cindy's world

Tonight, as I chase after my fleeting sanity, I wish for

tenderness…

…strength…

…self-love and acceptance of the imperfect self…

…and a sense of one-ness and belonging.

I don’t know why it surprises me, especially considering how I am, but it does. Telling someone my frustrations or other little complaints bums the person out. I guess I’m just used to being ignored or not taken seriously, because my experience is that when I bring up concerns to another person, these complaints tend to float in one ear and fly out the other. They are quickly forgotten, if even acknowledged in the first place. I just figured that, especially with guys, whatever displeases them are waved off. Except that today, after my observation of, “Are you upset about something?”, it turned out that my prior unhappiness had gathered and stacked up not only in my own head (which is really where I expected it all to remain if it were to remain anywhere), but on the shoulders of the other person, too. He said he feels that there are so many things about him that I’m unhappy about. I was so shocked that I didn’t know what to say. A guy? Keeping track? To the point that it bothers him? I asked him why he didn’t note the things that I am happy about but happened instead to focus on the unhappy things. He shrugged. Should I make him a list of the good things, I asked? He gave a half-laugh.

I’m not sure how to feel about the fact that my being unhappy actually affected someone, because wow, someone actually gives a shit about my feelings. (My expectations are so low.) On the other hand, I didn’t take into account that what I do or feel has any remaining impact beyond the actual conversation or fight or whatever deals with it directly.

This is a hard post to write. It’s all muggy in my head, too. I just feel bad.

I think someone may have wished me peace over the weekend. Or maybe I wished myself peace. Maybe the gift I was given is not peace, but perspective, because after all, all this layered drama has been going on around me and for once, they’re not MINE! All I know is that as much as my head acknowledged what was going on, my emotions were steady on Friday morning. I’d sat there alone and smiled in retrothought. Again, tonight. I’m not happy about things, but if it were a month ago, I’d have been distraught and bedridden with emotional angst. Instead, I’m sitting at work (yes, at work), happily joking with Vanessa and arranging flowers and printing out stuff.

I deserve some emotional stability, man.

Our trial yesterday ended at 4p, but I stayed at work till almost 6p to do more divorce files. I’m almost at goal. Blech. I didn’t get home till 6:30p, and by then, especially since Vanessa was home, stressed from work and wanted to treat herself to a nice dinner and drinks, I found it impossible not to ditch jujitsu again. I was starving and had a headache, anyway.

So we went to Market City Caffe where I had way too much wonderful fresh crusty bread, way too much creamy delicious Italian pasta, and way, way too much pinot grigio wine.

Obviously, we were too wired by then to just go to bed or something, so just as I was thinking about maybe watching a movie at home, Vanessa asked, “So what do you wanna do now?” I said, “Let’s go to Bed, Bath & Beyond!” It’s only a few blocks from my house. So we went there, learned it was closed, and instead went to…WalMart! Woohoo! Entering the megastore, Vanessa made a joke about oh no, we’re not gonna get out without spending hundreds of dollars, and altho I laughed, I had no intention of buying anything.

$150 later at the checkout (between both of us), we were remarking astoundedly to the friendly register lady how neither of us really expected to buy the massive quantities of scented candles, tea light holders, large mosaic photo frames, standing glass vase, DVD movies, long-necked lighters, Gatorade, low-rise panties, knee-high hosiery, incense holder, and other stuff I can’t remember cuz we were probably a little tipsy giggling down the aisles and admiring all the REALLY COOL and REALLY CHEAP STUFF that we NEEDED to buy RIGHT NOW in case they RUN OUT and we find we REALLY NEED THAT STUFF later on when it’s TOO LATE. It may be safe to infer that our judgments were a bit impaired. But that’s the beauty of WalMart. Sure, you can’t leave without spending a bunch of money you didn’t expect to spend, but you get, like, a billion items for the price. Costco works that way, too, but at Costco, you get a billion of the same products, in industrial-sized packages.

At one point, when I was clinging onto the shopping cart (we walked into WalMart without one, and I realized at some point early on we should have one; that was the beginning of the end), I had a moment of clarity and said, “I can objectively step away and observe that we are being really lame.” She said something about how being lame with someone else being lame is what’s fun about it. It reminded me of being a lame teenager running thru Thrifty (now Sav-On) with my friends Sandy, Vicky, Ling-Ling, cousin Jennifer, whomever was with me at the time, laughing and looking at all the really cool stuff we knew our parents would never let us buy. Like makeup and razors.

When I’d first gotten home and Vanessa had finished telling me about her most recent work drama, I said, “Boy, we picked a good time for moving in together.” She agreed, as the drama had been rotated between me, then her, then me, and then her, and having a friend at home made things so much easier.

Oh, I’d forgotten to mention in the post about the weekend that on Friday, we decided Vanessa would stay with me another month until her boyfriend moved down and they could find a place together. Yay!

A coworker found out some stuff yesterday that his live-in girlfriend had done on Monday, he was furious, and last nite went home and broke up with her. Just like that. Canceled their upcoming vacation cruise and flight and everything at nearly a $1300 loss. Today, he is fully functional, and when we search his face carefully and ask how he is, he says with no more than a rueful smile that it’s done, it’s over. He’d already taken her key and garage door opener back, she’d taken her stuff out of his place and left. Knowing her, she took the day off from work and is going thru emotional hell at her parents’ house.

I’ve always been astounded by and yet envious of people who can end a major relationship in their life and yet appear to shrug it off and move on immediately. How do they do that? I used to watch the characters on “Friends” break up with people with a hug and an “I’m sorry it didn’t work out,” “I’m sorry, too” exchange and they’d walk right back into the apartment, the other Friends would come give the breaker-upper a hug and a sympathetic rub on the back, and they’d move on to the next thing, just like that. I used to think, “That’s cuz it’s just a TV show, they only have 20 minutes to tell their story, they’re not gonna spend the entire episode on one cast member’s misery,” but then there really are people in the real world like that. The only time I’d been so emotionally nonchalant about a breakup was when I didn’t have much emotionally invested in the relationship to begin with.

Are men just not emotionally vested? It does seem that during times of physical separation, we tend to miss them a hell of a lot more than they’d even think of us.

Mr. W just emailed me a photo of me taken on Saturday that he’d manipulated. The photo was taken when the photographer was behind me, then she called my name and I turned to look over my right shoulder, and that’s when the camera snapped. Mr. W cropped the photo so that it’s my head down to part of my shoulders and back, and then he did some special effect on it that made it look like abstract green, yellow and black bold strokes comprise the photo. I don’t like how I look in that photo, even before he artsified it. My bailiff agreed, after looking over my shoulder, that it was not a good picture of me and it looks like I have a big jaw. I have other problems with this picture that I’m too embarassed to say on here. Mr. W, however, loves this photo. In his words, it’s “a photo [he] absolutely love[s].” And it’s now the wallpaper background on his gigantic-screened new laptop. Which he brings everywhere with him. Including work. Great.

I remember that Grace’s high school boyfriend Edgar (still one of my good friends now) took a close-up photo of her face that she hated. She was laying down on a couch or a bed or something and laughing, and the angle of the camera to her face made her have a massive double-chin. And Grace was skinny; she was always a size 0/1. She did not ordinarily have a double-chin. I’ve seen the photo and I had to agree with her that it is the most unflattering shot of her, ever. EVER. But she couldn’t get Edgar to get rid of it. He loved that photo, even had it framed and set it up next to his bed. “She looks so cute!” he’d said.

I don’t know. Maybe these men love us with or without external flaws, and don’t see us with the vanity-aimed eyes through which we view ourselves. Maybe they don’t even see the flaws we see. Or maybe they love our flaws — big jaws, double-chins, and all — because these flaws are part of the appearance they have learned to love in looking at their significant others.

And they say men are visual.

OMG, I feel SO GOOD now that those posts have been purged out of me! I feel like a huge weight has been lifted. I’m even light-headed right now. I can breathe!

When I got home yesterday, I watered the cat, started dinner and went upstairs to change into my flannel PJs, came back down, lit some candles, ate dinner as I watched TBS’s 3 back-to-back “Friends” episodes, then fell asleep as I expected to. At some point, I woke up in pitch darkness except for the glow cast by the TV. I had no idea what time it was, and I got up on one elbow and turned my left wrist toward the TV to see my watch. It was 11:15p. I thought I heard a voice directly to my left in the kitchen, but looking there, not only could I not see anything as I was bathed in the glare of the TV light, but I had fallen asleep in my contacts which then dried up in my eyes, so now things were not just contrasted, but blurry. I looked forward again toward the stairs. There seemed to be an orange glow coming from upstairs. I wondered if Vanessa had come home and walked by me completely unobserved. Or maybe the glow is from the streetlamp pouring into the side window of my hallway. I finally decided to get up and turn on the torchiere lamp. Vanessa was indeed smiling at me drinking water in the kitchen. “When’d you get home?” I asked her.
“Oh, not that long, about an hour ago.”
“How long’ve you been standing there?”
“Not that long, just taking my herbal supplements and meds. Want some water?”
I realized I did not drink a drop of water all day. “Yeah, thanks,” I said, and she brought me a tall glass. Since I was laying down on the couch, she sat Indian-style to my left and petted my cat as he walked up to greet her. “I’m all messed up,” I whined.
“Wanna talk about it?”
So we did, briefly, and half-watched “Friends” and “Will & Grace” as those shows flickered by on the big screen. At some point, she got up to use the restroom, and I fell asleep again. When I awoke at 4:30 a.m., I was again curled up in darkness save for the patterned lights strewn from the TV. Vanessa had blown out my candles and turned off the lamp, but left the TV on “in case [I] need the background noise to sleep,” as she’d told me the last time I fell asleep in front of the TV and awoke to find the candles extinguished and the lights off.
I looked behind me and saw that Dodo was also asleep, curled lightly sideways with the upper half of his body on his catnip scratching pad and the lower half on the carpet. I turned off the TV, walked upstairs, and laid down in my bed. I don’t know what it is about my bed that is so extremely comforting. I slept until 7a when my alarm went off, but drifted in and out of sleep instead of getting up.
I guess I thought that getting enough rest would reset myself mentally and physically, and instead, I was craving even more sleep. I examined the rounded puffy bags under my eyes as I squeezed the toothpaste onto my toothbrush. I’m not sure if I’m under-rested or over-rested, but something did bring me to a realization as I drove to work.

It’s not the bad things that are done to me or happen to me that bring on the depression. What really shakes my ground is the losing, or the loss, of faith in where I am in life. I want to be committed to where I am, but if things happen to make me doubt my present choice, the fact that I know I have the power to change my path and yet not knowing whether I’m meant to change it, that brings on a conflict of emotion vs. intellect, heart vs. head. I don’t like big choices like this. I don’t even like small choices, like does this object of clothing go into the delicate, regular, or heavy duty pile of the light or dark loads? That’s the prime reason I hate doing laundry. I’m also not keene on huge lifestyle changes. So when I get pieces of information that tell me a choice I’ve made in the past may no longer be the right choice for me in the present or future, now I’m panicking. And stalling only makes things worse as I’m conscious of the fact that the longer I drag things out, the more the alternative opportunities slip away.

I guess I’d always known this on some level, but I usually don’t address it and don’t give the thoughts much exploration. Maybe the extra sleep gave me the ability to deal with that global aspect.

Over the weekend, I sat quietly on the balcony and watched as a little hummingbird tried to land on a metal rod that the hummingbird feeder was suspended from. The imitation twig rod is about a half-inch in diameter, and I think it’s made of black iron. It’s attached to a hinge that’s bolted to a vertical support beam, and it reaches upward at approximately a 60-degree diagonal angle from the post and from the top is a loop that the feeder is hung on. The little hummingbird, probably thinking it’s landing on a tree limb, tried to stop on the rod but couldn’t stop flapping its wings because he couldn’t stabilize himself on the rod; he kept sliding down. So he’d flap and struggle to go up a bit, and as soon as its skinny little feet landed on the rod, he’d start sliding downward toward the hinge. He tried and tried for maybe 30 seconds, flapping and shuffling his feet trying to move upwards, but always sliding back, until he gave up and flitted off to investigate the feeder itself.

I think my mood as of late has been like the hummingbird. Left alone, I slip downwards. I need constant flapping and struggling to stay in the same place, otherwise the natural law of gravity, or perhaps Newton’s law of motion, would take over. It’s tiring, especially when the flapping isn’t solely up to me. It’s crazy how something small could totally make my mood. If only they knew how easy and effortless it is.

Do you ever miss something so strongly that you feel saddened and empty without it, only you don’t know what it is you miss? I’m nostalgic for something, but I don’t know what. If there was someone so truly special and wonderful to me that my sad times are a stark contrast to being with him, such that it brings up tears and nausea with how hard I long and yearn, I don’t have any distinct memories of him. Maybe it’s a time I miss. Maybe I miss a time when I was secure and happy. I just miss something or someone so much right now that I want to curl up in a ball and cry. I feel like my conscious memories have been wiped clean but yet something instinctual and subconscious remembers. I remember warmth, and yet some coolness. I remember rosiness. I remember comfort and trust. I remember feather-light caresses, loving strokes upon my head. I remember feeling so protected that I could let everything go because of the faith that nothing could happen to me if I relax. I remember white light, and a sense of being surrounded by white wings wrapped around me from behind.

Here, I feel cold and alone in the dark. I’m often miserable. I’m aware of other light sources around me, but it’s not the same. There, a few dark dots may appear in the light; here, it’s the rare light that thinly penetrates the darkness. And a lot of the light isn’t bright, it’s more of a gray. People who seem lit eventually turn gray on you as you see more of them.