and familiarity with some basic moves and arm bars. Jujitsu started back up this past Monday, and I haven’t been to one class. I also bought some belly dancing hip scarves (colorful gauze triangular scarves you tie around your hips decked out in bells and little coins that jingle when you move) in Hawaii, not realizing until last night that belly dancing ended last Wednesday, a day I’d ditched.

I also only went to the gym for the first time in almost 3 weeks yesterday at lunch, but only because all other lunch options fell through. The weights punished me for neglecting them for so long, and my triceps and quads are appropriately sore today. My abs aren’t, though.

Mr. W agreed with me that I appear to be burned out already and these classes have lost their value to me. “But you only took those classes to take up time anyway, and how you have me!” he said happily, curling his arms around me.

I can’t help thinking, tho, that I need to find something physical to do on a regular basis, even if it means switching genres (altho I’m not going back to the crazy yoga instructor Mr. W and I went to earlier in the year again, either). Besides, Mr. W needs his “alone” time to be a gamer. I don’t know what to do next. Maybe take up hip hop again? Or maybe I’ll try a different belly dancing instructor, one that some coworkers go to, since they’d been trying to talk me into that class for some time and now I have jingling hip scarves.

Or MAYBE I’ll take something easy, like ESL. I can pretend to be a total English dunce, fake an accent, and then be the most improved student at the end of the semester. That’ll be good for all the foreigners’ self-esteem. It’ll give them a raised bar to work toward. We’ll call it public service.

I love my friends. I think I have hand-picked a wonderful group of people who have proven their quality and worth to me, and their existence in my life enriches my own existence. They subsidize me when I have shortcomings, they set me straight when I’m off-balance, they give me emotional, intellectual and psychological support. They’re great company, and they’re a mixed company. Which leads me to some thoughts bouncing in the back of my head.

Teenagers and young people today have platonic friends of both genders. There are things one gender gives you that the other gender doesn’t, and sometimes the best minds and compatibility happens to be in a person of the opposite gender. And it’s totally acceptable these days. Looking one generation up, however, I see that my parents have “their” friends they hang out with in a married group, and of course that’s co-ed. But my mother does not have men that are exclusively “her” friends and not my dad’s, and my dad doesn’t just go out and do lunch with some chick he says is his friend. In fact, if I were to come home one day (we good little Asian kids still refer to the parents’ house as “home” whether we live there or not) and my dad’s home alone, telling me that she’s out having dinner with Mr. So-and-so, I’d be extremely uncomfortable. I’d have awful pictures in my head of my mom at some white table-cloth date with some sleezy man determined to undermine my father’s place in my mother’s life. I’d want to drive out there and glare at them. And I’d hate the man, no matter who he is. But first and foremost, I’d shake my dad until his glasses fell off for letting his wife go out to dinner with another man. Luckily, this has never happened. The few times my parents weren’t together due to a social reason, it was because my mom was out with her coworkers (all female) for their monthly gaggle, or my dad was out fishing with his fishing buddies (all family friends).

Now I turn to myself. I’m 30. That’s a grown-up! Sure, I’ve never been married and I have no kids, so I still categorize myself as a single person with single person habits and lifestyle and friends. I can be a little irresponsible and go out late, and have tons of friends. But is this supposed to be given up if I enter the next stage of life? If I got married, would it be no longer appropriate to accept Dwaine’s spontaneous invitations to go wine-shopping with him, or to go on an impromptu run after jujitsu with other dojo-mates, or to grab a drink or bite with James after we wash our cars and work out at the gym?

Or is the difference that my parents have entered this country as an established married couple, so all friends they have, they met together, whereas I grew up here so I had plentiful time to establish long-term bonds and friendships as an individual?

Running these self-induced guilty thoughts by Mr. W, he waves the whole thing off simply with, “Well, I trust you and your judgments. If you had inappropriate feelings about these ‘friends’ that’d be a different story.” I think one saving grace about my male buddies is that they have always only been just that — buddies. I am not in regular contact with men I’ve had a dating or non-platonic relationship with. I think that’s unnecessary stress on the relationship to have my significant other think, “She found him attractive before, and they gave in to temptation before, how do I know it won’t happen again?” But I am on civil enough terms with my 5-year relationship ex so that if we needed information or something, we can call the other and they’d help (Gary, for example, gave me the connections for my recent car purchase), and he’d called me for some legal guidance a few months ago, too. Although we don’t communicate on a regular basis and we don’t make plans to see each other, I think that it’s pretty cool how we are.

It’s finally chilly in the mornings again. It started to cool off a bit in California before my Hawaii trip, but right before we left, the dry, cow-scented Santa Ana winds heated up SoCal again. This weekend it was so dry that, having forgotten to smear body butter on myself after the shower Sunday morning, my skin felt itchy at the Getty Center, like it was gonna rip if I bent over too suddenly.

Even though the high was forecasted to be 85 degrees F today, the morning was icy. I wrapped up in a thick terry bathrobe after my shower. Dodo-Puff’s fur was cold to the touch, too. He’s fluffier than usual, which means his body’s sensing the climate shift as well and is growing extra fur. (Either that or I need to brush him more to get rid of the old fur.)

I like chilly mornings. It reminds me of winter mornings past.
* Me as a 6-year-old in the country for the first time, away from the tropical island I was born, looking out the window minutes before dawn breaks, admiring the water-colored people-less tree-lined streets that is America.
* Reading Calvin & Hobbes cartoons in elementary and high school, wishing I could relate to the sled-rides, the snow monsters, the snow fort, the mittens/scarves/snow pants.
* Reading other stories of 60s and 70s American life, wanting so badly to tap into a maple tree for maple syrup that I could boil on the stove, then bring outside to pour on some tightly packed and pounded snow on the ground to make crunchy maple candy.
* Awakening in the mornings at UCLA in the chill, seeing Diana up and moving around making tea, or plodding along in her pajamas getting set to study with her gigantic headphones.
* Walking the Naples water canals in Long Beach with my coworker Sandy and our significant others, admiring the extravagant Christmas decor of the rich with endless money to throw at electricity.
* Curling up on my sheepskin rug in front my crackling lit fireplace the first time I was really truly happy in my own skin being single, smiling at my house, my Dodo boy and multitude of lit candles around me.
* Mr. W lighting his fake fireplace for me knowing I love the dance of flames, and finally allowing me to throw in a pine cone so I could watch it change to carbon (I had a blog by then, and I wrote about that here).

There are so many more memories, in between all these events, that I savor and relive when the temperature drops. =)

For the past few weeks, I’ve been having near-nightly nightmares about Mr. W. I forget the dreams within an hour of so of waking up, but I know that I’m furious at him in all of them. Sometimes things happen that aren’t necessarily the fault of Dream W, but the situation it places me in the nightmare sends me reeling, making me self-analyze, even in my unconscious state, whether I’m overreacting or unreasonable. The pattern upon waking, of course, is the slow dawning realization that Dream W situations would not happen in real life as the real life Mr. W does not have the asshole behavior that Dream W exhibits. I’m not sure whether these dreams are my subconscious acting out my worst relationship fears, or maybe putting Mr. W’s face on behaviors of past assholes I’d been involved with. 2 nightmares ago, I’d remembered the dream long enough to tell Mr. W about it in the morning. As I relived the details, I wondered aloud why Dream Cindy didn’t just dump Dream W as I feel she definitely should have. So in the last dream I had, Dream Cindy did dump Dream W. Here’s me IMing Mr. W about it:

Cindy: OOH, I had another nightmare about you this morning!!
I was SO MAD when I woke up.
I was so pissed in the dream I actually DID dump you this time.
You bought this game on some game console that you kept playing, but you never let me play.
Mr. W: Awe I must be an asshole in your dreams
I want you to play
Cindy: so I finally made a big point of sitting in the chair you always sit in to play the game, because the controller is right there, and you simply moved the controller and played from another position.
At first I was just like, “Jerk won’t share his turn.” And THEN I realized “WAIT a minute, there are TWO DAMN CONTROLLERS. He could totally let me play AND play himself at the same time! But he just WON’T! He DELIBERATELY plays in single mode!”
And I was SO mad that I got up and said, “You know what? That’s IT, it’s OVER!” and you seemed perfectly content to let me leave but you STILL wouldn’t let me play.
AAAAAARRRRHGGGGHHHHH!!
Mr. W: Wanna come over and play xbox tonight?
Cindy: HAHAHA!!!
Ya know…after that dream, I kinda do.
Mr. W: Yaaaeeh!

I swear, not all my dream infuriations are over such stupid things.