cindy's world

I’m trying to sort out my conflicting feelings. The sort of feelings that hit you when you open the door to leave a cutesy little surprise for your boyfriend (when he’s not supposed to be there), and your eyes are met with the sight of your boyfriend there chatting with his ex. And this is the one ex who, despite not knowing you, gave you problems and attitude, ignored you when you tried to smile at her or greet her civilly, said derogatory stuff to other people about you, when you first started dating your boyfriend. The conflict comes from feeling miffed by her, being caught off-guard, and the smothering of the rosy little glow of leaving a gift for your beloved. That’s all under a giant umbrella of feeling out-of-place and uncomfortable. And it doesn’t help that you find out instantly afterwards that when your boyfriend talks about things you guys did over the weekend or whatnot with his ex, he leaves you out of the descriptions. Another side of the conflict is the grownup side of me that really does want the two of them to get along since they have occasion to be in each others’ presence, and they’re finally getting along again now. (They had been friendly for 5, 6 years after the split, and then she suddenly gave him the cold shoulder once she found out about me.)

I think I just feel slighted. That even tho she was the one being oddly immature and catty for no good reason at all, that I had been the one who retreated from the room, only to find out that I involuntarily get retreated from their conversations, too. Another injury came when Mr. W, who came out after me, assumed that I was angry and immediately tried to explain what she was doing there. I wasn’t angry, I’d dropped off his silly little gift, said hello and left, I really don’t care what she was doing there, I don’t have a problem with her being there, so I merely made the crack, “It’s not like she was on your lap.” But his entire set of actions and words at that point were clearly aimed at diffusing a jealous reaction from me, which is the reaction he’d have gotten if I were any of his exes, and now I feel like he’s projecting their flaws on me and not seeing me. Again. He apologized for it after we had a chance to talk a bit, but now I felt wronged. He said his reactions to situations come from learned conditioning, and I said that’s fine, you should learn the cubbyholes to categorize things in when you’re with someone, but you’re not supposed to use the same set of cubbyholes on a new person that you’d developed for an old person in your life. On top of that, his old cubbyholes are not only inaccurate, but offensive to me, because in order to group my actions into those cubbyholes, he’d have to think I’m petty and jealous and not see anything I do to the contrary. And now I feel like I’ve been sacrificial and overly fair (in regards to other people, especially women, in his life) for nothing. And I feel sorry for myself.

But what am I supposed to do? What is he supposed to change? Their getting along is infinitely better than her immaturity in the beginning of our relationship. Maybe I should bow out altogether and avoid dealing with anything. Someone else’s baggage shouldn’t be my problem, it’s not my fault his ex is still possessive over him, and if he’s going to coddle her feelings, my hands are tied.

And yet it all still comes down to this: doubting myself. Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I just shouldn’t be in relationships. Maybe all I really am, and will ever be, is a sad, sad little girl.

A long time ago, in my second year of college (well, it’s long enough), I had creeped myself out reading a horror novel about a supernatural murderer that reached its victims through chain letters. And then I got a really strange chain letter via email that seemed identical to the one in the novel and this email did not behave like a regular email, either. So I freaked out, called Grace (who was attending UC Berkeley in northern California), and then decided while on the phone with her to simply delete the email, altho it may be cursing me as I do that, in order to stop the chain with me and not let bad karma or whatever get to my friends. (The fact that I still refuse to pass on threatening chain letters to this day dates back to that instance.) I don’t think Grace was ever superstitious, and she certainly didn’t read the horror novel I had then just read, but the fact that I was distraught was enough for her. She called up the girl who sent me the chain letter, an acquaintance from high school (I don’t even know how Grace got her number), and chewed her out. I didn’t know about that phone call until a year or two later when I had occasion to talk to that girl, who told me what Grace had done for me. It had never occurred to the girl that, even if she herself weren’t passing it on due to superstitious fear for her own selfish well-being (which she was), that she may be passing it on to someone who IS superstitious. Every time I get an evil chain letter and make the same decision to delete it lest I pass it on to someone superstitious, I think of Grace and that incident.

I keep my plastic bags, twisted into its own knot, in the lowest drawer next to my kitchen stove for use later to line my trash cans or to bag things in. This morning, I opened my plastic bag drawer in the kitchen and pulled out a white and royal blue plastic bag that I didn’t recognize. I had bypassed a white grocery bag with Chinese lettering for that blue bag. I dumped an apple, an avocado, and a Chinese veggie bun into the bag and brought it to work with me. I ate the apple during an afternoon break in our trial, and 5 minutes before beginning this entry, I took the still unripe avocado out and placed it on my desk. Then I removed the bun. (I had lunch with Mr. W and a friend of his today so I didn’t eat my stuff.) When I took the bun out, my hand on the outside of the bag felt something else in the bag. I looked in and saw a receipt. I looked at the bag. “WORLD Duty Free”, it reads in white lettering. Did I buy something duty-free at an airport recently? I had bought some salt water taffy waiting to come back from Florida last month. (Geez, was it only last month?!) I figured that’s where I got the bag. The receipt, however, reads:

WORLD DUTY FREE EUROPE LTD
130 Wilton Road London SW1V LQ

…WORLD DUTY FREE HEATHROW TERMINAL 3

And then it shows the purchase. Two Sheridans Cream, 100C, for 14.30 pounds. I have never been to Europe. But I did receive a bottle of Sheridans liquor for Christmas a few years ago… from Grace. I had introduced her to this vertically-split bottle of coffee liquor and cream liquor when I visited her in Berkeley our junior year of college. I got her a small bottle (she had recently turned 21), showed her at her studio apartment how to pour it over the rocks with the bottle completely inverted so that the bottle pours precisely a 2/3 coffee, 1/3 cream floater drink. I remember her lying on her back on her bed, 15 minutes after downing this drink (she loved coffee-flavored stuff), and saying, “Oh man, I am so buzzed.” I remember laughing at her. She remembered, at 12:38:50 on November 1, 2003 according to the receipt, that Sheridan’s remained one of my favorite liquors. I didn’t see her that Christmas, she was in New York going through some chemo treatment and her doctor wouldn’t let her travel. Her sister, who had just returned from visiting Grace in New York, had met me at a Starbucks in Brea and handed me this blue bag, Grace’s Christmas present to me. Inside was a bath kit nestled in a porcelain bowl of sorts, with yellow roses (my favorite color and my birthflower) painted on the porcelain. This bowl was next to a large bottle of Sheridans Liquor. Grace’s sister and I discussed Grace’s wedding and bridal shower plans, and then we parted ways. I called Grace to thank her for the presents. “Where’d you find the Sheridans?” I asked her. “I’ve been looking for it everywhere but I guess no one carries it around here anymore.” She said, “Actually, I saw it in London!” I think she may have told me that she bought a bottle for herself, too.

It’s amazing the things we take for granted, and the things we keep in our hearts. And the things we didn’t know we kept, but will treasure forever now due to unfortunate circumstances. This crumpled receipt will be tucked under my transparent desk blotter at work. Call me superstitious, but I believe Grace is telling me that she’s still with me.

I had an IM conversation with Diana last nite about how things will play out if something or someone is meant to be. The conversation reminded me of a particular circumstance. This is how fate or yuan (Mandarin) works in relationships.

My ex was very audible about how he’s a “breast man.” “The bigger the better, I don’t care if they’re fake,” he used to say. Granted, the exes or people he used to like/date that I’ve seen/met are large people so every part of them were big, not just the boobs. But he didn’t seem to mind that as long as they were, like, 44DDs or whatever they were. He’d asked me early on, “Would you ever consider getting a boob job?” I was taken off-guard and had responded with a snappish question — would he get a penis enlargement? And he’d responded that he would if he were asked to. But I was made to feel so inadequate in the breast department in that relationship that I did consider breast augmentation surgery. (I didn’t get one.) Subsequently, after I’d been a few months into dating Mr. W, I brought up the topic of implants. He was avidly against them, cited all the health risks and expense and how they’re not worth the exchange for simple vanity, and added that my breasts are perfect the way they are (I’ll spare you guys the adjectives and descriptions he used in telling me how I’m fine the way I am). I told him I’d briefly considered getting them augmented in the past, and he said that if I had done that, he would not be dating me right now.

So let me review. If I had altered something unnecessarily to please my ex, then I would not have been with this great man who loves me as I am, who values my health above some appearance preference. But because I chose to keep my body parts as they are, that left the door open to be with this new guy. I love the way that works out.

Let me clarify…the issue is not that we don’t like people who have implants. There are justifications for having implants, like maybe someone had a breast removed due to cancer, or someone with actual problems in the breast area and need to even them out for their own self-esteem. But to augment for a GUY (or guys in general) is a different story. It tells you where someone’s priorities lie, and the kind of motivation from whence their major decisions stem.

What the heck? I wrote a whole entry and it appeared to save but then it totally disappeared! Ugh, I hate doing the same post again, it never reads quite the same. And the constant phone calls and interruptions! Grrr.

Jordan copied and posted my “Iris” entry on her blog, and I read it on there through the eyes of people who don’t know me and have never read my blog. And boy, I sound vain and conceited in the I-tie-everything-in-to-my-looks part.

People who don’t know me don’t know that I was anorexic for years in high school. It was all about trying — and failing — to get myself to look a certain way or fit into a certain size. The more I failed, the more I obsessed about getting there. Success and happiness in life became defined by losing a pound; failures in life were gaining 3 pounds. My weight was the end-all to everything. If someone was mean to me, it was because I’m fat. If someone had a crush on me, it was because I’d recently dropped a few pounds. That’s how it was in my head. Pulling on a fat roll frustrated me to the point of tears. I had started defining who I am by my appearances, whether good or bad, and not not based on who I actually was.

Of course I blame my body’s present inability to respond to diet and exercise on anorexia. I have to work 5 times as hard to get a fraction of the results. Any normal person with my workout and diet regimen would be slender, toned, with a six-pack. Instead, I sit here, a chubby girl, always battling battling battling. My metabolism’s ready to switch off at any time and turn into fat-storing mode whenever I skip a meal. It sucks. I have frustrated many a good personal trainer, who have encouraged me to get my thyroid tested (I’m borderline hypothyroidism, too.)

I think it does help to be with a man who thinks I’m beautiful whether I gain or lose 5 pounds (at least, he sounds sincere in expressing his attraction to me), and realizing that over all the obsessing about physique, I value my mind more than I do my physical appearance. Maybe I can never get down to 22% body fat. Maybe I just have to be okay with 30% body fat, as long as I’m healthy. My heart, blood pressure, cholesterol, triglycerides, everything have invariably tested in the “very good” range.

Or maybe I should just get liposuction and let my body maintain its same equilibrium now, just with 10-20 pounds less fat hanging off me.

Just finished watching Iris. Mr. W had put the DVD in while we were still having brunch, so that the main menu played repeatedly. In a sunlit spot in a white hallway of what appeared to be a convalescent home or a hospice, the seasoned actress Judi Dench danced alone with an invisible partner, drifting contentedly to soft orchestral music. The blank wall on the left showed, like a superimposed slideshow, a misty image of a young woman (Kate Winslet) swimming underwater naked, reaching out with her arms, and then a man’s arm joined and locked fingers with hers as the two swam toward each other. The blank wall on the right showed an equally fuzzy picture of an aging Judi Dench swimming alone underwater in a black swimsuit. “Ugh,” I sighed wistfully at the music during the main menu display I’d described, “This is like On Golden Pond meets The Notebook.” And that was exactly how the movie went as it unfolded.

Stevie Wonder had directed me to note the two lectures Iris Murdoch gives in the movie, which “are brief extracts” of “the promise of everything she has to offer.” The first speech Iris gives in the film was during what appeared to be a benefit dinner for her college. She stands and tells the audience of the “importance of education.” To her, education is the key to happiness, because education allows one the means to realize that one’s happy. I disagreed with this instantly. I think of those people less educated or less intelligent, and the ease of their contentment. I think of those aware of the boundless possibilities of the universe, who realize the insignificance of their achievements and the distance between their finite personal probabilities and the infinite potential imaginable, even those potentials past the limits of our imaginations and perceptibility, and I understand why Einstein was manic-depressive, and why the higher a person’s IQ, the more likely he/she is to be diagnosed with depression. I remember my court reporter telling me about her new appreciation for our lives here in the U.S. after she went abroad to Panama and watched the local poor carry water baskets on their heads, sweating and straining as they bring their family’s only source of water from the river to their village. She said that these Panamanians’ lives are so hard and they have it so bad that it makes her feel like she has nothing to complain about in her life of luxury in this country. And I had asked her then, “What makes you think their life is hard? If that woman’s entire goal is to bring that water back, then she has done it, and she is successful to the full definition of that success, and she may be happy because her family’s needs are met. I don’t think she is dissatisfied with her life, or unhappy about what we perceive to be their limitations.” That water-carrying woman will never know the stress of meeting a publishing deadline, or fear losing her job for not logging enough billable hours this month. She will not lose years of data due to a computer crash, and the stocks mean little more than fresh meat or labor animals to her.

The movie Iris depicts the decline of novelist/professor Iris Murdoch’s life (along with her husband, a professor John Bayley), as she is afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease. The storytelling of her mental deterioration is broken frequently by vignettes and snippets of her early years from the time she meets John to the time they become a serious couple. The scenes in which the previously bright, ultra-coherent Iris begins to first be confused by Alzheimer’s were especially terrifying to me. Iris defines thought through words. Without words, she has said, how does one think? As much as I am not a particular subscriber to the theory of limiting thoughts to words, the fact that Iris does, and seeing her lose her words while slowly and simultaneously losing cohesion in her thoughts, made me unravel some of my own fears and associations.

For the first time, it occurred to me that something may be more of a sense of identity to me than looks. Having tied my self-esteem, identity, social behavior and just about everything else to my looks since high school, I had not realized until this moment that I would be more lost without my thoughts than I would without my looks. All this time when my primary physical goals orbited around getting into a particular physical shape, maintaining or getting back into a certain dress size, hating myself for the fat rolls, loving myself for muscle tone, being oversensitive to the way people treat me and attributing their responses to me to how I look to them, being fearful of body changes that come with age, gravity and pregnancy, it had not occurred to me that there’s a reason why when asked what my greatest fear is, I had always answered it with “becoming ignorant,” or “being unaware,” and never with “getting fat.” My mind is who I am. My opalescent thoughts, my ever-changing opinions, my constant analysis and self-analysis. Without that as the nourishing soil, the roots of my physical identity will not have any substance to grip, and the flower of my person will stop burgeoning and wither away in the cruelty of the external (natural) forces.

For Iris, the inability to form her thoughts into solid shapes and express them in cohesive words while still having the awareness to see her mental shortcomings must have at once been terrifying and hope-draining. To have the glimmer of initial thought extinguish before your very eyes as you reach out and grasp for it, when you’re accustomed to nurturing and fanning the flames…it’s like Keyes’ “Flowers for Algernon;” it’s like, in paraphrasing Iris’s words, powerlessly sailing into darkness. After an exam during the early stages of her disease, Iris tells the doctor that when she loses a thought or gets lost, sometimes it terrifies her, and then, sometimes it doesn’t. And she doesn’t know which is worse because not being scared of it must mean that it’s winning. To which the doctor responded tactlessly (my opinion), “It will win.”

If present life on this planet is how we define ourselves, to be aware of our own mortality and to see the imminent approach of death is probably one of the most frightening things imaginable. If thought and language is how Iris defines herself, to be aware of her swift loss of the ability to think and express herself in language must be equally frightful.

There are glimpses into Iris’s early life and her, in my opinion, irresponsible hedonistic lifestyle that made me say sulkily at one point in the movie, “I don’t wanna be the Asian Irish Murdoch. Iris sucks,” which got Mr. W laughing extensively at me. But the movie, based on a book written by her husband, focuses more on their relationship in the beginning and in the end and about what happened to them, than about who Iris was. (I assume she’s deceased.) I’ve always been a believer that one’s identity does not necessarily revolve around what one does, so maybe I’m like her in mind, just not as good as justifying behavior that doesn’t adhere to a strong moral center.

And that brings up another frequent thought I entertain. Do I have the moral history I have because I am a good person with good adhesion to a good strong moral center? Or have I been good simply because the opportunities for bad have not presented themselves?

I need a break from this stuff. We’re off to a costume shop to feed our more frivolous side. Levity, here I come! *sliding out from beneath the dense cloud*

Vicky said this morning, “I’d like to tell my [future] kid or something that the year I turned 30, I ran a marathon and climbed Mount Whitney.”

Doesn’t that sound cool?! It immediately attracted me to the prospect. Maybe if I had ambitious physical goals like that, I wouldn’t be so scared of turning 30 because that would mean 30 isn’t over-the-hill, it isn’t official-boring-grownup-status, it doesn’t mean my life will be a decline from that point on.

The other thing I’m holding on to with my fingers crossed is something my ex and his friend William had said before, that women are at the peaks of their beauty in their early 30s. Something about still having the glow of youth with the sophistication and confidence that comes with wisdom gained through experience. (Not their words, I’m assuming and hoping that’s what it is, as opposed to, say, they just have a fetish for older women. GAACK, look, I still think of 30 as “older”!)

I’m gonna go up to San Jose to visit the Northern Cal buddies the weekend before my birthday. I already emailed them to clear their social calendars. They’re great wholesome people whom I know would not want to just sit at a bar and get me drunk. At that time, I would’ve known some of them just over a year. Wow, I can’t believe I haven’t even known them a year right now. They’re such a big part of my life. Well, my online life, anyway.

Do people do anything for less-than-a-year anniversaries anymore? I just realized that all we did for our 6 month anniversary was salvage the relationship. It was a busy weekend errand-wise for him, and I helped where I could, but we had no private time at all and I didn’t mind that. I guess I can romanticize it by saying, “On the precise day of the 6-month mark, we could have gone either way, but he gave me hope for the relationship and restored ‘us’ back to the way we were in the beginning. And that is the best gift I could have asked for.”

But the reality is, he got up really early Saturday morning to take his daughter to sing at an elementary school ball game’s opening ceremony, then they came back, collected me, the three of us went to his ex’s house to pick up his son, who was already uniformed and ready to start his high school baseball game, we stopped by a local restaurant for breakfast, dropped the son off at his game, went back to his place, dropped the daughter off at home, then he and I went back to the son’s ballgame, watched the son and his 2 nephews play on the team, left early to take his son (who had a fairly serious mishap) to the orthodontist, learned the office was closed, went back to his house to drop me off and make an appointment for urgent care, he took his son to sit in urgent care as I stayed home to hang out with his daughter, we watched “Friends” on DVD, he and son returned, he was messing with his fishtank so I took daughter to get her haircut, his ex came to pick up son, daughter and I watched Little Black Book on DVD while he planned his Alaska fishing boys’ expedition in June with his buddy, daughter went to bed, he and I sat up in the living room and talked out our problems. And that was just Saturday.

Sunday, he caught a renegade fish in his fishtank and we returned it to his fish store to trade it in for some shrimp and another different breed of fish. Had Japanese noodle house lunch by the fish shop. On the drive home with fish and shrimp prodding my lower abdomen through their bags on my lap, his daughter called and asked him to pick up a bite for her on the way back. He refused, said his fish needed to be taken care of pronto, but that he’d take her after he finished his fish-related errands. I offered to take her when we got back, so while he tended to acclimating his fish and shrimp, daughter and I went to McDonald’s where she, with great difficulty, filled her cup with Hi-C instead of soda because she’s going through sympathetic Lent and has given up soda until Easter Sunday. We came back, he and I went to another fish place to buy salt water and other supplies, and he cleaned his tank and put his newcomers in. We watched the interaction for awhile until we fell asleep, then I got up and went to my parents’ house. And that’s Sunday.

There’s a part of me that misses the marking of small milestones, and there’s another part of me that’s unconcerned enough about it to have forgotten about it over the weekend, since we were frying bigger fish. Maybe I’m growing up. Or maybe I’m growing into my inner guy.

My childhood friend Vicky, who has always sworn to hate running, has signed up for the San Diego marathon, running for the cause of the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. She has a progress page that documents her runs and the amounts of her donations, how close she is to her goal. I put in $100 just now. The site takes care of the donations online, it was really easy.

You guys may have heard me talk about Grace here and there. She was one of my best friends. We met waiting for the school bus an early September morning when we were 14. She swore I gave her a dirty look that morning and that she never would’ve thought then that we’d be friends. Not only did we become friends, but that friendship stretched across great distances as she went to Berkeley for undergrad and I went to UCLA, and when she moved from there to New York to take a job offer with Merrill Lynch Risk Management (consulting, something to do with the stock market). She met Justin while training for Merrill Lynch. He was sent down from the Great Britain branch for training in the New York branch. She caught his attention when she kept dropping the ball during one of their getting-acquainted exercises in which everyone in that group sat in a circle and whomever got the ball had to say something about themselves and throw the ball to someone else. They fell in love and the plan was that she’d move to London after their wedding. “You keep moving farther and farther away,” I’d once told her. But she was so happy, and I was so happy that she was so happy. I was to be one of her bridesmaids. She never made that move to London because leukemia made her move even farther. I donated to the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society then and also sponsored her when she did a walk across some bridge event for the Society, and registered as a bone marrow donor, but did little for the cause since.

I’m glad to be doing this for Vicky, and I’m glad that she’s doing this for the Society. And I’m so proud of her for completing her first 8-mile run this past weekend.

I tend to not “fight” for a person’s romantic interest. I tend to feel that if someone’s focus on me can be swayed or confused by some random outside person or thing, then that’s an internal problem with “us” and a relationship probably would not work out anyway. If there is some competition, I back off and if the guy likes me, he’ll bridge that gap and come to me. If he doesn’t, then that inaction tells me everything I need to know. Someone playing hard to get with me to spark my interest would just end up not being gotten. If he plays the hold-out-to-call-her thing, I assume he’s not interested and I move on. If he takes even longer, by the time he calls I may have forgotten about him. People who have dated me know this about me.

Thinking about this tendency of mine on the drive to work this morning, I wondered how much of it has to do with my being hurt and miffed. Am I not fighting for someone because of principle, or am I not fighting because I’m hurt and have retracted into my Cancer shell?

On the other hand, I have fought for someone before, just in the spirit of competition (I can only think of one example), because the chick trying to take this guy’s attention was totally on my nerves, and the guy wasn’t interested in her. He kept trying to turn back to me and she wouldn’t let him, until he just finally turned his back to her and came to me. She was really pissed, and kicked my chair hard on her way to the bathroom. It was all really immature. In this situation, I was not emotionally vested, so I could not be hurt that there’s competition out there. It was almost a big joke. This was a long time ago and now, I can’t imagine fighting for someone for sport. It just seems so unnecessary and childish. If he wants her, he’ll go to her, and if he wants me, he should come to me. That’s it.

So I guess that’s what it is. When there’s something or someone competing for the attention of someone I’m emotionally attached to, I get hurt, curl up, back off, and hope and wish that he’d come to me. If he doesn’t for a long enough period of time, I am tortured and start to deteriorate. And then I prepare myself to walk. I may put out one last effort to communicate my feelings to him, but if he’s unresponsive to that, then it’s pretty much over.

I don’t know if that’s healthy or not.

Sorry guys, I just had to put this out there for therapy.

I tread softly in knowledge’s shadow
The trouble with learning is we can’t unlearn
Aye, there’s the rub, isn’t it
I awake in its omnipresence
I choke on it when brushing my teeth
It collapses me throughout the day
Squeezes the air from my lungs in my shallow breaths
Pushes the tears out my eyes
Drains the productivity from my day
Reminds me constantly I am powerless
Steals the colors from around me
Kills the laughter from my past
Isolates me, then shakes me
Unthink me, it taunts daily
Get over me, Ignore me
And it’s too loud, and I’m too susceptible
But I can’t run, I certainly can’t walk
The hows and whys don’t matter
Maybe the way out is
Finding what does.