cindy's world

One day in March last year, I was given a pod by my parents. It was unremarkable except for its large size. I kept waiting and waiting for it to ripen, drooling at the thought of a creamy avocado of this size, nearly 6 inches in length and maybe 4 inches across. I remember it being very heavy. Little did I know then, that this avocado would never ripen, but instead housed a healthy bouncing baby boy for me to love!

The boy came out in a C-section. I’m sorry to say that the pod was inedible. Hard as a rubber ball, it was. But the boy became right at home up on my desk in a little cup of water. People came by to marvel at it, to question its identity, but most of all, to say stuff like, “That’s gross! You should throw it away! I think it’s MOLDING!” But I always had faith, so on the edge of the desk it continued to sit, making friends with the Lucky Bamboo.

It wasn’t even 3 months later in early June when the boy’s sprouting became indisputable.

People came by and were utterly shocked. “That’s a little avocado tree!” they exclaimed as the leaves were now identifiable. My boy was now taller than his buddy, Lucky Bamboo.

Many envious friends tried to raise their own avocado, but I haven’t heard of anyone else’s success quite like this one. Indeed, the little green plant grew and grew, it seemed that two new leaves popped out the top every other week. My court reporter and I have both noticed that the plant gives off a very positive energy, and yes, both of us sensed that he’s a boy.
Like all boys, they soon outgrow their clothes and shoes. So two weeks after the last photo when the little avocado plant was 3 months old, we nervously and excitedly gave him a new outfit, hoping he doesn’t go into shock and wilt.

Aww, lookit the little guy! My bailiff brought in potting soil, my gym trainee brought in the cute pot, and potted him. Now, more people were coming in and making astounded statements about the plant. “It’s a TREE now!” they said. Before the avocado was repotted, I’d offered him to a bailiff who had 3 expensive avocado saplings die on him. He said with a high-fallutin’ scoff, “I don’t want your little weed.” Who’re you calling a weed NOW?!

Here, my little avocado tree is 11 months old, and has stopped growing new leaves on top. I haven’t seen any new growth for a few weeks now, so clearly he’s outgrown this pot, too. The question is whether to put him into the ground somewhere, or to put him in a bigger pot. I think he could use a bigger pot just to get a little stronger before he’s exposed to the cruel elements outdoors. After all, he has been terribly spoiled so far. He’s never been outdoors and the only “raw” element he’s been exposed to was sunshine filtered through a window. He sits with me on the weekdays, where I water him with drinking water as needed and my court reporter comes up to him and nuzzles his green leaves with her nose as she smiles and puts her arms around him. My trainee pops in here and there and plumps up his ego by exclaiming, “It’s a shade tree now!” and smiling as she stands underneath its spread leaves, which appears to spread wider to provide her adequate shade from the overhead flourescent lights.

Yesterday, I received an email from a retired coworker, canceling her weekly lunch with us. The tone of her email seemed a little bummed to me, so I replied to her email asking her about it. She wrote back that I was perceptive, that she was indeed in a sort of “funk,” and that she was “Just waiting for spring to show up so I can start planting my garden and my hanging baskets.. The nurseries have no seedlings to plant as they are waiting for warmer weather also.” Are you thinking what I was thinking?

I responded, “Would you like a baby avocado tree to love? He’s very sweet, and I raised him from the seed stage in a plastic cup. He’s now almost 3 ft high and straight with big happy leaves, ready to be repotted. (I’d understand if you turn him down; I hear avocados are big trees and some people don’t have the yard room, like me.)”

Her response: “I’ll take your baby from you if you really don’t want him and I will understand if you do not want to part with him. Thank you for your sweet offer.”

Me: “I’ll miss him as he’s become our courtroom mascot and shade tree, but he needs some place to stretch and I’m unable to provide that. I’ll know he’s in a good home if you take him!” So she’s gonna stop by this Friday for a meet-n-greet with my little green boy.

I’m all of a sudden getting separation anxiety! The plant has become a fixture in the courtroom in the past 11 months. But I know that he’ll get lots of loving care from her, and may soon forget me, his first mommy.

Rest mouse pointer over photos for captions. I apologize for looking crappy today and not having my face or hair done. I did not expect to have my picture taken, and therefore rushed to work with my hair wet. You can tell my eyes are all red from all the incessant coughing.

Self-reflection:

I’m posting this with the express written consent of Vanessa. She finds herself at a 4-path crossroads with regards to her next stage in life. She asked her spirit guides for guidance. I did not inquire as to how she made contact with her guides, but Vanessa has her ways. Their response to her discouraged her. It was, “be true and loyal to that which you believe.” Vanessa’s reaction: “WTF? I was like HELLO I am asking you for advice and you don’t tell me anything else but that???”

Before she told me all this, she told me her path possibilities and asked for my feedback. All of her paths involved some pretty hefty uprooting of her lifestyle now. I advised her to not choose one of these options now, but to explore all of them before committing to any of them. Go to the locations and check ’em out before deciding whether to dump yourself there indefinitely, so to speak. And when she told me about her advice from Beyond, I felt it was not inappropriate or irrelevant advice, it was just a little ahead of her. I believe that if you go for an informed decision, then whatever path you choose will be the right one. That’s what they’re telling her. “The key here is for you to have conviction for the path that you BELIEVE in. That means you have to first establish a sense of conviction to HAVE a belief. They didn’t say ‘be true and loyal to that which you randomly stumble upon with a toss of a coin.’ They said BELIEVE. All I’m doing is giving you an idea for how to arrive on something that you’d believe in.”

Vanessa said she had been hoping to have a more directive answer from them, like “pick this and then do that.” I don’t think they’re supposed to tell you to do a and b and c, or life would be their puppetshow and we won’t learn anything. It’s not free will if we do things cuz “my spirit guide told me to.” She felt that at confusing times like this, tho, she wished the answers would be clearer to make things easier for her. So here’s my theory on that.

The reason we’re not more closely connected to the Other Side is because we’re supposed to be here to learn from our experiences, and the only way to do that is to see what happens when we act in a certain way. If we already know exactly what would happen, this incarnation’s pretty useless. Sure it’d be “easier” if we’re given a map (at least one we can access consciously), but the opportunities for the largest personal growth ARE these difficult spots. You are called upon to pull out every resource you’ve collected in your experience this life — be it your own past experiences, your friends, your intellect, your understanding of human nature, your ability to do research — to make an educated gamble about some aspect of your life. Not that it’s really a test to see if you were paying attention throughout your life, but this is a chance for you to USE the skills you’ve gone thru so much, decades’ worth of acquisition, to collect! And after you emerge from this rough experience, you’ve now gained MORE knowledge, experience, tools for you to use in bigger, harder tasks in the future. Cool, huh?

I think life’s sort of like an adventure/rpg video game.

On the opposite side of the coin, toward the end of the email discussion with Vanessa, I got an email from a “California genius” that got me heavily involved in a discussion about someone else’s inability to take or even acknowledge the myriad possible paths in life, opting instead, it appears, to play the safe if unfulfilling role.

This makes me wonder if my spirit guide is trying to tell me something, or at least get me to think about something that Mr. W’s been trying to get me to think about, i.e. settling for complacency and letting my own dreams slip through my fingers.

I’m on my old desktop, the one I’ve had since college, and lookie lookie what I found! Old stuff! It’s like, Cindy in another life! Rest mouse pointer over photos for captions, like always.

It all started here…

And then she pulled this out of her bag o’ tricks (aka uterus):

And they thought it’d be funny to dress me up like some China communist baby:

21 years later, the Commie Baby grew into this herre:


Funny thing is, hanging out with the Northern Cal folks this weekend, I was telling them about this photo shoot, in the short black leather dress and go-go boots. And here’s the photos! Well, very few of ’em. I don’t know why the photos on the left are stretched out. It’s supposed to look like this:

And here’s a ring I designed when I was in college:

Found another photo of me with long hair. This is from when Brad and Val visited me at work in August, 2005. It’s not a very flattering picture of me at all, but I like the way my hair looked.

Think I’ll give this short hair one more cut, highlight, and then let it grow out. Or maybe I won’t color it and I’ll let it grow out now until I trim all the old color off and have my natural dark dark color going. It’s been a long time since I’ve had my natural hair color.

Mr. W is still playing Zelda, I’m still fixing photos on my blog. Neither of us work on Monday, it’s, like, President’s Day or something.

I’ve been missing my long hair. Remember these photos?

My hair now’s finally just long enough to tie up in a ponytail so that my neck and face can breathe at the gym, and for some reason it seems to be growing excruciatingly slowly this time. I miss my long hair, cuz it’s so much lower maintenance. But today, Mr. W bought some hair dye for himself (he likes to play with hair color), and in the dye aisle, I remembered all the stuff I used to do to my own hair with these products. I wanna play, too! I want to highlight it again, but in order for that to look the way I want, I need to cut my hair another 2 inches. Oh, what to do? I think I’m gonna cut it again. Hopefully it’ll be long enough to tie back in time for Mike & Christi’s Hawaii wedding. I don’t wanna snorkel and swim with hair floating all around my mask.

I have 4 divorce files sitting on my desk bar that the judge has signed and is ready to be processed and finalized by me. As I rolled the date on my file stamp to today’s date, I realize that these people are going to be divorced on Valentine’s Day. Should I not process these things today, and do them tomorrow so that it wouldn’t be finalized on V-day? Or should I give them what they probably want, anyway, which is to be single for V-day?

Here’s a cameraphone photo of my V-day tulips sitting on the bar of my desk next to the divorce files.

…that there’s a finite amount of sexiness between couples. There’s this ball, this wad of sexy, and the two people can draw from it and divide it however they do. (This is probably why I’m h0tter when I’m single.) That being said, this post is a complaint that Mr. W is stealing all the sexiness that we share! 2 weeks of ailment, 2 weeks off from the gym, and my weight’s back up. Yup, I weighed myself this evening. I’m so upset. While I’m sitting there pouting about this fact, Mr. W found an opening to tell me that his size 34s are becoming hip huggers, and he’d just recently bought the 34 jeans (down from a 36). What the heck!! So now he’s all cut with these nice abs and yoke and stuff and I’m just this puffy mushy thing! If I gain another pound, standing together with Mr. W we’ll look like the number “10”, to quote Jay Mohr. Actually, I’m small, so we’ll look more like “lo.” “Lo and behold! See the most opposite looking couple in the world! He’s tall, she’s short; he’s light, she’s dark; he’s vertical, she’s spherical!” No matter what my lungs tell me tomorrow, I’m going back to the gym. I’m gonna bring some sexy back. So there!

Some inspiration from elsewhere in my blog…

Today, while James and I were Zaino-ing our cars, he thought to ask me why I’m not at work today. “It’s a holiday,” I said nonchalantly, wiping away.
“What holiday?”
“President’s Day.”
“What?! We don’t have President’s Day off!”
I shrugged. “I have next Monday off, too.”
“WHAT? Why?!”
“Lincoln’s Birthday or something like that.”
“Why do you get Lincoln’s birthday off?! How does Lincoln’s birthday affect you?”
“Well, the face of the American coin would be very different if it weren’t for Lincoln.”
“Oh. I guess that’s true,” he said.

My car’s nice and shiny now. That’s a pretty productive day off, even if I had to stop doing Zaino work every 15 minutes to blow my nose, or wipe off fresh bird shit. It’s weird; there were no birds overhead, but yellow streaks of poo just kept appearing! And it was hard work pushing the overhead clouds away so that sunlight comes through to dry the coats of polish. (James is convinced I have powers to control the weather, so I blew the clouds away when he complained of being cold. I sounded like this: *huffing* “awhoo! awhoo awhoo awhoo awhoo!” He seemed pretty content with that.) After we were done, I looked up and saw clouds highlighted by the dropping sun and noticed that the outline was a perfect angel, complete with wings spread and a lit halo over her head. James snapped some photos. As soon as he emails them to me, I’ll post them.

*** Addendum: Got it! Thanks, James! Believe me, people, the sight was more amazing in person.

*** Addendum #2: My childhood friend Sandy called me this evening and reaffirmed my faith in karma and the balance of the universe. There IS a God! She TOTALLY made my day. What a surreal day! =)

The banquet was fun. Here are the promised photos of the dress and of Mr. W all snazzed up. At least, it’s what Mr. W would look like if he were a bystander on Cops. Oh, and it rained on us. Brrrr!!

Boy, you can’t see my necklace at all, huh? I also realized, too late, that I hadn’t brought my strapless bra. So I just went without. Hope that wasn’t too obvious.

It got a little serious in here yesterday, so I’m gonna bring some yippy skippy through today’s post. And nothing exemplifies yippy skippy more than…DINNEYLAN!!! Unless you’re running the half-marathon at Dinneylan, in which case it’s too crowded to skip, and you’re too tired to yip.
(As always, rest mouse pointer over photos for captions.)

We first entered thru Downtown Disney.

At “Innovations,” Professor Tom Morrow (from Tomorrowland) introduces us to the technology of tomorrow! This is also where I had those aging photos taken.

What’s happier than a bunny grinning in front of Sleeping Beauty’s castle?

Uh-oh! Don’t look now but you’re being spied on!

Ya know, the thought of Disneyland is a lot nicer than the reality of it — or rather, the reality of being mobbed to death in its colorful vicinities.

Here’s some lazy people on Main Street, USA and a very unlazy beast of burden. When I was small (okay, I’m small still), I couldn’t bring myself to add my weight to the haul load the poor uncomplaining animal has to pull.

Sometimes, as an Asian girl, I just feel like I can’t live up to my parents’ expectations of me. “Look at me, I can never pass for the perfect bride, or the perfect daughter; Can it be, I’m not meant to play that paaaaaaart? I can see, that if I were ever to be myself, I would break my family’s hearrrrrrrt!”

Right as you enter Disney’s California Adventure, you see this atop some buildings on your left. It’s like a giant postcard from California.

The day we were there taking these photos (or, as I like to call it, the Day At Disneyland and California Adventure in which we Rode No Rides — That’s Right, No Rides, No Lie) was the last day the two parks had their Christmas decorations up. This is a tree in California Adventure, which is about 1/3 the size of the main tree in Disneyland’s Main Street USA.

Now wasn’t that nice? Awwww, Dinneylan. *sigh of contentment*
(I admit this isn’t my better photowork, it was a new camera, and it was sunny, and I didn’t have a wrist strap and I was paranoid I was gonna drop the camera and break it. AND the camera has no viewfinder, there’s only the screen in the back, which I couldn’t see cuz it was too sunny so there was always a glare that washed out the display, and *insert more excuses of your choosing here*.)