cindy's world

I read something in another blog that made me focus on an occasional fluttering in the back of my head. A lot of us, probably most, have something in our personal histories that we wish never happened. Certainly we don’t want to admit to its existence, which feels like glaring proof of our embarrassing past idiocy. I have a few of those. Sometimes something would remind me of one, causing me to wince uncomfortably, and my brain would try to change to subject. (Along the same lines, Diana just wrote to me in an email, “i would never to admit [my] awful experience except to those who already knew. i would comment on [the other blog entry] but it reminds me of too many things that i rather just forget. “)

Cirque du Soleil my junior year in high school, for instance; I allowed myself to get caught up in Grace’s enthusiasm to ditch the show during intermission and walk across the street to South Coast Plaza so that she could buy her then-boyfriend an anniversary present and surprise him. Thinking only of being a good friend and not a responsible officer of the high school club we had taken out there by 3 chartered buses, I offered to carry the goody she bought so that her boyfriend wouldn’t suspect she got him something, and subsequently she and I got in the biggest trouble of our lives for a stupid decision, and I was blamed for leading the decision, which I did not deny, all in the name of being a good friend.

One day, I’m supposed to look back on that day and laugh. Today is not that day. Maybe if Grace were alive, we’d be laughing at it tomorrow. She would tell me, though, that that incident is but a small eddy in the tsunamis of our lives. And she’d be right. There has been larger things since; stupider decisions that impacted me in more detrimental ways than a scalding lecture from some teachers, embarrassment in front of my peers, and a Saturday Swap (detention) at the high school. I look back at my decisions and wonder if I knew better at the time. I’d like to think that I knew what I was in for but just gritted my teeth against the hope that it’d turn out in my favor as I stepped into a calculated risk. I’d like to think that I don’t stumble clumsily, without cognition, on a tightrope while grinning like a dope, a froth of drool hanging off my lower lip. Of course that’s not me. I think way too much about life to have that ever be me. But is it better to see a pitfall and register a pitfall and fall into it anyway?

No one likes to look back and diagnose their past experiences as just a symptom of stupidity. And yet on the larger, more recent hurt that I’ve endured, I know I’d always suspected. Maybe even expected. Then why was I there? Why did I constantly talk myself into thinking it’d all be okay?

Maybe because it is. I look around me, and the shit I had to sift through has become fertilizer for my riches in life now. Great new friends (from one of whom also springs this blog), great life, new appreciation, clearer eyes. I can’t say I didn’t know what “bad” was before I had to learn it the hard way. Sure I knew. But it’s better defined now, and I can smell it a mile away like the ammonia- and sulfur-emitting rotting carcass of some unnamed evil. With the clearer definition of “bad” came my clearer recognition of “good.” I have that in my life now, too. I used to say, “I don’t need to be cheated on to know that cheating’s bad; why did I have to learn this lesson myself?” Au contraire. There are so many gifts that spring out of the manure that we couldn’t ever see before for the stench of the manure.

And maybe, that’s the meaning of life.

We were discussing ages while standing in the throw-me line in jujitsu earlier. Navy Vanessa (turned out she was Navy, not Air Force) said she’s gonna be 25 next Wednesday. I said, “Hey, you’re an insomiac. We should go out for drinks after jujitsu on Wednesday and celebrate your birthday!” Her eyes lit up. And then I just started inviting people. All of a sudden I was the girl who’s throwing some cool event that everyone wants to be a part of, and I didn’t even get Vanessa’s okay first. It even got to the point where Josh said discreetly that maybe we should talk about this with a more selective crowd of people around instead of making it seem like such an open invite to every stranger out there.

How presumptuous am I? But I can’t help thinking that if I were more like this in high school — more charismatic, more confident in my social acceptance — I would’ve been a hell of a lot more popular. Oh well, I had the childhood I had for a reason, and it made me who I am now, which I wouldn’t trade.

Today was a very inopportune morning to be trapped in a nightmare in which my ex had plotted to have me killed and I was unable to touch base with law enforcement about it. I was stuck in this nasty little world until almost 8:30a, which made me very late for work. And of course, this would be the day that I have a complicated criminal proceeding in my courtroom, and also the day I run into both supervisors, who were aware of my tardiness because they were trying to track me down to pull me out of my courtroom so that I could fill in for a specialized courtroom down the hall. Why they couldn’t have done this clerk scheduling last week was beyond me. So here I am, with a baby relief clerk in my courtroom trying to handle a rather fussy case, while I’m stuck in a busy civil law & motion calendar. I can feel two particular muscles clench in my neck and back, the old reaction I have to work-related stress.

I really, really want a day of massage, spa and pampering. I’ve wanted it so much that all my tentative get-together plans with various women revolve around plans for a spa treatment. And yet there’s nothing solid enough with any of them to book. I normally would just book on my own for something close to home after work and go alone, but I don’t really want to flake on jujitsu.

Maybe Friday, when there’s no jujitsu, I can leave my happy hour coworkers a bit early for a Friday evening appointment. Or maybe even drag some of them along. Hmm…

Thanks, Vicky, for getting me hooked on these things ever since that first Burke Williams appointment we did for your bachelorette event. I never knew what bliss I missed out on. I don’t know how I lived before spa treatments!

There’s more than one way to greet a new January morning. You can leap out of the bed to embrace the day, go outside and lean into the balcony, take in an eyeful of the peach and blue color changes in the sky, let the crispness of the air pull on your skin until it puckers and your nerves awaken with an exciting shiver. Add a fresh-brewed cup of coffee to that and you have Mr. W’s mornings.

Or you can do it my way. With the covers drawn up to my eyelids, I stubbornly refused to surrender the pocket of warmth in which I was nestled in fetal position. A grouchy voice in my head observed that people should not be up and about when it’s still cold and dark outside…it’s just unnatural, it’s still night for gosh sakes. In response to Mr. W’s politically correct way of asking if I’m getting up, I announced that don’t plan on getting up — ever. He said, in a tone way too understanding to be taken seriously, that okay, I can stay home and in bed and he’ll see me in 9 hours when he gets back from work, and then he turned and walked back to his kitchen.

The only thing that gave me the strength to get out of bed was the anticipation of putting on my big warm cushiony slippers to pad around the house in and finally, driving in those slippers back home to see my Dodo.

I was a bad girl today. We had a mandatory meeting the last half hour of lunch today so I didn’t have time to work out. Instead, I ate an entire chicken wet burrito from a local Mexican food restaurant. It was delicious and filled me up enough that I didn’t feel I had to eat dinner before jujitsu. But just to satisfy the munchies with minimal calories before jujitsu, I ate chocolate lite whipped cream. Yup. I just sprayed the sucker into a spoon and licked it off the spoon while I watched Jerry Maguire on TBS. Eight times. At 15 calories every 2 tablespoons, I only consumed 60 calories. Oh, and I ate a large cookie throughout the morning at work. Well, the whipped cream didn’t fill me up and I was hungry after jujitsu so I stopped by McDonald’s on my way back and had two chicken fajita rollups and a regular-size vanilla cone.

I realized in jujitsu today that I’ve now acquired the asexual jujitsu mentality. I saw the discomfort in a new guy’s face in learning to do a knife takedown, and I realized that when it had been my turn wielding the knife, my crotch repeatedly made contact with the blackbelt’s right hand as he forced my knife hand through my legs and then reached for my hand from behind my butt as he kicked my outside leg out and contorted the top leg after I fell. And thought nothing of it. None of us think anything of contact like this, it’s only the new people who are still aware of their personal sexual awkwardness. This class is gonna kill my sex drive.

Mr. W and I had a talk last nite and we decided to see a lot less of each other. At first it felt nauseatingly like slitting the throat of the honeymoon stage and ending it early, forcibly. I tend to do stuff like that because I’m sensitive to even minute changes. You’ve got something going on from 6-7? Okay, I’m not even going over at all that day then. Touch a snail’s antennae and it recoils immediately and completely into its shell. But Mr. W made a good point about his character. The only time in the recent past that I’d been comfortable doing my own thing was when I was single. It’s such a rarity that I can truly enjoy being self-indulgent that I had a really hard time giving up the singledom. However, what’s been unique in this relationship is that even if I wanted to travel around the world on foot by myself, Mr. W would encourage me to do it and although I would miss him, I’d know that while I was away, he would not be off somewhere betraying me. This may be a blessing in disguise. This may be the first time I could be comfortable being a whole person and not just “the girlfriend” while in a relationship.

Altho, on the flip side of the coin, and maybe this is just separation anxiety talking, I have known people in relationships that, unless it came out verbally somehow, you’d never know they were in a relationship. A person would come to events solo, anytime you ask if they’re available to hang out, they are, without having to check with anyone or anything first. People who know about the significant other would ask what the other half were doing, and the other half’s always out doing something totally separate and social. And people would whisper, “Why are they even together? They spend like no time together.” And eventually, this strange, estranged couple would break up, and everyone would nod at the predictability and say that they saw it coming. “There was no passion there, they didn’t even hang out, it was like they weren’t even friends.”

And yet, there is something nice about how last week, there was an event going on that I was deciding whether to attend, and a married friend had joked, “Did you get your hall pass?” I’d scoffed. Hall pass. I’d be lucky if he didn’t drag me there himself, kick me out of the car and take off without me, shouting something about strengthening my social network out the window.

Gosh, it really sounds like he doesn’t care to be around me, huh? Well, I guess I can’t keep up the last 4 months forever, accepting every invitation to go running over there, being home only half an hour a day to get ready for work, neglecting jujitsu and friends and bingo and stuff. And there’s stuff that he wants to do, too, that he’d never told me about until last nite. I used to ask him what he’d be doing on the weekend if he weren’t attending one of my friends’ events with me. He would say nothing, running errands, same stuff, except doing it alone. That was really nice of him to say that so that I wouldn’t feel like I was taking him away from more important things. It was so easy to just go with his flow and get comfortable. I guess the timing of this is right. It was starting to feel unhealthy last week when my cousin Jennifer suggested, “Make yourself happy,” and I couldn’t.

Last nite I dreamt I went to northern Cal to visit a friend, and while hanging with this friend and her friends, a long-lost friend of mine showed up because he knew one of the girls that were there. I jumped down his throat about why he lost contact with me after he went thru all that trouble to find me again and I’d responded and he apologized for not being better about being in touch and said he hopes to hear from me soon and when I wrote back, he never responded again (true in real life). We talked about other things, looked at old photos, reminisced how close we were way back when and how he was my best friend in ’94, I kissed him on the forehead and told him I loved him and probably always will. And when we parted I knew I would never see nor hear from him again. I also never got my answer.

It’s strange how someone could’ve meant the world to you, and never be there at the most important points of your life (like when I moved into my 1st apartment for college, and college graduation, both of which events he’d promised to be at). It’s amazing to see how resilient I was as I kept offering my best to him whenever he needed it, while knowing that when I needed him, he would be absent. I think this is why he’ll resurface here and there, jump thru hoops and connections to find me, offer me a page of apologies, but he is still unable to stabilize his own life, much less remain a constant in mine. Although he came from a good family and had every advantage (he was starting quarterback in high school and graduated from a UC) I’ve never known anyone to get into the type of trouble he’s been in. Not just with the law, but with Asian gangs, upper-echelon mob-business people, and a grab bag of illegal activities so unique that I have yet to see any of his crimes duplicated in any of my court cases.

I hope he’s okay.

I’m sad. I can think of many counterexcuses why I should be more understanding, but why should I make excuses for someone who doesn’t even care enough to make these excuses himself? Besides, excuses or not, the bottom line still remains that I’m sad.

I discovered in the wee hours of the morning that the pain becomes manageable if I curl up in a tight ball, hugging my knees, and remain upright. So I rearranged the pillows on my bed so that I could sorta sit and lean sideways and finally get some rest. I woke up with a start with the morning light streaming in through the windows, and my alarm clock, which had not gone off, was flashing 2:40. I’d lost power to the house 2 hours and 40 minutes ago. What the hell time was it? It was a bit past 8:30a. I called my supervisor and left a brief voice mail explaining my tardiness but saying I’m on my way, and clamored to the restroom and brushed my teeth, washed my face, decided to skip the makeup and instead bring my face to work with me in a makeup bag. I figured I’d make an appointment with Kaiser when I got to work.

When I got to my desk, I saw a flat little jewelry envelope sitting unobtrusively between my stapler and hole puncher. Inside is a metallic cookie-cutter type angel ornament that appears to be hand-painted. Definitely more sentimental than impersonally mass-produced. My staff knows nothing of it. I called a couple of coworkers who have left things anonymously on my desk before, and none of them seemed to know what I’m talking about. Who has access to a secure courtroom early in the morning, who would think to do this? I thought it was someone who reads my blog and therefore knows what I’m currently experiencing, and wants to leave a little token of support to tell me that I’ll be fine and that an angel is watching over me.

There is a small metal angel clipped to the upper left edge of my rear-view mirror, which I got after my first and only car accident. A circle around the angel reads, “An angel to watch over you.” I now have a courtroom angel which I will pin up on my desk bulletin. So to whomever left it, if you are a blog reader of mine, thank you for the reminder that things will work out. They do always work out.

I am going to juggle between my courtroom and a specialized courtroom down the hall today. They are very short on clerks again. My appointment is at 6:40pm a couple of miles from work, which will work out nicely because I’m gonna stay after work for the retirement party at a nearby hotel anyway. That way I’ll just leave at 6:20 or so to go to the appointment.

I had a little experience recently in which I was on my way somewhere unannounced, albeit invited. It started as a tiny little unrealistic voice in the back of my consciousness, and then it got louder and materialized itself in my conscious thought until it consumed me and it was all I could think about. I wasn’t terrified, exactly, because I didn’t really believe it, but having turned down the invitation initially, I found myself unable to proceed with the entrance without first pulling out the cell phone and giving trepidatious warning of my arrival. Yes, “warning.” If there were something going on that I’m not supposed to see or find out about, if there is something that I would walk into, knowledge of which would crush me, please get rid of it before I witness something that will change “us” forever.

Of course there was nothing. I was welcomed with open arms, as I had always been. He continuously passes every test, even though I am not testing him.

If I think back, I believe I can pinpoint the exact moment I started sliding backwards. It didn’t take much. It was just a tiny hair-thick root of a bad, bad weed. But I am powerless to pluck it out. It is not my garden, it is not my weed. And I am a sore gardener who still bears the dirt and stains evident of a prior battle with weeds that were not my own.

It is things like this, so small and insignificant by sight, so encompassing and ominous by feel, that makes me feel like I should quit gardening.