cindy's world

Dardy, who’s in town and staying at a house 5 minutes from my work, made plans with me to have lunch today. Mr. W called me late morning for a lunch date too, since due to a nasty Pop Tart burn he can’t work out today. (I told him that a grown-ass man has no business eating a Pop Tart anyway. It’s just unnatural. Of course he got a burn and an engorged water blister the size of a rat’s head.) The three of us went to get Indian food in nearby Artesia. I got to try the okra dish that Dardy always speaks/blogs so highly of, but unfortunately, he said the restaurant made it too dry here. In the car on the way back, we had this conversation regarding movies.

Me: (to Dardy) What’s that movie you wanted to see again?
Dardy: Juno.
Me: Did you see it yet?
Dardy: No, not yet.
Me: What’s the other one you wanted to see? The one that I wanted to see too but neither of us could find anyone to go with?
Dardy: Oh, that’s Lars and the Real Boy.
Me: Yeah, that! I still haven’t seen it!
Dardy: Me neither, I don’t think it’s playing in the theatre near me anymore.
Me: Yeah, it’s been out for awhile.
Mr. W: What ARE these movies? How come I’ve never heard of them?
*Dardy gives Mr. W a quick synopsis of each.*
Mr. W: *excitedly* OH, you know what I wanna go see? SWEENEY TODD!!!
*complete silence*
*crickets chirping*
I started laughing and noted the silence in the car.
Dardy: I don’t know what to say to that.

Remember my purposeful intent to mail out Christmas cards this year? If you didn’t get a card, either (1) I don’t have your mailing address and forgot to ask you for it, or, most likely, (2) I didn’t mail out any Christmas cards at all. I was busier than I thought I’d be the couple days I had off after the surgery last Wednesday. I even hit the mall mid-day on Friday and it was crazy crowded! I got a couple of Christmas cards and Christmas newsletters from friends, but the majority of people sent me a “Merry Christmas” cell phone text message on Christmas Day yesterday. I think our generation’s version of the Holiday Greeting Card is Holiday Text Messages. Although it costs me 10 cents each to send and receive, it still is cheaper than a postage stamp. All right, I’m just trying to make myself feel better. I’ll aspire to send actual cards next year.

Since the Christmas holiday did not connect to a weekend this year, Mr. W and I stuck around here instead of joining his family in Vegas as we did the last two years. We spent Christmas with my parents and grandma, and had Chinese hot pot with a tiramisu dessert (I know, huh?). We exchanged presents, fun conversation, some wedding talk (Mr. W is SO patient about this stuff), some housing talk. We may have uncovered a photographer connection, keeping my fingers crossed.

When we were in Vegas last week, Mr. W and I saw a couple of movies: Disney’s fairy-tale-in-NY Enchanted with his parents (I was in a state of enchantment watching that movie — I laughed, I cried, I coughed — it was great) and the Beatles musical Across the Universe with his gamer brother (not my kind of movie, I’m just not into the drug culture, I guess).

We got talking about upcoming movies and gamer bro described a movie about a woman whose husband died and then she started getting recordings and letters from her deceased husband with things for her to do for him, basically to help her carry on with her life after his death. As he got deeper into detail, I said this movie sounds like a book I’d read by Cecilia Ahern called P.S. I Love You and he said, “That’s the name of the movie, too!”

The author Cecilia Ahern, if I remember correctly, is the daughter of an Australian or Irish prime minister who wrote the novel when she was very young, I’m thinking teenage years. I came across the book at my best friend Grace’s funeral in New York in 2004; when Grace was ailing in the hospital with leukemia, she would order used books online to be delivered to her room and read avidly. P.S. I Love You arrived with two other books the day after the funeral, during the brunch reception hosted by her husband Justin at their apartment home. Justin had excused himself briefly to pick up a package that had arrived down in the lobby, and when he returned and opened the package to find these books she’d ordered, I watched his heart break and I quickly asked to borrow them (mostly to get them away from him). He gave them to me, said to keep them as long as I wanted. I think he even read the jacket for P.S. I Love You, which premise of a terminally ill spouse preparing packages and letters all ending with “P.S. I love you” to help a loved one move forward hit probably too close to home for him right then.

I started seeing previews on TV of the Warner Bros’ movie this week. They kept the same character names as far as I can tell, and some snippets seem to match some scenes in the book. I’m impressed at the powerful cast to bring this little book to life, people like Hilary Swank (playing the lead character of Holly), Lisa Kudrow (playing best friend Denise), Harry Connick, Jr. (playing new love interest Daniel), Kathy Bates (playing a character I don’t quite remember as it’d been awhile since I’d read the book), and a personal favorite, James Marsters playing some other character I don’t remember. James Marsters! “Spike” from TV series “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Angel”!

Here is the IMDB ratings and profile of the movie, and here is the official movie website.

Hey Diana, you still have my book. Have you read it yet?

A week without a post. I think that may be some sort of a record for me. Except for, wait…when I was on vacation and didn’t have internet access. That’s sort of what happened here, too. I went to Vegas for Thanksgiving and had the entire following week off for vacation. Since I didn’t have my own laptop with me, I haven’t been at work to use my work desktop, and I’ve stopped accessing this blog from Mr. W’s computer, you have this week-long gap. (The post in Vegas was written on Mr. W’s dad’s computer.)

We left for Vegas after work the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, got there wee early Thanksgiving morning, and our plan was to hang out there for 4 days and leave for Yosemite (where Mr. W has never been) on Sunday or Monday, hang out there for two days, and spend the rest of the week at home running errands, Christmas shopping and watching “Buffy” and “Angel” on DVD. But what actually happened was that after arriving to Vegas, we discovered that Mr. W’s gamer brother (as opposed to Rocker Brother who’s a guitarist in a band, and Chicago Brother whom I’ve never met cuz he’s in, duh, New York — I mean, Chicago) had the same week off work that we did. So Mr. W nixed the Yosemite plans and we instead hung out in Vegas with his family until Wednesday. That was great for me, as I was hacking and dying from my ailment and I think a few days in the very cold climate of Yosemite would’ve killed me.

Vegas: We walked the Strip, watched “The Mentalist” show, went to my first hockey game at The Orleans (totally thought about Flat Coke and Bat, the hockey freaks that they are), checked out the fairly-recently opened Hooters Casino (not impressive), hung out with Mr. W’s parents, played Wii and other games at Gamer Bro’s house, hung out with Gamer Bro and Wife, attended Rocker Bro’s band performance at a local restaurant bar. Ooh, I have a picture of that:

Sorry about the grainy photo; all I had was my cameraphone. I also got to see Mr. W and bros when they were little pesky children as Mr. W’s mom shared boxes of old family photos with me. It was only slightly disturbing to gloss over formal professional photos of Mr. W cuddling with his psycho ex #2 (the one after his kids’ mom) and her kids, if “slightly disturbing” means I want to reach back in time by reaching into those photos and squishing her obnoxious little head with my fingertips until her brain pops like a bubble of caviar, or that may be the monthly hormones talking. It is liberating to know he doesn’t read my blog anymore, tho. It is comforting to be able to write that I winced inside when his mom, showing me old photos of her other sons’ weddings while talking about preparing to make a separate album just of everyone’s wedding photos, said none of her kids had big weddings, except for Mr. W, who had two of them. Grrr.

Well, on to brighter things, like MY goddamned wedding. See next post.

I’m in Vegas doing the same Thanksgiving I’ve done in the past 2 years. Mr. W’s brother came to Thanksgiving dinner this time with the XBox360 game “Rock Band” in tow. Remember how hooked I got on “Guitar Hero” last year? Well, this is two guitars (one bass guitar), a microphone for karaoke AND a drum set. The drums even have a foot pedal. Man, this game is harder! It demands more precision on when you hit the notes on the guitar parts; a millisecond off and you don’t get the point. The drums are tricky because you have to hit in the center of each drum and there are 4 drums, plus foot, and you’ve got 2 hands and 2 drumsticks. I’ve always secretly thought I could be a drummer cuz I have rhythm, and it turns out that’s not nearly enough for this game. Oh well. Needless to say, the house was noisy that night.

The day after Thanksgiving (Friday), I was enjoying a leftover turkey leg, and commenting on how meat just tastes better on a stick. It’s good fun to pull chunks of turkey off a bone to eat. And then I had an idea. Christmas should be on a stick! We can have candlesticks lit, roast marshmallows on a stick in the fireplace or a firepit, have candied apples on a stick, eat shish-kabobs, popsicles, lollipops, celebrate our savior-on-a-stick (I know, eternal hellfire). Even the Christmas tree: needles on a stick. Maybe I can expand on the stick thing and pour leftover candied apple caramel on myself and make things stick to me. I can refuse to stick to a diet but yap at everyone else’s diets like I had a stick up my butt. And when I get attacked for that, I’d have to stick up for myself all by myself. The stress would make me lose weight and get sick all over again, and I’d become a stick figure.

Stick holidays. Could happen.

I’ve been up since like 3am watching “A Shot at Love” on MTV. I woke up to the show on the living room couch and the station kept playing back-to-back episodes of the reality series, and its current drama at the Tila Tequila mansion. For those of you who’ve never heard of the show, Tila Tequila is a Vietnamese model/actress (?) who just came out of the closet as bisexual and is doing a “The Bachelorette”-style elimination dating series but with equal numbers of male and female suitors. Yeah, it surprised me, too, that I’m watching it. Since I’d first found the show some weeks ago, I have become of aware of some friends’ serious dislike for Tila Tequila and/or the show, and now that I’m seeing it again, I find myself thinking, “They’re right, her face isn’t all that attractive.” But if I had her figure, minus the fake boobs, I’d be showing it off, too. Plus she has a good hair stylist. And I’m in awe at her mansion. The show presents it as HER house, and if she really does own it, whoa…

I think the reason I kept watching the series this morning, though, is because 1) there are suitors who so get on my nerves that I’m rooting AGAINST them and I keep waiting to watch them get voted off; and 2) my sleeping pattern is so jacked up right now that I wake up every morning between 2am and 4am and remain wide awake thereafter, hacking and coughing and trying to swallow past the painful swollen tonsils in my throat.

This catfight is the end of the last episode on this morning. BTW, I rooted against Vanessa (the curly-haired brunette in the polka dots).

We just got back from Cirque du Soleil’s “Corteo” at the Orange County Fairgrounds. Mr. W is a huge Cirque fan. But if you ask me what “Corteo” is about, I couldn’t tell you; I didn’t pay much attention as I was sitting in my seat for the 2+ hours practicing my extraordinary ability to stay perfectly still while seething and composing this post in my head.

Before the show started, we were sitting next to each other in our assigned seats and then a guy and a girl sat down directly in front of us. The guy was THE tallest guy in his entire row, head/shoulders/back 2 feet above the seatback, and of course he sat down directly in front of me blocking my view of the stage. The rest of our row to my right was empty, and remained empty even after the doors closed and the music started, so Mr. W and I moved 3-4 seats to my right so that we sat behind a gap. We weren’t there longer than 5 minutes when the guy and the girl got up and moved a few seats over to THEIR right, and with an open seat between the guy and the girl, the girl sat in front of us blocking our (mostly Mr. W’s view) of the stage again.

What happened next if you heard Mr. W tell it would be: Cindy got irrationally upset at the people who moved and cussed them out at the top of her lungs, starting a bunch of tension and trouble that was unnecessary and designed to ruin Mr. W’s day.

With my elephant memory, let me give the actual play-by-play. After the guy and girl moved, I didn’t react but Mr. W looked at me incredulously, raised his hands in an exasperated gesture, and made a scoffing sound. He said something short, something to the effect of “Can you believe that?” or “Unbelievable.”
I looked down at the guy and girl and commiserated with him by saying, “I don’t know why they have to sit apart.” (Although they both moved down, they left an empty seat between them.)
As Mr. W was pointing to my right and suggesting I move yet another couple of seats down our row, the guy actually turned around in his seat, glared at me, and said in a snotty voice, “Is it really that big of a problem?” I just stared back at him as we moved, but I refused to give him a verbal response since I wasn’t ever talking to him to begin with.
The guy kept glaring even after we finished moving over, and Mr. W said to him, “We moved so that she could see.”
The girl at this point turned around toward me (partially) and said in a sympathetic tone, “I’m in the same boat as you.”
The guy finally turned around back toward the front, and I called it as I saw it. “What an ass.” Not her, I meant him.
I was surprised they heard me, but it was obvious they did because the girl gave an audible gasp and visibly started, although she didn’t turn around, but the guy turned around, pointed a finger at me, and said, “Shut up. You shut up right now. Shut up. Shut up.” I still didn’t talk to him, just gave him a look like, Dude, you’re the ONLY ONE talking right now.
After like the 6th “shut up” and other random statements I couldn’t make out from him, I finally said the only thing I would say to him the entire night: “If she’s in the same boat as me, you should understand.”
He responded with other things I couldn’t hear. But what was my darling Mr. W doing the entire time this was going on? Loudly shushing ME. That was most of the reason why I couldn’t hear what the other guy was saying.
“Thanks for getting my back, as usual,” I said sarcastically to Mr. W when the two people in front had turned back to watch the stage. We had a short argument about the situation, him saying that they were just moving over for a better view just like I had just done so I shouldn’t get all bent about that, me saying I didn’t give a shit about the moving over, it was HIM that was upset they moved and I was just commiserating with him and the guy was the one who turned around and instigated something with ME and it’s nice to know that if I were ever involved in a physical altercation that Mr. W would hold ME back and let the other party punch me. Mr. W kept insisting that I cussed them out when they were just moving over when I could’ve just fixed the situation by moving yet another seat over myself like we had ended up doing, and he was just not getting that it’s about backing ME up and had nothing to do with wherever the hell other people were sitting. I was pissed that someone else could instigate shit with me and he would blame ME for “ruining his day” and going into a speech about how he was so tired of people ruining his life and ruining his day, when I don’t think I should have to bend over and grab my ankles when some guy wants to be an ass. I was not the confrontational one here.

I was so pissed the entire night that when composing this post in my head, I fantasized about downgrading Mr. W’s nickname from Mr. W and instead calling him the GID, the guy-I’m-dating, just in this post.

BTW, the girl didn’t get involved with creating nasty stuff, but she didn’t shush her man, either. Even if she backed him silently, she still backed him. He owes her some loyalty points. Wonder what that feels like.

My wish: We’ve fought about similar things before (him not backing me), and like I’ve told him in those arguments, I don’t need someone to fight my battles for me and I don’t need him to come to the forefront swinging a sword, but I would like him to at least STAND BY ME and not go against me in public and slide into “poor me, I’m such a victim” mode when someone started shit with ME.

Today being Veteran’s Day holiday, Mr. W and I went to Knott’s Berry Farm for free. He just had to show proof that he’s a Vet. (Vicky and I joked on the phone the other day that Mr. W was a Marine in WWII, and then she went even farther back to say that he’s a Civil War Vet. Haha, making fun of our age gap still ain’t gettin’ old. Pun not intended.) It was a really fun day, blue sky, sunshine, temperature easily in the 90s in the sun. It was like summer again. (I told Mr. W that my commenter ‘k’ recently told me that they had snow flurries the other day in Minneapolis where she’s located, and that she’d laughed at me when I had to tell her I didn’t know what snow flurries were. Mr. W, a Chicago native, laughed at me, too.) The roller coasters were great, and I even enjoyed standing in line with him. I noted that he spent a lot of time staring at the back of my head today. I had such a great time, I asked him, “Is it like this being married?” He would know, right? Unfortunately, his answer was that married life has added stressors of making mortgage payments (which can’t be a big deal; I make mortgage payments now anyway), of feeding kids, providing diapers, of kids outgrowing their clothes and shoes, paying for college. Okay, so that would be new for me, but I think I’d be more worried if my kids WEREN’T outgrowing their clothes and shoes or going to college. Speaking of kids, I had a small realization today while in line. I told him, “Remind me to NEVER let our kids have sugar. Never. [*looking at the fake-log walls of the building we were walking in*] Or gum. No gum.”

Days like today, and like yesterday, when Mr. W drove us to LAX to pick up my parents upon their return from China and then we hung out at my parents’ house while they showed off all their new loot and made us see all their 350+ photos as fed by digital camera into their bigscreen TV, I am really happy with my life, and with my relationship. I feel so lucky.

Things I loved:
* Mr. W hugging me when we’re in line, generously sprinkling kisses all over the top of my head
* being able to reach over to Mr. W whenever I felt like it, without being pushed off or accused of being clingy, or having to reel in my emotions and affections
* exiting the restaurant Po’ Folks and walking back to the car, with our arms around each other, and pretending we’re in a 3-legged race while trying to throw each others’ rhythms off, laughing all the way to the car
* him sitting on the floor listening to my dad introducing each photo of their vacation “slide show”, accidentally feeling my cold foot behind him from the couch, and then reaching over and holding my cold foot thru the rest of the slide show in an attempt to warm me up while never missing a beat with my dad

Mr. W’s foggy memory paired with my elephant one is gonna cause endless frustrations, I can tell. I’m already saddened that he doesn’t remember anything about asking me out 2 years before we first started dating, nor does he remember much about our first weekend together and much of our momentous first times.

Yesterday evening (Saturday), childhood friend Vicky and I, with a very patient and game-faced Mr. W in accompaniment, did one of our ritual 5-hour, 15-game Bingo sessions at our old high school. It used to be a monthly thing before she and I hooked up with the men we are with now, and we hadn’t done it together in years. (Yes, the venue is fraught with little old ladies on oxygen tanks cussing, and yes, I have won before; $250 a pop!) Not that our stopping was the fault of either of our men; we just couldn’t get our schedules to mesh and then gave up for awhile.
So at Bingo, the topic of the “Transformers” movie came up. Vicky said she’s never seen it, which I was shocked by, cuz this is the girl I grew up watching all the 80s cartoons with! We loved He-Man, She-Rah, GI Joe, the short-lived Rainbow Brite and Cabbage Patch Kids, and I think even The Care Bears before I decided I hated them cuz despite all their promised rescues of sad little boys and girls on the cartoon, they never came and rescued ME when I was blue. Vicky asked what we thought of the “Transformers” movie. Mr. W jumped right in and said he thought it was great, he liked it, and thought it was funny. This confused me because I distinctly remember that as we were walking out of the movie, we were in the long hallway immediately exiting the theatre room and he was on my right, I had said, “Huh. That was actually better the second time around” (since I thought it was pretty disappointing the first time I watched it with Vanessa and James when they took me for my birthday, despite what EVERYONE ELSE thought of the movie, which was give it blockbusting rave reviews). And Mr. W had said that he didn’t think it was great, either, and that like my first time, he had trouble staying awake. He’d thought the movie was confusing, didn’t know who the good guys and bad guys were, and generally didn’t think it was as clever or funny as all my friends had said. I’d said I didn’t catch a lot of the supposed funny lines, either, and he’d said that it was because the characters said a lot of stuff in passing under their breaths so if you weren’t really paying attention to the dialogue you’d miss it. So now at Bingo, I objected, “That’s not what you said when you came out of the movie! You said you didn’t like it.”
Mr. W argued, “No, I DID like it and I said that it was good.”
I said, “You said it was confusing and you had trouble following it.”
He said, “No I didn’t, I wasn’t confused, which I thought was good considering I had never even seen one episode of the original Transformers show. It was one of your other friends who didn’t like it.”
“EVERYBODY else loved the movie,” I said, which was the bond that he and shared over NOT being impressed by the movie, which bond I felt when he and I walked out of the theatre holding hands griping about the disappointment of movies being overhyped and underacted. I think he may have even said back then that the characters were superficial and underdeveloped and you don’t feel attached to them because of the way the plot moved, but that may have also been a comment made by someone else.
Well, we lost THAT bond now, I thought as Mr. W and Vicky went into, “YOU’VE NEVER SEEN TRANSFORMERS?” and Mr. W explained that he was way into adulthood by the time those shows rolled around and he wasn’t watching Saturday Morning Cartoons or after-school 3pm cartoons anymore.

After we came home, we watched another episode of Buffy and Angel on DVD and Mr. W went to bed. I couldn’t fall asleep as the above stupid, inconsequential, all-in-all meaningless discrepancy ripped out chunks of my brain and tossed them at me. I finally got out of bed and came to Mr. W’s laptop and did a search for the Transformers movie on my blog, and found where I’d written back in July that Mr. W had confessed his trouble staying awake during the movie. It wasn’t everything I wanted, but it was SOMETHING confirmed. I went back to bed, which motion woke Mr. W up and he looked at me and asked what was wrong. I didn’t want to talk about this at 4 in the morning, but since he ASKED, I said, “What makes you think something is wrong?” He said because I’m clearly wide awake. Since he was looking at me with his eyelids propped up, I went into a whole “You said blah blah blah blah blah! And I remembered that it was really blah blah blah! And I looked it up in my blog just now and it WAS blah blah blah!”
In the most anticlimatic way, he said “Hmm” twice, as if thoughtfully, and rolled over and went to sleep. I curled up around him feeling better and slept soundly, too.

I IMed Mr. W yesterday afternoon, “if you don’t have any plans for halloween, wanna go to the mall and watch costumes walk by?” We ended up going to South Coast Plaza, a hoity toity large shopping mall in Costa Mesa (Orange County) and having dinner at a French restaurant in the mall watching little rich kids trick-or-treat store-to-store, from Salvatori Ferragamo to Louis Vuitton to Tiffany. Mr. W cracked a joke about how someone said because he’s recently come into money and been shopping a lot, he now speaks good Italian. “I’m surprised you wanna do this,” he told me as we were watching little pumpkins, pirates, wizards and fairies run by. But I didn’t want to do it cuz I think kids are just so freaking adorable in their coot wittle costumes begging for free loot. It just takes me back to when I was in elementary school and the weather would be really cold so my mom wouldn’t let me trick-or-treat out in the neighborhood, and instead made me, childhood friend Vicky and her sister Karen go to the mall to beg for candy and stickers from stores instead. I know there’s a photo somewhere…lemme try to find it…
Oh, here we go! Click here.