cindy's world

It worked! Mr. W’s suggestion for an impromptu lunchtime picnic with a portable swinging nylon hammock, some fresh loquats and sesame candy was just what the doctor (well, Jade) recommended. Within minutes of laying in the sun on the hammock, I looked down at my skirt hemline and saw I had achieved a tan mid-thigh, so I scooted my skirt higher to try to even out the tan a bit. The sun got so friendly that we finally had to move the hammock and food into the shade. After we ate, we lay in the hammock together as Mr. W rocked us gently with his hand on the ground. Birds chirped overhead. A slight breeze caressed the back of my legs as his hand caressed…uh…a little higher than that. I kept looking at my watch because I was afraid I’d fall asleep and get back to work late.

But I feel MUCH better now.

Navy Girl Vanessa had driven out to jujitsu on Monday only to find that the building was locked up and the place was like a ghost town. Spring Break, apparently. I contacted Josh and he confirmed that there’s no jujitsu at all this week.

So after work yesterday, I drove out to my cousin’s car shop and got an oil change and got my windshield wipers replaced. The original wipers that came with the car had been just smearing the rain on my windshield instead of wiping it off. My cousin also fixed my right rear tire, which I knew some time ago had been leaking air and I’d (well, Mr. W, actually) filled it with air once and it seemed fine for weeks afterwards so I forgot about it but apparently there was a big nail in it.

And then I went home and was happy to see Vanessa’s car in the garage. When I walked in, she was sitting on the couch and she looked up at me with wide sad eyes. I looked to her right and saw that she was watching the end tearjerker scene of What Dreams May Come, one of my favorite movies and one that had a large part in changing my life. We chatted a bit, drove out and had dinner at a local Mexican restaurant, had margaritas and fried ice cream at another local Mexican restaurant, and then came home and watched Somewhere in Time, another movie by the same novel writer, Richard Matheson, and the same producer, some Deutsch guy.

I’d missed having friends nearby that I could go out with. And I’m enjoying the week off from jujitsu. But I haven’t exercised since last Friday. Oh well, you can’t win ’em all.

This morning while getting ready for work, I remembered a phone conversation with my childhood friend Sandy when I had broken up with an ex. I was saying sadly that I miss him. She said, “You don’t miss him! You’re just bored.” I paused, considered it, and by golly, she was RIGHT. Cuz if I imagined myself out doing something, the feeling of missing him went away. That just goes to show the dangers of boredom. Idle hands are the devil’s playground, the saying goes.

I had posted a comment on another blog, likening the Japanese shabu shabu to the Chinese hot pot, and received a response from Wilco claiming that shabu shabu is “totally different” from hot pot. So today, Mr. W and I had lunch at House of Shabu Shabu in Irvine.

Shabu shabu is a much more organized meal than the chaotic everything-goes hot pot. The concept is the same: pot of boiling water/broth in front of you, you order plates of raw vegetables and thinly sliced meat, which you boil in the liquid and then take out, dip in seasoned sauces, and eat. Shabu shabu, however, differs in precisely the reasons that I don’t like hot pot. There’s a delicious ponzu sauce for the meats and a separate sauce for the vegetables. I don’t like how the hot pot sauce makes everything taste the same, and “the same” isn’t even as good as the flavors of the shabu shabu sauces. This shabu shabu place also comes with a bowl of rice and some udon with noodle sauce that you eat in the end with the broth (which should be flavored by all the stuff you dump in there when you’re done with the meat and veggie consumption).

I will definitely eat shabu shabu again. And I still don’t like hot pot.

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Saturday was spent at the Renaissance Pleasure Faire with Mr. W, my bailiff and his girlfriend. If you’ve never been to a Renaissance Faire, it is the most bawdy place ever. Gravity-defying cleavage and sexually connotated double entendres thrown shamelessly everywhere a la Billy Shakespeare. During a joust, I even received a coupon that reads in old English calligraphy: This card entitles the bearer to ONE FREE KISS from any willing man, woman or beast. I read this, looked up and inquired, “How does one know if a beast is willing?” If you’re under 17 or you’re related to me and don’t want to read about my participation in this land of sin, stop reading now.

I got dressed up, which made no sense because I’m Asian, so to add to the confusion, Mr. W bought me a pair of fawn horns. Not fawn as in a little deer, but fawn as in woodland mythological beast. He in turn had more obvious twisted longish white horns on. It matched his devilish look and impish smile well, everyone (strangers mostly) kept commenting. One lady selling corsages in a basket (which women wear tucked into the cleavage to decorate the breasts) said to Mr. W, “My good sir, I see you’ve let your horny lady walk around naked and yet you’ve plowed her and left her no garden! ‘Tis shameless! Here are some flowers for her fertile hillside.” He selected a heavenly-scented gardenia which was tucked into a regular florists’ plastic tube of water, and with her instruction, he pried my boobs apart a bit while she pushed the cold tube into my cleavage. “She’s tight, you lucky sire!” she said to him. (I have a really funky tan line on my chest now, by the way.) At an alcohol booth, a young lady filling Mr. W’s drink order saw my gardenia and asked to “smell [my] flower.” I stepped up onto a low step in front of the counter and leaned forward and she stuck her nose into my boobs and inhaled, saying, “Mmmm.”

At one point, Mr. W had gone to the restroom (or “privies”) and my bailiff and his girlfriend had gone to the food court. So I sat alone on a bench in a court, in front of this:

I was doing my usual avoid-all-eye-contact thing on this bench, when out of the corner of my eye, I could see a man walking toward me, in nobility attire (probably one of the RenFaire actors), with a similarly dressed man. He separated from his friend and came too close into my personal space, and stopped, as tho willing me to turn and look up at him. So finally I did.

Him: You have horns on your head.
Me: Yes, I know. I’m “horny.”
Him: You stole my line! I was gonna say that next.
Me: I’ve been hearing it all day. “You’re a horny girl,” “Since you’re horny, you would appreciate a nice piece of wood between your legs.” (Said by a “ride operator” referring to the large wooden rocking horse ride.)
Him: (turning his hip so that the ornate hilt of his sword is exposed and pointing at me from under his cape) Wood? What about steel?
Me: Well, I suppose steel is firmer than wood.
Him: (turning so that it appears to anyone not standing to our side that he’s thrusting his hips toward me from underneath his cape) You wanna touch it? You can touch it.
Me: (eyeing the sword) No, I might be tempted to unsheathe it.
Him: (pulling open the cape and exposing the leather lacing up the side of the sheath) You won’t be able to. It’s peace-laced.
Me: (raising an eyebrow looking at his face) Hmm, it sounds like a challenge now.

His friend had been looking back and forth at first amused, and then shocked, and then impressed. I now looked at his friend who was standing to the side and I waved a hand at him and said, “Eh, we could go on like this all day,” and gave him his friend back and the two walked away.

This politician was walking around smiling into his frame and asking people to vote for him.

When I walked away from this guy, he said, “Now you’re well-hung.” I said, “Hmm. I’ve never been well-hung before.” He said, “Or forcibly mounted, whichever you prefer.” I said, “I definitely prefer the latter.”

The horns made me do it.

I am seriously considering ditching jujitsu today to watch the Bruins take the NCAA Championship crown. But Navy Chick Vanessa’s supposed to meet up with me at jujitsu so that she could follow me back to my place after class and move in with me. I’m actually looking forward to having her live with me for a month. I left her a voice mail saying that I’m gonna skip class, giving her the option to either way for me to “pick her up” after class there so she could follow me back, or to come on her own with my directions, or to ditch class and watch the game with me. I’m not sure how into basketball she is, but she’s definitely not a UCLA alumnus.

We ran late into lunch today, so I didn’t get to go work out. I’m not going tonite. Tomorrow at lunch is my trainee’s bday and a ton of people are gonna take her out to lunch to celebrate and she’s invited me as well. So that leaves being good the rest of the week, I guess.

I kinda wish I knew some Bruins near me that I can watch the game with. I am definitely not driving to LA to hang with my Bruin friends up there. That’d be suicide. In 1995, the last time we won, riots broke out all over Westwood and there were students stampeding in the streets and they tipped over a KIIS (local Top 40s radio station) newsvan. It was embarrassing.

The things Diana and I had to hit after I picked her up on Thursday nite was

Thursday:
* sushi at Ch0mp on our way back to my house
Friday:
* old-style pancake breakfast
* lunch at Market City Caffe in Brea
* spa appointments in afternoon in Brea
* UCLA for NCAA Final Four gear in the evening
* Monterey Park for late-night Chinese food run on the way back from UCLA
Saturday:
* book my birthday flight up to San Jose online
* take her to the aiport in the late morning

Here’s how it actually went. I picked her up Thursday nite, traffic was hellish and there were always idiots in front of me. But whatever, that’s a commonplace occurrence, altho it was bad enough that Diana noted how I’m always behind the morons no matter what lane I change to. Getting to Chomp, we got a prime parking spot in a very overcrowded parking lot, and then we got out and saw a roped-off line in front of the restaurant by a bouncer. The bouncer told us that Thursday was their all-you-can-eat sushi nite and that’s what the line’s for. WHAT?! The ONE DAY we were there! The wait for the restaurant was hours-long, and we asked the bouncer how long the sushi bar wait was. He nodded at the line and said, “These people have been standing here for…oh…about 45 minutes already.” Jeebus! (I’ve never typed that before.) We were starving, so we got in my car, regretfully vacated our prime spot, and left. Diana then suggested Market City Caffe, which is one of her favorite Italian restaurants near me. We drove there, parked, walked over…it was closed already! It wasn’t that late! We then walked by another restaurant across the street that she was interested in trying, and it was closed, too. We’re 0 for 3. We finally walked to the nearby Taps Brewery and had a great dinner there. I had Chilean Sea Bass. Yum. So now it was totally late on Friday and we came back to my house, full, tried to stay up and watch TV and chat like the good ol’ days, but we must’ve both aged since college cuz we were asleep on the couch within the first 15 minutes of watching my Bewitched DVD.

On Friday morning, which is a holiday for me because it was Caesar Chavez’s birthday, Diana tried to do some work on her laptop but couldn’t because my internet router is secured. I put in what I thought was the password key to allow her access, but it was wrong. (She’d done most of her research the nite before on my laptop.) So I frantically IMed Mr. W, who was at work, and asked him if he recalled the correct password key which he set up when he set up my router. He did not, but suggested I simply push the tiny concealed “reset” button on the back of the router with a paperclip, and then re-set-up the router and make up my own password, allowing Diana access that way. Diana meanwhile was shaking her head, telling us it’s okay, don’t bother, that’s too much trouble. Well…always listen to an engineer who graduated magna cum laude from UCLA, because she was RIGHT. My router crashed. My modem crashed. I could not access the internet thru my laptop, desktop, or by unplugging my router and plugging my modem directly back into the desktop or the laptop. An hour or two of troubleshooting later, we gave up and drove to Knott’s Berry Farm for the big breakfast.
Knott’s was having some “special event” according to the signs, and a sign blocked off the regular entrance into the parking lot for the Knott’s Marketplace, so I unknowingly drove past it. There was nowhere to turn around once I passed that point, so I had to leave Knott’s and go around the block. I somehow did not go around the block as I thought and ended up lost. I hate driving around in circles and/or backtracking, but Diana’s calm nonchalance about the fact that I was now STARVING again while looking for a restaurant did chill me out. We eventually found our way back and I parked, and we walked to Mrs. Knott’s Chicken Dinner Restaurant. I walked in and noted how it looked totally different. She asked if the lobby was not how I remembered it. I said maybe I came in a different entrance before. We circled out and looked around. No, that’s the only entrance. This was weird. And then suddenly, I let out a gasp. This was NOT the restaurant I was thinking about! This was one I’d wanted to try, but never did. I was thinking about Po’Folks about 3 blocks away! Crap. We thought we’d try the restaurant anyway, but because of the late morning time that it now was, they had stopped serving breakfast. So we got back in the car, drove to Po’Folks while I cussed about how we’re perpetually hunting down restaurants fruitlessly, and did end up having a great lunch (it was WAY past breakfast time by now) there. I have no idea how I made that mistake — confused a restaurant I’d never been to with a restaurant I’d been to twice, and as recently as in the last month or so.
So now we were plenty full, not the state you want to be in when going to get massages. But we got to Glen Ivy Day Spa without further incident beyond idiotic drivers blocking me on the road. We did have a great massage, hung out in the jacuzzi and steam room, and then it was off to UCLA.
The drive there was great once we passed some initial clogs on the freeways, and it only took us an hour or so. We parked in Westwood with fairly little difficulty, grabbed some cookie ice cream sandwiches and walked to campus munching, and so far, so good. When we got on campus, happily high on sugar and reminscing, we were stopped dead in our tracks when we saw that an older lady trying to open the door to the Student Store apparently couldn’t. The door was locked! We peeped in. The store’s closed! We looked at the posted hours. It was an HOUR before the posted closing time for the day, and they were freakishly closed! Diana said it must be because it’s Spring Break. WTF! But who would close the store right before the weekend of the Final 4 game?! Do they not want to make money?! Diana suggested we just wander around Westwood to buy UCLA stuff at the smaller retail stores. How could all the stores be closed for Spring Break, right? We roamed Westwood and the few stores that sold UCLA anything either had virtually no selection, or were closed earlier than posted hours. Seriously, WHAT THE HECK?! Diana then remembered that there’s a UCLA Store in Santa Monica on 3rd Street Promenade which, she reasoned, couldn’t possibly be closed because 3rd Street is always bustling with people and activity. I was bummed about our luck, so she looked up the store on Google via her Internet-accessible Blackberry, read the phone number for the Santa Monica location aloud, and I dialed it on my cell phone. We were on a busy street in Westwood, so there were buses passing by, which kept me from hearing what the girl who answered said. It was just a “Blah-blah-blah! How can I help you?”
Me: Hi, I’m wondering what your hours are tonight.
Her: We’re open until 6.
Me: (looking at watch) It’s 6 right now.
Her: Oh! Well, we’ll be here ’till 7.
Me: Okay. I’m just wondering because we’re at UCLA right now trying to buy UCLA merchandise, and the Student Store’s closed, and I wanted to make sure you’d still be open before we drove all the way out to Santa Monica.
Her: Uh, I think you have the wrong number.
Me: What store did I call again?
Her: This isn’t a store. It’s a sex house.
Me: (pause) Oh, I definitely have the wrong number, then. Thank you!
Her: You’re welcome, have a great day.
Me: (to Diana, after hanging up) IT’S NOT A STORE, IT’S A SEX HOUSE! NOT EVEN A SEX STORE, BUT A SEX HOUSE! Isn’t that illegal?!
Diana: (checking her Blackberry for the Google listing again) What number did I give you?
Me: I have a SEX HOUSE on my phone record! This does NOT look good! If Mr. W ever checked my cell phone or phone bill, he’d think I was totally lying about us hanging out all day to do our own thing!
Diana: What number did you call?
Me: (reading number out of my “dialed” list)
Diana: That’s what it says! I DIDN’T read you the wrong number. But see, the address is totally correct. We should just go there, I’m sure they’re gonna be open late.

On the way to Santa Monica, we stopped by a great little Italian restaurant first where we had a delicious dinner, and it was pouring rain while we were inside eating, so we remarked on our great luck that at least we weren’t out walking on 3rd Street Promenade while it was raining that hard.
And then we hit 3rd Street in dry weather. It was POURING the second we stepped out of the parking structure, however. We walked up and down 3rd street, looking for the address, and we stopped and looked into the windows of…a whole different store. The UCLA Store that used to be here doesn’t exist anymore! We checked the posted store directory in case it moved. Nope. Diana re-checked the directory and read all the listings. We walked thru the area anyway in case some other store had UCLA merchandise. No luck whatsoever. “I don’t understand how we could’ve tried SO HARD to buy UCLA stuff and have not been able to. This makes NO SENSE. It’s not like a weekend or a holiday! Places either are freakishly closed early, or they no longer exist, or they’ve been turned into a sex house! What the heck! I mean, what’s the purpose of this in the universe?” Diana said, “Maybe we weren’t meant to buy Final Four stuff because UCLA is going to win tomorrow against LSU and enter the finals. But maybe that’s just wishful thinking.” “I hope you’re right,” I grumbled, “Cuz this would make NO sense otherwise.”
Amazingly, she was right. But we wouldn’t find out for another day.
So we left Santa Monica and drove thru massive rain and decided to nix Monterey Park for some Chinese cafes closer to home, so that we wouldn’t get lost in the rain and possibly get stuck in rain traffic. We ended up at a Thai restaurant in Rowland Heights called The Boat and had great food. That was about 11pm, and we didn’t finish eating until midnight.
I wanted to stay up another 3 hours to digest my food, but we again crashed in front of my TV. She wanted to watch The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, but only remembers that it came on and the next thing she knew, she woke up and it was The Cosby Show.

On Saturday, I did get her to the airport in Santa Ana without much ado, and I didn’t get lost going from there to Mr. W’s, and he and I had a great time at Cirque to Soleil watching Quidam. I also go to eat at Chomp’s with him last nite. So I guess all’s well that ends well.

And no, I’m not gonna post the phone number of the sex house on my blog for you pervies.

I’ve somehow made myself probably busier than I have time to prepare for.

On the drive to jujitsu, college roommie Diana and I were on the cell confirming our weekend plans to meet up after her work in Southern California on Thursday evening. We’d been trying to do a spa day and/or a UCLA visit for Friday, if she could get the day off. She just got the day off. I have Friday off, too. Cesar Chavez holiday. So I’m gonna pick her up Thursday night after her deposition in Costa Mesa, we’re gonna have a huge breakfast Friday morning at a restaurant in Knott’s Berry Farm, then it’s off to our spa appointments (which we still have to make), and then a late lunch, maybe at or near UCLA! We’re gonna buy Final Four stuff. She wants an easy, relaxing day so I have no plans after that, short of taking her to the airport to catch her flight home on Saturday morning. After she leaves I will go to Mr. W’s and we’re going to see Cirque du Soleil’s Quidam, my V-day present to him.

After jujitsu, 9 of us went to a great sushi joint in Fullerton called “Chomp Rockin’ Sushi and Teppan Grill“. It’s trendy, the prices are pretty average for sushi, the restaurant is huge and beautiful, there are gargantuan salt water tanks all over the place, including in the center of the large square sushi bar, and it was playing 80s music. Diana called me when I was there and I told her I was gonna take her there. I should also take Mr. W there, as he would really love the decor and the tanks. And the unique rolls! It’s really cool that I could insist on going to sushi after class and then end up with 9 people (most of the returning students) with me at a local restaurant I never would’ve known of on my own. I love that class.

On the way to sushi, I was walking out with Navy Girl Vanessa. She was complaining to me about the 1-month gap she had between when her current lease expires and when she moves in with her new roommate. She planned on moving in with her dad in the interim, and her dad seems to be totally taking advantage of her, telling her not only does she have to pay rent, but she needs to pay the $150+ electricity bill he has lying around and hire people to fix his plumbing. And there were some strange rules he imposed, too. She seemed really miserable, so I offered up my spare room for the month. She was so grateful and happy, she offered to pay my utility bills for the month. (I’m not charging her rent.) I asked when the month starts. She said she needs to move out by this Friday. Eeek! That directly conflicted with my plans with the college roommie Diana. So Vanessa’s going to stay with her boyfriend this weekend (he lives 80 miles away, tho) and move in next week with me. It should be fun. If not, it’s only a month. And we can carpool to jujitsu. She’s also an insomniac, so we’re compatible that way. Basically, neither of us are gonna sleep for a month. We’ll probably be at the gym. Hee hee.

Now, I gotta figure out how to tidy up the house and finish my laundry and clear out the spare room and guest bath by Thursday. I’ve got 2 loads of laundry going right now. It’s probably gonna be a couple of all-nighters. Either that or I gotta skip jujitsu the rest of the week.

So yesterday, from like 4am to 10pm, the film crew for the upcoming CBS law-drama series “Shark” filmed portions of their pilot episode in and around my courtroom. The director is Spike Lee and the main star is played by James Woods. Apparently, this series is about a defense attorney (James Woods) who switched sides to become a prosecutor after a sports star he successfully got acquitted of attempted murder against the sports guy’s wife went home and then murdered his wife. I heard they turned our jury room into a jail interview room with gray wall panels and a prop door change, and they filmed outside our courtroom in the hallway, in front of the courthouse and downstairs in a hall off the main lobby area. A props woman came by to study my desk and apparently commented on the photos of Dodo I have all over my bulletin board. She told the sheriff here on security that she liked my desk, and how you can’t learn this stuff unless you see the real thing. Maybe in a future episode, they’ll show a clerk’s desk on the camera and it’d look exactly like mine. Little invasive aliens all over my PC and all.

Don’t you guys just want to watch this show now? I swear, I’m not being paid for this publicity.

When I walked into the building last week, one of the security officers said to me, “I can’t believe how good your boys are doing!” I didn’t know what he was talking about at first, and then realized he meant UCLA men’s basketball. “I know!” I said happily. And then watched my first UCLA game last nite. *sheepish*

Diana and Jimmy both came down to LA independently and we all met up, with 9 other people, in Marina Del Ray for dinner last nite. Dinner for 11 was difficult at the small, non-reservation-taking restaurant Killer Shrimp. But first, 6 of us met up at a bar 5 blocks away from the restaurant and watched #2 ranked UCLA’s very tight game at #10 Alabama. I can’t believe it was such a close game, there was no consistent lead, and in the last 5-6 minutes or so, we never led by more then 3-4 points. The bar was alive with UCLA fans’ adrenaline. (By the way, the people we were meeting up with were old UCLA friends, too.) We barely won, which is scary considering the ranking difference. But it was an exciting game. “Now we can relax and eat in peace,” Diana said as we left the bar to begin our trek toward the restaurant. (I emphasize the distance because there was some debate about whether it was 2-3 blocks away from the restaurant or, like I said, more like 5-6 blocks away.)

Killer Shrimp wasn’t able to accomodate a large party like ours until their 2 linkable tables left, and altho I’d given them a heads up that 11 would be coming at 7p, they couldn’t get those tables cleared until almost 9p. Diana popped in and out and gave us updates. “They’re just waiting for these 4 women to leave, and they already paid and everything, but they’ve just been sitting in there FOREVER!” After standing outside in the cold for that long already, I offered to kick these lolly-gagging women’s asses on their way out. Jimmy pointed out that this is where Mr. W’s gun, had he brought it, would’ve come in handy to add some pressure. Mr. W forbade me to take advice from Jimmy in the future. The dinner turned out to be worth the wait. Killer Shrimp is about a dozen large shrimp served in a spicy Louisiana-style broth in a large bowl, and they give you a generous refillable basket of French bread to dip into the broth and to dig the shrimp out to peel-and-eat. You can also get rice in the broth or angel hair pasta in the broth for $2 more ($16.95 or something like that) in addition to the bread basket. Their pecan sweet potato pie was AMAZING, too. And that is the entire menu. It was a lot of fun and I HIGHLY recommend it. The sauce was rich with butter, chili, garlic, basil, rosemary, parsley, and oregano. Large chunks of these herbs. *drool*

Oh. Jimmy took some pictures, so there may be something to post up later.

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*