cindy's world

Apples are just kewl, aren’t they? When I was little, I’d imagine that early peoples (like Neanderthals, I guess) who didn’t know what an apple was would be handed this red hard rock-looking thing, and be told to bite into it. They’d dubiously look at the object in their hand. “But it’s hard. And I’m thirsty.” Then the apple introducer would explain that yes, it is a solid, but as you chew it, liquid comes out that you can just swallow directly. So they’d take their first hesitating bites. *Crunch, crunch, chug, chug.* “This is amazing! And it’s sweet! Apples are kewl!”
“Yes, and it cleans your teeth, too! Feel how squeaky clean your teeth surfaces are.”
*lick lick, squeak squeak*
(Cut me some slack. I am an only child. But my Barbies and stuffed animals always had the most interesting conversations with each other.) It’s juice, that travels easily. You don’t have to worry about spillage, it’s all contained in these solid-looking cells.

Now, there are so many different sizes, textures, flavors. You like slightly more sour juice with cleaner teeth? Gnaw on this Granny Smith apple. You like crisp and syrupy sweet? Here’s a Fuji apple. Have one a day! It keeps the doctor away! As you chew and drink, chew and drink, you’re actually getting all these great tasty vitamins and antioxidants, too! Easy delivery method, no pill-swallowing required.

Plus, there’s just something about apples that helps you go poo. I don’t know what it is, maybe all the fiber goes through your system and scrapes your innards clean on its way back out.

You want cold juice? Refrigerate an apple! And altho I’m not a fan of this, you can have your apples hot, too, cut in chunks and wrapped up in sugar and pastry shells!

Apples are as kewl as bar soaps are neato!

(Read the 1st in the Miraculous Series [which may turn out to be just a two-part post instead of a whole series, I dunno yet], The Miraculous Soap Bar.)

After what felt like weeks of teasing us with the prospect of putting up some soap post, Jordan finally did it. She wrote a terrific soap post, inspired by the original soap post on my blog. It took a lot of poking and prodding and convincing to get her to finally put the post up, because she felt that James and I overhyped the soap post demand and now she can’t meet everyone’s expectations (but of course she never fails to meet them, and still didn’t. Fail, I mean. Not that she didn’t meet the expectations. Forgive me, it’s late. Or really, really early.). It really deserves a read, if for nothing else than to look over her great little pictures, ESPECIALLY the picture of the prison soap.

I’m posting because her first image, an animated picture of colorful soap bubbles rising up, reminded me of the first time I played with bubbles. It was kindergarten in Taiwan. The teachers took us out into the cemented yard, where they’d set up stations of plastic and metal tubs on the ground with liquid in them. There were little plastic bubble wands, too. They explained what bubbles were and showed us how to make them, and then let the kids go station to station. Apparently there was this big bustle around one particular station where the kids gathered chattering excitedly about “rainbow-colored bubbles!” I’d walked around asking what this rainbow bubbles are, and some kids said that these blow out in different colors. So I looked really hard, expecting a red bubble, orange bubble, green bubble, blue bubble, indigo bubble and violet bubble to float around. But no, it looked like the non-multi-colored bubbles at the other station to me. It was also hard to see because these cheap-ass ghetto homemade bubbles just clustered off the wand and fell in a wad to the ground if they were even forming bubbles to begin with, altho much of the time the teachers and the aids just ended up blowing soapy liquid straight into the eyes of the mob of eagerly waiting Chinese kindergartners. *blink blink* “Ooh! Ah!” *blink* “Oh!” Stupid kids.

Now that I’m an adult and have immigrated over into this country, where bubble solution is produced by actual engineers under major toy manufacturers, I wonder: WTF is the alternative to a multi-colored bubble membrane? Did they actually have black and white bubbles?!

Apparently I’m kinda angry at this time in the morning. Or maybe it’s just memories of how much I was picked on at that age. It leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. Maybe I need to wash it out with some prison soap.

It’s finally chilly in the mornings again. It started to cool off a bit in California before my Hawaii trip, but right before we left, the dry, cow-scented Santa Ana winds heated up SoCal again. This weekend it was so dry that, having forgotten to smear body butter on myself after the shower Sunday morning, my skin felt itchy at the Getty Center, like it was gonna rip if I bent over too suddenly.

Even though the high was forecasted to be 85 degrees F today, the morning was icy. I wrapped up in a thick terry bathrobe after my shower. Dodo-Puff’s fur was cold to the touch, too. He’s fluffier than usual, which means his body’s sensing the climate shift as well and is growing extra fur. (Either that or I need to brush him more to get rid of the old fur.)

I like chilly mornings. It reminds me of winter mornings past.
* Me as a 6-year-old in the country for the first time, away from the tropical island I was born, looking out the window minutes before dawn breaks, admiring the water-colored people-less tree-lined streets that is America.
* Reading Calvin & Hobbes cartoons in elementary and high school, wishing I could relate to the sled-rides, the snow monsters, the snow fort, the mittens/scarves/snow pants.
* Reading other stories of 60s and 70s American life, wanting so badly to tap into a maple tree for maple syrup that I could boil on the stove, then bring outside to pour on some tightly packed and pounded snow on the ground to make crunchy maple candy.
* Awakening in the mornings at UCLA in the chill, seeing Diana up and moving around making tea, or plodding along in her pajamas getting set to study with her gigantic headphones.
* Walking the Naples water canals in Long Beach with my coworker Sandy and our significant others, admiring the extravagant Christmas decor of the rich with endless money to throw at electricity.
* Curling up on my sheepskin rug in front my crackling lit fireplace the first time I was really truly happy in my own skin being single, smiling at my house, my Dodo boy and multitude of lit candles around me.
* Mr. W lighting his fake fireplace for me knowing I love the dance of flames, and finally allowing me to throw in a pine cone so I could watch it change to carbon (I had a blog by then, and I wrote about that here).

There are so many more memories, in between all these events, that I savor and relive when the temperature drops. =)

Yesterday evening, I told Mr. W a story about a childhood eraser I had. It was a small flat eraser in the shape of a rotary dial phone. When I was in grade school, I showed the cute eraser to my cousin Jennifer, who’s a few years younger than me. She didn’t know what the eraser depicted. “It’s a phone,” I told her, incredulous. She said, “Nuh-uh. What’s that round thing in the middle?” “That’s where the dial is.” “There’re no buttons? Then how do you dial?” I had to explain to her how rotary phones work. You dial by turning the dial. Kids these days don’t know where the term “dialing the phone” comes from, because they’ve always pushed buttons. Today, they say they “punch in the numbers.” Just as the keyboards on computers now have an “enter” key, whereas the older keyboards had a “return” key. “Return” doesn’t make sense anymore because there’s no roller holding a piece of paper up that you have to return to the beginning left position to keep typing on your typewriter. And when the kids now say, “Ditto” to signal an agreement? They don’t know what that means. They have “xeroxes,” not “dittos.” They’ve never seen a teacher hand-crank a deep purple ink press original through a ditto machine to copy a worksheet to pass out to the class. (Mr. W interjected here that he used to love sniffing the chemicals on his dittos. But he grew up in the druggie age.)

Technology has never improved itself so exponentially as in our lifetime right now. In half a generation, we have nostalgia about more items than our parents had to reminisce about. My high school trig teacher, Mr. Brose, told us a story about how when he was in college, they had just come out with the scientific calculator (which was required basic equipment for our trig class). He remembers the early calculators that only had 5 or 9 digits on the display, and only did basic functions, and then they started coming out with more and more functions. “And then I turned to my buddy and made a crack, ‘In the future, they’re gonna come up with a calculator where you punch in some figures and you turn it over and they’ll GRAPH it for you on the back. HAHAHAHA!’ ” Now graphing calculators are a required basic of high school math classes.

Little boy to man on a cartoon: “Dad, tell me again about how when you were a kid, you had to walk all the way up to the TV to change the channel!”

This morning, I held my breath and nervously pulled up a pair of size 2 Express Editor pants. They zipped and buttoned perfectly fine. I pulled on a thin pink ribbed 3/4 length knit shirt, an Express small, and that fit, too. Yay, I’m back in my skinny clothes! I mean, they could fit better, but at least they’re don-able. On my way out I grabbed a light leather jacket from the hall closet.

I can’t wear a leather jacket without a line from this guy’s email running through my head. Some years ago, I was doing my own thing and was stopped by a female acquaintance. She asked me whether I was seeing someone, and I told her not at the moment. She said one of her friends was interested in me, and had asked her to find out some stuff about me. So I guess her tactful way of doing it was just coming out and asking me. I was flattered, so that led me to exchange a few emails with this friend of hers. In one email, he complained about having a headache. He further explained that he had a headache because he’d gone to an outdoors concert event the night before, and “was banged around for an hour in a leather jacket.” My mental reaction now is the same as it was the time I read it, i.e. ??? Assuming he did not mean that people tied him up in a leather strait jacket and beat him senseless with a bat for an hour, I guess he wore a leather jacket in a moshing-like environment. But what’s the leather jacket have to do with his headache? Does banging on a leather jacket cause some kind of chemical reaction, like two molecules hitting each other? Maybe the force of the impacts releases some kind of toxic gas that gives people headaches. Maybe the sound created from banging on leather emits such a deep echo that it gives the wearer a headache.

Or maybe, just maybe, he was s t r e t c h i n g to brag about the fact that he owns a leather jacket, shoving that fact into a story that really has no relevance to the fact at all. Which just makes it kinda sad and pathetic. I’ve come to learn that people who do, or people who are, even people who have, don’t need to talk about it. Typically, people who talk are overcompensating for what they don’t or aren’t or haven’t.

I think it was in the early months of 1996. I was a junior in college. Childhood friend Sandy and I were hanging out in another family friend’s living room during one of our multi-family get-togethers that our parents used to have with their fishing buddies. She was admiring a pearl ring I wore on my right ring finger. It was a one-month anniversary present from my first boyfriend, whom I’d gotten together with shortly after Christmas. Pearl is my birthstone (although I much prefer my alternate semi-precious birthstone of Alexandrite), and a white one was set in four yellow gold petals. Two tiny diamonds connected the petals to the band. Sandy was saying, “Wow, he must really like you. My mom says you can marry someone with a bad temper, or marry someone poor, or marry someone boring, but you should never marry someone cheap. Someone who’s cheap to you will make your life really, really bitter.” This was back in the day when Sandy started really taking to heart old Chinese proverbial advice from her mother about whom she should date because, at the ripe age of 20, anyone we dated seriously at that point is a potential husband. The irony, of course, is that 10 years later now, neither of us are married. And we’ve both swept through strings of men. Heck, we learned a lot about ourselves in the process of dating wrong people, though.

The fun part of this memory is what follows. I had to go pee, so I got off the couch and went to the restroom behind the living room. I closed the door behind me, then walked the length of the long restroom and sat on the toilet. The door was to my left. Suddenly, there was a bang as the door swung violently open and Sandy flew through the door into the restroom with an “Oof!”, stumbling. Then she paused, laughed, and ran out the door, slamming it behind her. I just sat there and looked down the length of the bathroom. What the heck just happened? When I left the restroom, I walked out to see her laughing hysterically on the couch. “Do you need the restroom?” I asked her.
“No!” she gasped in between gales.
“What happened?” I asked.
“I was just — *gasp* I was just — messing around *laugh laugh* — I was gonna pound on the door and say, ‘LET ME IN! LET ME IN!’ and mess around like you locked me out, but the door wasn’t closed and I fell in!”
HAHAHAHA!!!! Talk about a stupid practical joke/stunt backfiring and making you look stupid! I can just picture her sitting on the couch having this brilliant idea to be stupid, then walking around to the bathroom raising both fists to pound on the door, and then one pound and the door gives way and she falls in. HAHAHAHA!

Okay, you had to be there.

I secretly feel bad that my life has stabilized to the point that there is no drama to entertain people with on this blog. But I don’t feel bad enough to hope for drama just to keep my readership up. I also secretly feel bad that what little drama I deal with can’t be posted on here for privacy reasons regarding the people I would be bitching about. But that just gives my friends a reason to call me and see what’s new that I can’t write about on this very open, very public, surprisingly searchable site. I don’t like censorship. I also secretly wish people out there know enough “inside” stuff to get how boundary-flirtatious some of these posts truly are, but I’m not gonna spell things out. They just have to read between the lines or be on the inside path.

As a single-digit-age kid, I loved flipping through those thick Best department store color catalogs. Those things were like phone books! Best doesn’t exist anymore, but in the 80s it was a mega department store that had unbelievable inventories of jewelry, household appliances, bedding, knick-knacks, tools, and my favorite: toys!! When I was 6, I would turn to the jewelry section and “randomly” put initials by rings and such to designate a “random,” “fair” divi-ing up of loot between me and my 2 favorite playmates, my cousins Diana and Jennifer. And then I’d show them the book. And they’d realize that altho the assignments seemed random, I appeared to always have the prettiest rings designated to me. “No fair!” my cousin Diana had once said, throwing the book into the air. I had to later ask my mom what “no fair” meant. Hey, I was 6 and didn’t speak the language, okay? But darn it, at ages 7 and 4, my cousins were on to me and my youthful double-edged stealth.

My point is, at that age, I’d flip right by the bedding and appliance “grownup” sections in a catalog, and I’d wonder, “Who looks at this?! It’s so boring!” And here I am, blogging about INSURANCE. My inner child is screaming and rocking.

Reading Jordan’s blog today got me thinking about my September 11, 2001. I’ve never told anyone the details of what happened with me that day, mostly because I am ashamed of the first half of it.

Because New York is 3 hours ahead of California, when it all went down, I was still in bed. The phone ringing woke me up. It was my then-boyfriend, Gary. “A plane just hit one of the Twin Towers in New York!” he exclaimed. That meant nothing to me. I’d never been to the Towers, didn’t know about the now infamous landmark. I was just annoyed that he woke me up. I said something crankily into the phone and hung up, rolled over and went back to sleep. Some time later, I was once again awoken by Gary. “A second plane just hit the tower! You better call Grace and make sure she’s okay!” he said excitedly (but not in a good way). “I’m sure she’s fine!” I said, and prepared to hang up again. “CALL HER!” he told me. “They’re saying it’s an ATTACK on America!” What the hell. I hung up, once again pulled the cover over my face, made myself go back to sleep, and overslept. A third phone call woke me up, and when I saw the time, I leapt out of bed in a panic and did not get the phone. Turned out it was my court reporter. She left a message on my answering machine and said they were evacuating our courthouse and other government buildings are shutting down, so if I had not left for work yet, I needn’t come in. (She gets to work super-early.) I finally was curious enough about what’s going on to turn on the TV in the downstairs living room, and since every channel was playing the same breaking news, I didn’t even need to look for information. I stood close to the TV to see it since I hadn’t put my glasses on yet, and as the images processed in my brain, as tiny suit-clad people fell out of two smoking highrises on national television, I on the other end of the country fell to my knees. And cried, and cried and cried.

Grace lived and worked close enough to the Twin Towers to have the immediate air around her affected by the smoke and debris, but as I found out later, she wasn’t home, nor at work, because her leukemia recently had acted up enough that her concerned doctor had hospitalized her to keep an eye on her to make sure she wasn’t coming out of remission. Her then-fiance Justin had just walked through the Twin Towers and gotten on the subway to his office at Deutsche Bank, so was out of harm’s way. Grace’s father, who was visiting, was near the towers when everything went crazy. Grace’s mother, at the hospital with her, called and called her husband’s cell phone but could not get through. The rooftop of the towers served as a communications signal relay point and when the buildings were hit, many satellites and other cell sites couldn’t bring their signals down to the people. They eventually heard from her dad, who only managed a seconds-long phone call to say he was all right and trying to find a way through the mess to get to the hospital to them, before the phone call went dead again.

The next day at work, before we called our first case in Law & Motion, my judge took the bench and asked the courtroom to observe a moment of silence for the victims of the terrorist attack in New York, the Pentagon and United Flight 93’s foiled attack. The courtroomful of civil adversaries bowed their heads collectively and for once, was actually “civil” in their shared grief and patriotism.

We will never forget.

Oh hey, the server’s back up for the blog! Yay! Hello out there in readership land!

My coupe is being turned over to Mr. W today. I’m a little sad. That car’s been with me for 8 years of loyal service. It was the first car I’d purchased. I’d driven other cars before, but this is the one that was really the product of my hard-earned sweat and tears.

When I was 16, my parents were glad to hand over their 8 year old gray Ford LTD so that they didn’t have to shuttle me around to all my club, extracurricular and social activities. My friends and I called that car The Tank. It was a nice comfortable ride with plush velvet-like miniature checkered seats. My friends (i.e., Vicky) joked that it was a “luxury sedan,” since it was big and roomy and yes, the seats were really comfortable. You didn’t get those jolts and squeaks you get riding in the “cooler” cars, which back in the early 90s were the fixed-up Honda Civics, Acura Integras, Mitsubishi Eclipses. For whatever generous or perhaps guilt-induced reason, my parents “fixed up” my LTD with a pull-out radio. I’d turn the treble down and the bass up, and my car with all its hyper boppy passengers would vibrate to the bass line of Sir Mixalot’s Baby Got Back and Paperboy’s The Ditty. Is it any wonder that when the now old-school hip hop of the early to mid 90s come on the radio, I’m taken back to those happy days parking on the street in front of the high school (since the only parking lot for students were assigned senior parking which you had to get up at the buttcrack of dawn and get to school 2 hours before class started in order to snatch one of the precious spaces), when I’d be there so early I’d simply do my Calculus homework due 1st period right there on the steering wheel. By the end of my senior year, that car had decidely had it. The thermostat stuck and caused the car to overheat a few times, one of which was during my return from a Senior Breakfast event in Pomona; the rubber hoses had hardened and cracked, one at a time, such that one time coasting down a hill toward my house I had a green coolant water fountain squirting out the left side of my hood. That car became too much of an expense to repair, so my parents got rid of it (and I was sad then, too) and I went without a car to college. It was too inconvenient (and expensive!) to drive in Westwood, anyway. On weekends home I simply borrowed one of my parents’ Volvos.

A couple of months before I graduated college, my parents mentioned something about my buying a car. “Why would I buy a car?” I wondered. “You don’t expect to borrow one of our cars forever when you graduate, do you? How are WE supposed to get to work then?” my mom said. Oh, I hadn’t thought of that. I started looking and doing research. That was 1998, and the Accord had just newly redesigned a coupe. It was hot hot hot on the market, because for the first time, the Accord coupe didn’t look simply like a 2-door version of the Accord sedan. The tail lights formed isoceles triangles and were reminiscent of the NSX rears. The body shape had an aggressive sporty stance. It came with a VTec engine. People were on waiting lists with the dealerships paying above window sticker price. Through connections with the ex (the same one who hooked me up again), I paid $21K out the door for the upgraded EX trim, thousands below sticker price, on Mother’s Day, 1998. With the windows tinted and leather seats, that car was the envy of everyone. My cousin (mechanic specializing in Hondas) serviced that car faithfully for the 8 years I owned it. That car, at 8 years old now, is nothing like the Ford LTD in its 8th year. There really is something to be said for Hondas in lasting power.

In my garage last night, I had the two cars side by side and transferred some things from the Accord to the Lexus. There were other things I threw away — movie ticket stubs dating back to 1998; hand-drawn maps to ex-boyfriends’ houses, offices, events; printed mapquested directions to spas, friends’ houses, other courthouses, restaurants. I don’t need those anymore with the new navigation system. I found an email string I’d printed out and kept in the car back when my friend Lily counseled me through an emotional melt-down, which trauma I’m sure is poured into those pages, but it was too painful for me to even attempt to reread. I also found another sliver of paper, a vignette of an email from my cousin Mark written to me around the same time, with some words of encouragement telling me that I shall be victor because “nothing less is expected or possible.” Early business cards of friends from when we stepped from the golden hazy schoolkid days into the bleached harsh gray of the real world. For a packrat sentimentalist, I had some minor symbolic victories in the act of throwing away the first poem typed to me from the Cheating Ex (which I’d printed out and kept in the car to, in a sense, be near him), and throwing away a stack of business cards for another ex’s store. It’s amazing what you uncover in what is arguably a time capsule that took you from your early 20s of adulthood (age 21) to age 30.

Even though my Accord doesn’t respond to my voice the way the Lexus does (when I push the voice command button), I’d like to think that it had bonded with me and my heart like a living entity that had carried me through laughter and suicidal pain, triumphant successes and a few failures, old familiar routes and unexplored roads.

I drove the Accord in to work today. At lunch, I went to the gym and upon walking back to my car, I saw it for the first time in a long time in daylight. The dings and scratches on it are unbelievable. People who park in our work structure are such JERKS! I know it happened in our structure because it either parks alone in my garage or alone in Mr. W’s garage, and I don’t go into public parking lots much. At the gym, I park it in a far lonely aisle for the shade and people usually don’t want to park that far so it’s usually alone there, too.

There was a time probably 5 years ago when I’d parked it in the structure at the Brea Mall. As I walked toward my car, I saw a young mother getting out of her car, which was parked next to mine. She had two young kids in the backseat, and as they climbed out the car, the mom said, “Be careful, make sure you don’t hit that other car with your door.” The kids very gingerly pushed the door out and climbed out carefully, then shut the door behind them. At this point I walked up to my car and she looked up in surprise at me smiling at her. “Thank you,” I told her, and hit my unlock button so that she knew it was my car she was protecting. She said, “Oh, you’re welcome! People need to be more responsible these days. I always teach my kids to respect other people’s property.” I wish there were more people like her around.