cindy's world

I hate it when you let someone in and they now have access to wreak havoc on your heart and mind.

I hate it. I hate this. I hate it. I hate this.

Yup, the avocado is still there in its little clear plastic cup of shame. Kind of like how people were punished in the ol’ Medieval days by being shackled and locked head and hands in a wooden stock and people would walk by and laugh at them or throw apples at them.

The tip of the stem has now died and turned brown. It was suggested to me that maybe I was drowning the seed, so I poured out most of the water and just left the bottom part of the avocado sitting in the pool. The crack split open more, and I thought something was happening, but it’d been a few days. People do stop and ask what the hell that is, but I’d forgotten that I’d wanted to say it was the testicle of a cougar, so instead I’d been answering people with “It’s the brain of the last attorney who was in here.” Very few people pursue the question further. The movie props people who were in my courtroom filming a few weekends ago had asked the sheriff who was posted in my courtroom what was in the cup, and I’m not sure what he told them. He did tell me people kept asking about it.

I had been about to dump the seed when I turned it and realized that something between the yellowed color of the seed and a light green had begun to grow in the middle of the crack. It doesn’t appear to be a root, not stringy enough. It resembles the very young sprout of a bamboo or something, about the size and shape of a large sunflower seed shell. So I guess I’m keeping it a bit longer to see what happens.

A few people have told me when Disney’s Lilo and Stitch first came out that I must’ve been like Lilo as a young girl. This now reminds me of the scene in which Lilo’s shaking up a large liquid-filled glass jar that had a few wooden spoons in it and the spoons have faces drawn on the scoop parts and yarn hair glued to the tops. Someone asked her what she’s doing, and she said without looking up, “I’m punishing my friends when they’ve been bad,” or something to that effect.

I’ve gotta watch that movie again.

If someone hides the fact that he’s in a relationship from someone of the opposite sex, it makes me uncomfortable if the concealment goes beyond simply “it never came up.” I’m talking if the person had to lie about it, i.e. calling the significant other by a different title (“friend,” “roommate”) when the need to refer to him/her arises. And to make matters worse, when it comes out in the open that this person’s married, it doesn’t stop this person for long before advancing to the next step, which is engaging in a conversation (with the person of the opposite sex) that the spouse would be very offended by, hitting topics that are highly inappropriate altho they are addressed rather matter-of-factly and clinically. Should the recipient of this attention be flattered? I think it’s rather scary, personally. Because I’d like to have faith in married people, have faith in marriage, especially the ones that appear happy. At least the marriages that I see around me. I don’t care about divorce case people whose files are ruining my workday. And now the opposite sex person is stuck in a position where he/she has to keep something from the spouse, and now there’s some secret bond that exists between the married person and the opposite sex person outside of the marriage. Ugh. Isn’t it true that if they’ll do it for you, they’ll do it TO you?

I need to take my own advice sometimes. A friend is dealing with garbage people from her past polluting her present peace that she had worked so hard to achieve. She’s hoping that karma gets them in the end. And here’s what I told her, because it’s SO CLEAR when it’s about someone else:

“Another side to this is, you know if they’re messing with you, they are REALLY unhappy people who are trying to feel better by making you fall. That means they perceive your happiness and are jealous. So in the whole karmic balance, you’re ALREADY one-up on them. You spend your day doing your own thing and grinning, and they spend their day having it ruined by you simply because you exist. You got them back and didn’t even have to lift a finger or dirty your own karma to do it.

“Really, my advice is just to roll your eyes at it, laugh at it, or wave your hand impatiently in a go-away-I-don’t-have-time-for-you gesture at it. It’s really laughable and pathetic. They’re STILL hung up on you after all this time that they can’t keep themselves from trying to knock on your door? It’s YOUR door to YOUR life, you don’t have to open it and let them in. Well, you opened it to see what it was. You don’t have to let them in.

“This isn’t elementary school where people will tease you or make your life hard just because they’re trying to get points for popularity or because they ACTUALLY don’t like you for the way you look or dress or act. In adulthood, they (try to) mess with you because your existence makes them feel insignificant, and they don’t like that. That’s not YOUR fault! They are insignificant because if they were better people, they’d be significant to somebody. It’s sad, really. Maybe that’s what you should do. Shake your head at them sadly and tsk.”

I’m just posting this on my blog because I could use the reminder, as well.

I’ve got this horrible nauseating feeling deep down between the back of my throat and my chest that seems to be pulling down into my stomach. I developed it on my drive back to work from the gym earlier, probably around 1:15p. I just took my heartrate. My normal resting heartrate is about 66, 67. It’s 103 right now. I feel sick and really, really nervous. Taking deep breaths doesn’t seem to be shaking it.

Am I having an anxiety attack?

I hope nothing’s wrong with my loved ones. That’s what it feels like. Anxiety and dread.

I spent a few hours with my dad at my parents’ house last nite. My mom wasn’t there, she was, from what I could gather, at some political event banquet with my grandmother (her mom). My dad was watching some Chinese-English hybrid movie that was kinda like classic Chinese horror meets “The X Files.” I was totally creeped out driving home alone.

The movie reminded me of when I had to walk through UCLA alone in the dark. There’s a portion of a tree-lined walk on the edge of campus between one side of the fenced-off football practice field and the tennis courts. I’d always get the heebie jeebies walking thru there (it’s usually fairly isolated) at night cuz I’d be picturing dead people hung on the trees and dropping down, various supernatural nightmare creatures watching me and planning their moment of strike, etc. To make myself feel better, I’d remind myself of what my dad had said to me. “You’re scared of ghosts?! There’s nothing scary about ghosts! Now people, THEY’RE scary!” People are more vicious and cruel than any ghosts, but people are less intimidating in my head, so I’d feel better. I usually could keep myself from breaking into a panicked run.

Last night’s dream:

I received a phone call from Grace. She was gonna come over and visit. Grace! I thought she’d passed away due to leukemia! Or…wait…was that just the prognosis, and not the actual event? I vaguely seem to remember something about a treatment or a misdiagnosis or something…I didn’t want to admit over the phone with her that I thought she’d died because I hadn’t kept up with the news of her health condition. What kind of friend would I be? She came over, and I hugged her, so glad to see her. I may have said something about her ailment, because I felt her tears on my shoulder as she recalled how hard that phase of her life had been. She told me about a turn of events that seemed vaguely familiar, some medical procedure that discovered that she actually didn’t even have leukemia, it was something else that made her sick with symptoms similar to that of leukemia, and they were taking care of that and she was nearly completely recovered. [Interruption: I just realized where I got this memory confusion from. Stevie Wonder’s dog was initially diagnosed with canine leukemia, but through a barrage of tests, they found that it wasn’t leukemia after all, and altho that’s good news, they at the same time weren’t really sure what it was. When Stevie Wonder called me to tell me this most current news, I felt tremendous relief, suddenly followed by, “Wait. Huh? Then what’s going on now? They don’t know?”] So we hung out a bit and chatted, I think her mom — her overjoyed, loving mom — was also there, and an unknown smaller/younger male, who was a family member or a close friend of the family or something. Grace and her mom left, and this male and I were discussing, and then I realized that I distinctly remember knowing that Grace was cremated. I remember Grace’s husband, mother and her close friend who had been at the cremation site had talked about how her husband had removed her ring, but let her bridal bouquet burn with her. I started to see flashes of real-life memory: Grace’s ashes in the palm of my hand as I scattered them in the ocean at her request, at the site where her wedding would have been in Laguna Beach. Her mother standing around the rocky bend from us at beachside, unable to bring herself to watch her daughter being scattered by sister, best friends, husband, father. Altho I wasn’t at the actual cremation, I slowly realized that this girl who acted and looked just like Grace, couldn’t have been Grace. It must’ve been some amazingly convincing robot or advanced hologram. I had no clue who’d try to fool us that way, or why. The boy and I discussed how we couldn’t tell Grace’s mom, look how happy she is to have her daughter back! She’s in complete denial, it’d be not only difficult, but extremely painful, to burst her bubble.

Blech. The whole morning has me rattled and I’m just insecure and feeling…blech. I tried to make myself feel better by putting more effort into my appearance, trying to bring up the confidence level. But still. Blech. I have no idea what the dream means.

My brain has associated certain songs with certain frames of mind. A mixed CD (remember mixed tape days?) I listened to a lot in late 2002, early 2003 when I was single was playing in my car this morning as I drove to work. Cranking up the volume in these songs, I could reinvoke a fraction of the euphoria I felt “back in the day”.

It was a pretty high drive to work…until a DA almost killed me by driving backwards the wrong way up an aisle in the parking structure at a high speed without looking behind her.

Ptthh. I just found it. Turns out it IS in my own blog, AND in my comment section here where I responded to something Jordan wrote. And right after I wrote this whole entry, too.

Well, I’m glad to see that Murphy’s alive and well.

I could’ve sworn I’d written something either on my blog or as a comment on someone else’s blog something about how it’s scary to be in a relationship because you give someone you have no control over your very fragile world and you just have to trust that the other person won’t be careless with your heart, and then I said something about how you must venture forth with your eyes wide open so that you could determine in as short a time as possible whether the person you’re dealing with is trustworthy, hopefully before you totally fall for him. However, I can’t find this comment ANYWHERE. Not on my blog, not on the comments of blog I frequent. How frustrating! Maybe I wrote that in an email of support to a friend.

But yeah, the scariest thing about a relationship to me is that half of the relationship is out of my hands and it’s purely reliant on how good a judge of character I am that decreases the odds that someone will rip my heart senseless. That’s why I tend to be euphoric alone, especially after I’ve come out of a bad relationship. It’s because for once (or so it feels), it’s finally the case that no one is able to have a negative effect on me. That no one has the power to make me sad. Some would say that even in a relationship, the other person shouldn’t have the power to destroy you, anyway, but come on. Let’s be realistic. If someone doesn’t have the power to crash you to hell, then either you’re a robot, or you weren’t that into them to begin with.