cindy's world

I’ve just completed my 8th workout since Monday, I’m sore all over from running, jujitsu and weightlifting, and you know what I really, really want? A really savory pizza and Taiwanese food. Talk about unhealthy.

I wonder if I can get the combination together when I hang out with my gym trainee after work today for drinks.

Lots of stuff going on this weekend. Some weekends it’s static, and then other weekends it’s an old friend’s b-day shindig in Venice, getting to my parents’ to transfer data on the taxes I’d completed last nite for them (at past 1am!), Mr. W’s gonna install a wireless printer something-or-other for them, meeting up with Vicky for some Burke Williams massage and pampering, and hanging out with the W. I probably missed something. Oh, Bingo! And all these are happening at the same time. “Stevie Wonder” also loaned me a DVD of Iris, the Iris Murdoch story, so I’ll finally know what he’s talking about when he calls me the Asian Iris Murdoch.

I’m so glad I already cleaned my house.

I was truly torn yesterday at the close of the business day about whether I should go to the DAs’ thing, or to jujitsu, or do some hybrid of both (for which I’d have to sacrifice alcohol with the DAs). The timing would be pretty tight because I’d have to leave the DAs in about an hour to make it to jujitsu. And then the answer came when a coworker, the one who took care of fuzzy wuzzy Dodo bear (a.k.a. the cat with the cone) the week I was on the cruise, came and asked for a favor. Her car was still in the shop, and she needed a ride home, and her home is less than a mile from my home. I grasped that as divine intervention, and left for home with her. I got to see her new townhouse and meet her adopted pregnant kitty, a very pretty and petite silver tabby whom I became fast friends with, and we hung out about half an hour until I left to go home and change for jujitsu.

I was so glad I went! Our instructor shut the door and gave us a “secret blackbelt workout.” Every school has their secret moves passed down only to the serious, very advanced students (and in some beliefs, only to the first-born son of the instructor), and we got to play with 3 of these moves. Pretty lethal stuff. I also told the instructor that just that day, my turn for picking vacation time came up and to my shock, the 1st week of November was available (which I immediately snatched), which means I can join the class for the week-long jujitsu training in Hawaii this year! Our school originated from Hawaii, so he’s still got connections there with some of the other instructors who were students back when he was. We’re going to have a clinic for 3 of the 7 days to work out, learn Hawaiian massage, and Hawaiian stick fighting. The other 4 days are ours to goof off and explore, plus there’s a banquet somewhere in the middle with an authentic Hawaiian luau (not the commercial stuff they give tourists, but a real, private one). They’re hooking us up with a beachside hotel and a good rate on flights. Unfortunately, it turns out when my instructor said “the first week of November,” he didn’t mean the first calendar week. He meant the first 7 days of November, which begins on a Wednesday, and my vacation days go by calendar weeks and I don’t have the 2nd week off from work. Once we figured that out, he immediately called Hawaii and changed the banquet from Sunday to Saturday so I can still attend and they’re going to shift the workouts some to accomodate me. I’m grateful they’ll do that, so I’m thinking of flying in early (since I have the whole week off) and doing my own thing first, then ending the vacation with the training, whereas the other students are going to begin their vacation with training and end on goofing off. He even made arrangements with the other Hawaii-based instructor to pick me up at the aiport. “So you have to wear a shirt that says ‘Cindy,’ he joked. “You got any of those?” I said, “That’s my whole wardrobe!”

I’ve never been to Hawaii. I can’t wait!

There are days I’m too tired or lazy to go to jujitsu, but there is not one time when I made myself go that I was not laughing and really glad that I was there.

After jujitsu today, a large portion of the class went to a local steakhouse pub to celebrate one of the instructors’ 32nd birthday. Let’s see, class ended at 8:45p, so we changed, cleared out… I was sitting at the restaurant past 9pm looking at a menu. This conversation…

Me: I shouldn’t be looking at food.
Vanessa (Navy Chick): You’re in a restaurant! Of course you should be looking at food!
Me: But I’ve resolved to stop eating past 6pm.
Rebecca: WHAT?! You can’t not eat, you just worked out!
Laurel: Just think of it this way. You ordered a drink. It would be irresponsible of you not to have some food with your alcohol.
Me: I know, I’m starting to think I shouldn’t have ordered that Redheaded Slut.
Vanessa: No, you HAVE to drink! We’re celebrating Ramon’s birthday!

…with alcohol, later came THIS conversation…

Vanessa: (motioning at the four of us girls at the end of the table) We should start a band.
Rebecca and Laurel: YEAH!
Laurel: We can call ourselves Attention Whore.
Me: That is a good name for our band, cuz that’d be the reason we’re starting one.

…with more alcohol, the conversation evolved to THIS…

Vanessa: Okay, so our band’s gonna be called The RubSluts.
Me: Wow, can you imagine what great costumes we’d have with a bandname like that? Are we gonna be in all rubber?
Vanessa: Yeah, with tiny short skirts to dance onstage with.
Laurel: I’ve always wanted to be a go-go dancer. (doing some go-go dancer moves with her arms)
Me: And we can wear fuck-me boots with holes in them…
Vanessa: I HAVE a pair of those, patent leather boots from Frederick’s of Hollywood! They’re the most awesome boots, and they have holes on the side! I went to a goth club wearing those and this woman asked if she can photograph my boots for a flyer.
Laurel: We should go clubbing!
Me: Yeah, let’s all go goth and go to a goth club!
Vanessa: You want to! There’s an event this Saturday. It’s S&M night. You guys’ll fit right in!
Me: Can we connect a chain from someone’s penis piercing to a collar around my throat, and then I’ll just snap my head like this (quick sideway tilt of my head) to get him to c’mere!
Laurel: (just tuning in again and thinking that I’m swishing my head/hair to the live metal band that we’d been shouting over) Yeah! Whoo! (swishing her head to the music, too)
Me: No, no, that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about S&M!

Yup. When the chickas in jujitsu chat, the men stop and listen.

Our little dinner crew:

In Jordan’s words, “This was the show at 3:45 a.m. The one they don’t advertise in the brochures.”

Here are some photos that I’ve uploaded. There’ll be more to come later. Unless I get lazy. Which is a high likelihood. Rest your mouse pointer over the photos for a caption.

JAMAICA, MON!
Rivertubing at White River.


I never knew that in Jamaica, people drove on the left side of the street and the driver of a vehicle sits on the right side of the car. Our excursion guide said, “In Jamaica, the left side is the right side. And the right side…is suicide.”
Here, snorkeling at a reef off of a beach in Ocho Rios, Jamaica.

ON THE SHIP!
As many of you know, a signature of major ocean cruiseships is the different animals your cabin steward makes out of your bath towels and hides in your room daily. Here’s a bunny we found after coming back from a formal dinner.


Remember how I tried to give you women out there a nice shot of a hot guy across the bar from me when I was in San Francisco but couldn’t get a good enough picture? Well, here he is again, at the ship’s center Atrium, completely unaware that I was taking this picture. I think he should be flattered.

This is one of those ship portraits that I was talking about. We walked by after our formal dinner and they waved us over and posed us.

I’m back! Mr. W is, as I type, scanning in the cruise photographers’ photos of us so that we can order multi-sized copies from Costco.com and pick them up in an hour. Much smarter than paying $20 per 8×10 and $7 per 5×7 from the ship. Despite buying only 15% of the professional photos of us, we still spent over $150 on ship photos alone. But I figure, professional photo sessions don’t have you go thru that many changes of clothing, and just the sitting fee alone would be almost $50 w/o any pictures, so it’s still cheaper to buy one copy of poses we like on a cruiseship and have them serve as souvenirs. (The ship has photo ops set up all over the place daily and when you walk by one, they wave you over to take some photos. The photos are printed out the next day and put on display, and you buy what you want, if not they get recycled.)

The cruise was fun, altho I felt like I started running out of things to do after the 2nd or 3rd day at sea. This is mainly because, “due to the port authorities closing the ports, it is not our fault” (captain over the loudspeaker early Monday morning), we did not stop at the Cayman Islands at all. The night’s storm, wind and choppy water conditions made it unsafe for us to stop there. We had prepaid shipwreck snorkeling excursions there, which was refunded, along with port fees of $25 each. Nevertheless, Mr. W was extremely disappointed, as he made sure everyone we came across knew every day thereafter. I personally didn’t care that much because to me, quality time with him is quality time anywhere. But I’m not a big snorkeling fanatic the way he is. We did get our snorkeling in at Ocho Rios, Jamaica, the next day. We paid a private boat to bring us out to a reef and we plopped in and took a bunch of underwater pictures with my camera in a waterproof camera bag. The camera bag came in handy also during our 3-mile innertube ride down the White River rapids in Jamaica. Photos to follow. My favorite thing about the cruise, however, is not the midnight standup comedy, nor the food (altho it was gourmet and delicious, I even had escargot as an appetizer the last nite), nor the excursions, nor the photos (altho the photos are a close 2nd). It was something we totally lucked out on. The ship makes assigned seating for the nightly formal dinners, and the people we were assigned to the same table with are awesome. We had things in common, we laughed, we goofed off, and we had a lot of differences which made for really interesting dinner conversation. Jordan (a Floridian nurse), myself, Nadia (a kindergarten schoolteacher), Nadia’s boyfriend Terry (I’m not sure I ever got what he did) were talking about Nadia’s bout with alcoholism, and at the time of the cruise, she was 5 1/2 years sober, and attended some of the stealthily named “Friends of Bill W” AA meetings onboard with Terry, who chose to stop his recreational alcohol consumption when he met her and decided to be with her a year ago. Jordan, of course, had seen a lot of substance abuse addicts go thru detox in her hospital over the years, and seen some of her coworkers get addicted to the readily accessible painkillers at their workplace. It was an intense, very real, very candid conversation. A very serious conversation during which I turned my attention briefly to Mr. W and Jordan’s boyfriend Jeff’s conversation, as they were not part of our conversation. Jeff’s eyes were blazing with interest and Mr. W was saying excitedly, “And the last Harry Potter movie’s coming out in March, can you believe it?!” Two movie fanatics. And “fanatic” is a euphemism for movie-obsessed geekazoids who own twelve gazillion times more movies than they can possibly watch. I love how everyone has these threads of common interest. Jordan and I bonded over bitching about how the average American man hitting on us over the internet, as my childhood friend Vicky had once put it, “can’t speel to save his lif.” For morning breakfasts in the formal dining room, we are just randomly seated with people who have space on their table, as directed by the dining staff as we walk in. There are a lot of holier-than-thou, snooty, judgmental, whiny, queasy-ab0ut-food people on the ship. I missed our regular dinner group whenever we attend one of these breakfasts. So of course I made sure to exchange email addresses with everyone.

We spent one night at Fort Lauderdale after the cruise returned to Miami so that we could have free time to rent a car, explore Florida and visit the Everglades. It was coincidentally a cold weekend in Florida this past weekend, and the Everglades, which is just wide swampland covered in reeds and overgrown grass, was cold and uncomfortable as we were blasted around up to 70mph by a loud airboat. By loud, I mean they handed out toilet paper as we got seated so that we could wad them up and stuff them in our ears. It didn’t make much of a difference, tho. It was also too cold to see any alligators or crocodiles, who were apparently all hiding out in bushes to stay warm. The Everglades tour did end in a ‘gator farm, and we saw some gators in captivity there. Mr. W later had alligator meat at the local cafe. Take that, stupid alligators, for making us go all the way out and freeze our tails off for nothing.

The flight back from Ft. Lauderdale to Los Angeles the next day was scheduled to depart at 3:46p. We got to the airport early, checked our baggage, and found out that the plane that was scheduled to come had technical problems and never left the previous airport. So they assigned another plane to get us, and that wasn’t expected to arrive until 8:10p. We made the most of it, hailed a taxi out to a beach, goofed off, Mr. W made a sand angel (photos to follow), hailed another taxi back to the airport around 6:45p, only to discover that the 2nd American Airlines plane also had technical problems shortly after departure and turned around. They were now sending a third flight to get us, and that one’s due at 11:20p. This time we stayed at the airport and I was actually really proud of Mr. W for maintaining his cool and rolling with the punches. We were supposed to arrive in LA yesterday evening at about 5:50p, but didn’t end up getting in until 5:30a this morning. Of course we weren’t going to call someone to get us a ride, so we rented a car and drove it back to his place.

Wow. We got done early. The judge let the jury go home early so that he and the attorneys can work on jury instructions and the verdict form. So on Monday, they’ll do closing arguments, jury instructions and the jury will commence their deliberation.

I guess I WON’T miss the flight. Yay! I told Mr. W things will work out! I’m jumping ship now.

Have a great week, guys! I hear that major cruiseships now have computer rooms, so if they do, maybe I’ll toss an entry your way here and there. In either case, I’m gonna be collecting photos of Jamaica, the Cayman Islands, and Florida (hopefully the Everglades) for posting when I get back. I should do a photo of me before and after the tan.

Sunday evening, Mr. W and I took my parents and maternal grandma out to dinner for Chinese New Year. My parents were eager for Mr. W to try a Szechwan restaurant in Rowland Heights because of his partiality toward spicy foods and trying new, different cultural dishes. Szechwan food is regional to a mountainous part of China where it’s so cold that the people had taken to increasing the spicy factor in their foods to stimulate body heat and metabolism. We had lots of ma la (numb & spicy) dishes. There’s a particular spice that numbs up your mouth and it’s added to very spicy foods in authentic Szechwan cooking. The numbing thing bothered me a bit and I complained about feeling like I’d been rinsing with Chloroseptic, but Mr. W really took to the food. A lot of the dishes were so spicy that my parents were remarking jokingly on the number of napkins they’d gone thru to wipe the sweat from their brows. I chugged ice water as Mr. W enjoyed the tea; I backed away from the spicier dishes as Mr. W embraced them piled them in his plate. My mom remarked that apparently, I’m the white person and Mr. W’s the Chinese one. Oh, well.

I do so enjoy watching Mr. W enjoy my culture even if I don’t have quite the same appreciation for various parts of it. I’ll blame that on my prior stomach ulcer.

Happy Chinese New Year! Happy year of the dog! Woof!

Saturday (hours ago, yes I realize what time it is), Mr. W had friends over most of whom I know and have hung out with already, and we had a game evening. Some people got drunk and had to be ushered out by their significant others. But over all, it was a lot of fun. We played Cranium and Loaded Questions. Loaded Questions is probably my favorite game. You get a group together, preferably the people know each other, and the person whose turn it is rolls a die to see what category of subjective question will be read. Then a question is read aloud, and everyone answers on their piece of paper what their personal answer is (e.g. “Given your current financial situation, what is the year, make and model of your next car?” I answered my usual, Volvo C-70, and guessed it’d be 2007. I then found my Volvo connection. A guy there used to work as the finance manager for Volvo and he can get me that car at a deep discount. I had been going on for YEARS about not having a Volvo connection.). The papers are passed to the question reader, and the reader of the question reads all the answers to the person whose turn it is, and the person whose turn it is has to guess who responded with what answer. Every one you guess correctly advances you one spot on the game board. Everyone left saying we need to make game nite a regular thing. I’ll say it was a success.

I just got back from watching King Kong. Here’s an outline:

Hour 1: Why the island movie has to be made; setting: New York and ship.
Hour 2: King Kong vs. Godzilla meets Jurassic Park meets Land of the Lost (sans Sleestaks); setting: Skull Island.
Hour 3: Exploitation of the King by us awful people; setting: New York City.

They could’ve cut the majority of the first hour out. The second hour has amazing effects and gorgeous scenery, but it looked like a more realistic Looney Tunes Merrie Melodies cartoon. It was so goofy. It was cool how Ann, despite being thrown around by King Kong and running around the jungle being chased by dinosaurs (yes.) and huge centipedes, stayed perfectly clean and beautiful, her hair still softly curled, clothing barely falling within the description of “dingy.” Hour 3. Sigh, hour 3. The stuff of love stories. Bittersweet, beautiful, tear-jerking hour 3. I laughed, I cried. And then I cried and cried. People around me cried. Men and women cried. Hour 3 is worth the first 2 hours.

King Kong has such life. His face is amazing. You feel like you know him and know what he’s thinking. His character (they actually gave him a character, not just a rubber body) is like a spoiled guy with some attitude, some boyish charm, and lots of alpha male testosterone and pride. And he’s a noble hero. As the actor character said, “Real heros don’t look like me! They have bad teeth, and bald spots, and beer bellies!” There you have it. King Kong is a hero.