cindy's world

As I sat curled up in fetal position on the corner of your couch, your fury raining down around me in the form of CDs, remote controls, whatever else you could grab and throw, the eulogy was already forming in my head. The painful din of the rock music you blasted through your stereo system, your wailing sing-along echoing off the bare walls and hardwood floors, the insane dancing and wild arm gestures you threw. Your beer-drenched breath spilling over me as you yelled your psychosis – you went through months’ worth of my phone bills; you recorded and called numbers foreign to you; you had Joe abuse his credit bureau power to get his information; you found additional addresses and phone numbers for him. These are to form my last memories of you. You want to believe I cheated on you. You want to believe I dated him for revenge. You want to believe I was played. None of these are true, but they help you hate me. Your rage is understandable. But all of it, all of tonight, confirms as I watched you what will never be. Your threats about him, your dedication to your lifestyle, your promise of a near-future drunkeness, all of these things are nothing new and reaffirms that things will never change. I no longer struggle to make sense of the hows and whys. So goodbye, my best friend of two years, my lover of two and a half, all the potential I thought I saw, goodbye.

I thought I’d try something different today: controlling the direction of the day by changing little things and setting things up differently. On the nasty drive to work, I tried to change the irrate mood of having to deal w/idiotic drivers by listening to Harry Connick, Jr. croon the romantic standards of the ’50s and ’60s accompanied by orchestra and big band. I’m skipping breakfast and lunch. At lunch, I will go back to my old gym and try my luck there again, hoping that this time I will be left alone. After work, I’ll spend a little time cleaning my place up and then I will be meeting an old friend for some Korean soon tofu. I hope those plans go thru. He’s not normally a flaker, but sometimes I just get these feelings.

Mein Gott. Was habe ich getan? Vielleicht nichts, und ich habe technischlich keine Regel gebrochen. Moralischlich fuehle ich abscheulich. Vielleicht alles dass ich getan habe, ist mein Leben in Gotts Haenden gesetzen. Gott, bitte mich schuetzen. Warum war ich drei Stunde vor so dumm?

I don’t usually think too highly of what celebrities have to say in interviews, but what John Mayer said in a live radio interview about a year ago still sticks to me. When asked by the radio DJ whether he’s currently single, he said he was in the true sense of the word, and went on to elaborate. People these days, he explains, all claim to be “single” but they’re really “single with baggage.” They’ve technically broken up with the ex, but are still seeing the ex, sleeping with the ex, in some weird sort of personal limbo, under the delusion that they can be or are “friends” with the ex, etc. He said the way he was single, was that he was completely and utterly unattached, he doesn’t need “permission” to go out with a new girl he meets or have to figure out a way to weasel out of plans with the ex w/o offending her or giving too much information away. He was so single that, if he met the right person right then, he’d be able to instantly go into exploring that relationship baggage-free, wholy and completely.

John Mayer’s a smart man. Then again, what else do I expect from someone whose album has the periodic table of elements on it?

I’m tired of complications, of other people’s baggage, of having to find excuses to talk myself into being okay with this flaw or that flaw even tho the flawed guy doesn’t even bother making excuses for himself. Does “integrity” mean anything to you men out there? Does the “golden rule” exist for you guys? Why don’t you weigh your instant gratification and just take one second of your life to evaluate what you’re about to trade in for your 10 minutes of pleasure? And if you choose your 10 minutes, have the backbone to not come running back to me and expect me to “get over it” while you tell me you love me too much to let me go.

Oh my gawd, this blog took an awful turn. Andrae was right. I’m gonna stop blogging for now.

Are pissy moods contagious? Cuz I just caught a HUGE bug.
Maybe I didn’t get enough sleep to begin with. (I’m slightly febrile now having had an hour of sleep last nite. For the past few weeks I’ve been getting about 4-5 hours and that seemed to be sufficient.) Maybe it’s being caught in a family law pass-the-buck case this morning. Maybe it’s all the family law phone calls and the random phone calls using us as a switchboard, asking for #s to different departments, different offices, different government buildings. Maybe it’s the fact that the ex parte Arizona family law case we got last Friday STILL hasn’t been input in the system so I STILL can’t update the record as to our hearing and it’s coming back in a few days and I probably still won’t be able to update the system then, either, which puts me farther behind on just that particular case. (I’d called the supervisor last Friday and he’d said he’d make sure the case is set up in the system THAT DAY.)
Aside: I just got a call from the attorney involved in the pass-the-buck family law case this morning. She said the pass-the-buck department misunderstood the situation and it IS indeed supposed to be their hearing so I’m just going to set it back in their department for a future hearing date. At least that takes care of that, and the small vindication feels good.
And then I get an email from someone I’m fed up to HERE with who made an offensive statement that totally pushed a button with me and I swung the axe. Cyber blood all over the place. Flesh fragments oozing down cyber walls.

I guess what I learned about myself in this is that people should do as I say, not as I do, considering the placating advice I gave a pissy cranky friend yesterday.

Today, I hate everybody and everything.

At Rob May on Friday, I couldn’t find any dresses I could wear to Lily’s wedding, but did find my dad an awesome Father’s Day present. It’s a foot-tall liquor dispenser, shaped like an old-fashioned gasoline station pump, complete with sterling silver base, dispensing arm and handle. Clear glass top with liquid level indicators on side. Beautiful. I can see him pulling out the arm and dispensing a precise 4 ounces of brandy, neat, for his friends.

The sales lady commented about the cute shorts I was buying as she was ringing my purchases up. She said she’d like to wear them, if she could get into them, and that she’d lost some weight recently. It became a conversation about how her weight loss and depression was due to the fact that her husband of 13 years is going thru prostate cancer and surgery, and he’s bedridden presently with a catheter, which situation prevents her from being able to confront him about the fact that SHE JUST FOUND OUT HE’S BEEN CARRYING ON A LONG-TERM AFFAIR FOR THE PAST TWO YEARS.

Men suck.

The day is off. Something is in the air. My gut says I need to lay low today.
* woke up terribly late
* forgot my cell phone at home
* the sky’s dark, muggy, thick with dark cloud layers
* it’s raining not the feel-good rain which gives a vicarious cathartic release of rainfall, but the floating misty water that just gets the windshield translucent and makes the car gray
* we were just handed a Family Law ex parte case that was just transferred from Arizona this morning; there’s no file created yet, and nothing exists in the Family Law computer system yet so I can’t look up the case nor add today’s minutes to the case, or create any sort of a record at all of today’s hearing
* my judge loathes whining sniveling family law issues, and is in a foul mood (we’re not a family law court so it’s a double-insult that we got this case instead of the 3 family law courts in the building, altho there’s probably an explanation somewhere about that)
* my HS friend’s wedding is tomorrow evening and I don’t know what I’m wearing, or what gift I’ll be bearing; the “out” is that her online registery allows you to sponsor part of her honeymoon for the wedding gift, which I think is a GREAT idea (instead of collecting a bunch of useless clutter) and easy for the guests
* a friend’s sister’s college graduation is tomorrow morning and I haven’t bought her anything, either; the “out” here is that I don’t have a direct relationship with the graduate; I’m going along as company for the friend. And I did put together the ensuing brunch at Cheesecake Factory, so I feel like I did more than I’m obliged to already
* Father’s Day is next weekend and of course I’m also unprepared

So I finally got my “explanation.” It was a very nonchalant and unsatisfying “I totally forgot. And I didn’t check my phone last nite. My phone was dead all day today and I just got your voice mails right now. Sorry.” (10pm, 24 hours after the flaking was happening.)
“So what’re you gonna do about it? You owe me a big one for this,” I said, rather good-naturedly considering the situation, I felt.
The flaker seemed actually annoyed. “I don’t know what to say right now. What do you want, blood? Obviously my apology isn’t enough.”
I tried to explain the concept of how flaking makes the victim feel unimportant, and how this pitiful apology (I didn’t use an adjective when I said it aloud) isn’t cutting it. The lack of guilt or even any sort of human emotional response I was getting from the other side was so discouraging and annoying that altho I had initially agreed to hangout with these people and let them make me a bloody mary, I backed out of it and said I hadn’t been convinced. “You need convincing? I don’t know what to tell you. I mean, your problem used to be that I didn’t call you enough or whatever, and now I call you the next day and you’re still mad… I really don’t want to get into this right now. You have yourself a good night. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

I didn’t push the issue since I understand it’s awkward when someone’s trying to get on your case when you’re out in public (grocery store in this case) and you’re with friends. HOWEVER, this totally makes me feel wronged! I mean, WAIT A MINUTE! We had prearranged plans for me to stop by after my cooking class and DELIVER A VARIETY OF FRESH MADE BREAD to your doorstep, and not only do you not call like you said you would, but you don’t pick up your phone when I call, and 24 hours later, you call and tell me you forgot, and then give me attitude because I’m miffed? And you feel I should be GRATEFUL that you BOTHERED to call me the next day after flaking on me?! And for the record, I did not have problems of “Boohoo, you don’t call me enough.” That’s retarded. What I’d said before was that if someone knew I had just had my best friend die on me, or had just found evidence that my house was broken into, or was just crying because my world collapsed around me, you’d think they’d bother to check up on you at least ONCE in the next 2 weeks, and that I took the fact that this was not done to mean not that this friend did anything “wrong” per se, but that I am simply not a priority, I am unimportant, I am not on this person’s mind. I made it very clear when I had this talk that I was not making an accusation or judging anything that was done (or more accurately, not done) as “wrong,” I was simply saying it told me where I stood. I can’t believe it was taken as some stupid whining over not calling me enough.

I don’t understand things like this. If it were me who’d “forgotten,” I’d feel so rotten that I’d be offering to treat dinner, COOK dinner, whatever it took to make it up to the person. I certainly wouldn’t pull a cranky demand for brownie points for simply calling the next day.

I feel so disconnected. I miss having people I feel close to. I miss being able to go grab an impromptu drink with someone at this hour (11:30pm). Why does everyone around here still live w/their parents, and the ones who don’t, move so far away?! I think I just miss college.

Seriously, I am SO perturbed! Didn’t I just vow to never let anyone drag me down like this again? WTF. This better be hormonally related and not actual slippage from my emotional and psychological progress.

On the brighter side of things, the tentative agenda for July 4th weekend is a homemade Italian meal at someone’s house on Saturday evening (I’ll make lasagne and tiramisu, everyone else can figure out what they’re able to contribute…altho now that I think about it, I don’t know how I’m gonna pull off tiramisu because I’m flying up Saturday and I usually like finished tiramisu to sit overnite for the flavors to develop), kayaking on Sunday, July 4th BBQ/pool party on Monday.

Damn it, that didn’t even cheer me up. I can not believe how offended and bummed I am.

My staff and I had a conversation today about how “living” is not to spend countless hours every night at a bar, stationary except for the constant arm movement lifting alcohol to mouth, forking over hard-earned money in exchange for useless calories and inebriation. Living is visiting important friends and meeting his/her friends, and doing things like bike rides in beautiful wine country, creating friendships, new perspectives, and memories. When I look back over the last couple of years, it looks like a life in shadow. Blurry, cold, frustrating, drudging. Trying not to get dragged down into the sludgy viscosity, trying to watch deluded drunk men’s backs as the only sober person, while trying to watch my own back to keep from being dragged into barfights or destruction of others’ personal property. In wonderous contrast, where I have been the last few weeks is sunny, colorful, vibrant. This is living! This is learning, experiencing, growing. I hope I never again become stagnant like I had been.

I’m having trouble registering for my Kenpo Karate class online, so I guess I’ll do it in person later on in the week. It won’t be tomorrow, tho, since I will be attending a specialized bread-making class after work. 🙂 This is living!