cindy's world

#1 My mom used to tell me, as an incentive to lose weight as a pre-teen, that if I needed emergency heart surgery or something like that, if I were thin the doctors could just cut right in and fix me up. But if I were fat, they’d have to cut through all these layers of fat and move them aside before they could get to the heart of the matter (pun intended), thereby causing potentially life-threatening delays. So this had me thinking… if I were obese and the doctor has to cut through fat in the surgery anyway, does he or would he just cut off the fat rolls and discard them? Cuz then, free lipo! Kill two birds with one stone! Or would he charge to cut the fat out? I suppose if it were that easy, all these heart patients who undergo surgery wouldn’t have to go thru the “You must lose weight to keep your heart well, we barely saved you this time. You need to change your lifestyle” doctor-patient lectures.

#2 Why would someone willingly drive a convertible really fast with the top down through wooded areas like the car commercials show? Wouldn’t you get bugs splattered on your face the way they splatter on your car? And what if you have a passenger and you’re trying to talk to him/her and you have to yell really loud to compensate for the wind noise, and cuz your mouth is open, you SWALLOW a bug?

One of my most prized possessions in grade school was a pretty large Fisher Price dollhouse. It opens up and you can move the little plastic dolls around the children’s bedroom area, a kitchen/dining area, living room area, and a parents’ master bedroom area. There was also a side garage with a blue door that slid up to open, and a yellow plastic car with 2 holes to plop the dolls of your choice in for a ride, and a smiling dog doll. The back of the garage served as a doghouse entrance. On the house itself were cartoon pictures of things, like shrubbery, curtains, flowerbeds on windowsills, birds. The drawn kitchen window, as seen from outside the house, depicts a cartoon mom smiling and waving from what is presumably the sink. There may have even been a pie cooling off on the windowsill. I played with this house endlessly, charmed by the ways my characters could interact, even ring the doorbell by flicking a small plastic lever that’d spring back up to hit a resonating bell. The characters were always smiling and they always got along. I knew it was unrealistic, and I loved it.

Today, after purchasing my new $93 New Balance stability-inducing running shoes at A Snail’s Pace, I decided to break them in by wearing them to visit my parents. Mr. W had suggested we visit them first and then come back to his place for a short (3 mile) run so I don’t blister when I train in them. When I pulled up to my parents’ house in the evening, my dad was to our left watering the front lawn, and I lowered the window, said, “Hi dad!” and he waved at us. As we waved back, I giggled at how Fisher Price this felt, my dad watering the lawn, smiling and waving at his daughter and her boyfriend, who are smiling and waving back pulling into the driveway. It’s the classic Lego/Barbie depiction of “life.” We got out of the car, walked to my dad, and chatted about the trees. I decided to take Mr. W around the backyard since there’s been considerable changes made since I’d last been out there maybe 10 years ago. My dad walked with us watering all the leafy fruit trees, telling us what each one was. Lime grafted with palmelo, white peach grafted with some other thing I’d forgotten, 3 types of guavas, kumquats grafted with another type of kumquat, and then we rounded the side of the house to the back of the house. “Eh??” I heard coming from the kitchen window. My mom was standing there, presumably doing dishes, looking surprised to see us. “Hi mom!” I waved. “Hi!” she waved back. I giggled again. We walked around the garden looking at the other stuff, the veggies on the other side of the yard, squash, tomatoes, and the gourds hanging from the rafters, some so large they nearly hit Mr. W on the head. My mom came out and talked about the neighbor’s figs. Fresh figs? My mom took us to the other side of the yard and pointed out the neighbor’s fig tree, heavy with large drops of deep purple fruit. Apparently this neighbor can’t get rid of the figs fast enough and constantly invites my parents to help themselves. So Mr. W and I leaned down the slope and picked some fresh figs. They were delicious, soft and syrupy inside. My mom made won ton soup for us and we sat around the dinner table chatting and eating. Then, as my parents left to my aunt’s house to return some DVDs in their weekly Chinese soap opera exchange, Mr. W and I set off for a walk around my parents’ hilly neighborhood as we were now too full to run. First we explored a newly built fancy senior citizen’s recreation center up on a nearby park at the top of a hill. As we strolled along the perimeter, my parents drove by on their way to my aunt’s and I heard my mom’s playful higher-pitched chirp, “Hello!” We waved at them as my mom’s extended waving arm disappeared around the bend. I giggled again. A walk that takes my parents 40 minutes took us over an hour. I was pretty proud of them. It was not an easy walk, definitely very slopey. I didn’t blister at all, and I think I broke those shoes in. After unloading soy milk, yogurt, fruit, crackers, an oven mit, and some Chinese bath salt paste on me, my parents walked us out the garage and we were off.

This evening, in addition to the early afternoon spent napping (I took like 3 naps today, and I don’t normally nap at all), watching interesting shows on TV and Inside Man on DVD, and eating freshly made guacamole, homemade oatmeal-butterscotch cookies, and Ben & Jerry’s “Vermonty Python” ice cream (I just learned that Ben & Jerry’s only uses milk/cream from cows not treated with growth hormones, cool!) made for a relaxing, happy day. Perfectly in contrast to the chaos that will be tomorrow as I go into work to play with the 90 new prospective jurors we’re supposed to pick 15 people from for the 2nd jury of our 4-defendant, dual jury murder trial.

My mom wrote me an email at 9am this morning, saying that at that time 30 years ago, I was 15 hours old.

I must’ve been ugly. But I bet I had 10 fingers and 10 toes! And I bet they counted them!

Did you guys ever count your own toes, after realizing that you’ve never actually counted them before so maybe you’ve been an eleven-toed freak all along but you never realized it? I did, when I was 10, and I’m glad to report, I have 10 li’l piggies.

When my childhood friend Sandy was turning 30 last month, I called her to wish her a happy birthday. In the conversation, I asked what time she was born, and then noted that she wasn’t actually 30 yet, she technically had a few more hours. She said, “But I was born in Taiwan so technically, I turned 30 yesterday.” “Oh yeah!” I said and laughed at her for being old already. And then it hit me. I was born in Taiwan, too! Damn it, I’ve been 30 for 3 days already, then.

A coworker was selling Gold Canyon Co. jar candles as a fundraiser for her sons’ boy scout troop, and dropped my 2 items off in my courtroom this morning. I took a whiff of the scent called Ginger Lime and was instantly taken back to 1982. I was 6, freshly in the country, running around in our first apartment in Rowland Heights. The apartment complex was owned by my aunt and uncle, and all 4 adults were cleaning it after the last renters moved out. There was some cleaner they were using, I believe it was something similar to the powdered Comet or Ajax, that smelled exactly like this candle. The scent makes me think of furry foamy brown carpet, shelving paper with designs of mushrooms (which my mom cut out and gave me as stickers to play with), paneled tinted mirrors covering one wall with gold splashes on them.

Heh, so 80s.

Ooh, and a tan stuffed bear half the size of my 6-year-old non-English-speaking self, which had been left behind in the 2-bedroom apartment and which my parents/aunt had washed for me and gave me. The bear’s fur got spikey and ruined with the washing, and they couldn’t comb it out to make it fluffy again, so my other aunt knitted a brown shirt that looks rather like a smock for my bear to wear, and cover as much spikey fur as possible.

Heh, so ghetto.

Today, Mr. W and I brought 3 kids with us to visit UCLA. All 3 (not all his) want to attend my alma mater, so they were excited at the prospect of a tour. It was sweltering hot (in the 90s Fahrenheit), there was lots of walking involved both on campus and around the neighboring Westwood, but they had each other so they didn’t complain much. The two boys tossed a baseball back and forth to each other throughout their walk, but they did ask a few times whether we were close to the car. The answer was usually “HAHA, no.” Kids are so not used to physical exertion these days, not because their bodies can’t handle it (we had one cheerleader, 2 baseball players), but because they’re spoiled by technology. There’s a Calvin & Hobbes cartoon in which Calvin is bugging his mom to drive him to his friend’s house to play. His mom tells him to walk there, since it’s only a couple of blocks away. Calvin refuses to walk. His mom starts yelling, and ends with, “What do you think people have FEET for?!” Calvin yells back equally irrately, “To work the gas pedals!”

We got to show them much of the beautiful North campus and Sculpture Garden (where they played toss-the-tennis-ball with a huge yellow labrador retriever that was wading in the Sculpture Garden fountain and took photos hanging off a bossy looking fat woman statue), they bought souvenirs at the Student Store, walked through Powell Library and got to peek in a lecture hall doing a video presentation in Dodd Hall. They admired the state-of-the-art athletic facilities inside Pauley Pavilion and the Wooden Center. At one point, the five of us were studying an unusual looking sculpture, and I was in the front with my back turned to the kids. I heard a “wap!” and then the girl’s voice, “Ow!” I turned and the boys were grinning so I thought they threw the baseball at her and hit her. She turned around and gave the younger boy a dirty look, then looked around and realized it was a pine cone that fell from a tree overhead and hit her. She said, “I thought you threw the baseball at me! I was gonna shove you!” Her older brother said, “Man! I heard that, too! It made a sound as it dropped, like whoosh, BAM!” The girl, whom her dad always calls a drama queen, said, “If that had hit my head, I would have a CONCUSSION! Lookit, my hand’s all red! Ow!” I thought it was hilarious. On our way out of that area, we once again walked by that area, and she ran up to me and showed me the offending pine cone. “Lookit how hard it is! It totally hurt!” I said, “How do you know that’s the same pine cone?” “Because,” her brother said, “That’s the only one over there.” “Only you,” I told her. “Only you can stand in a big broad grassy area, and there would be just ONE pine cone falling, and it’d hit you.” She laughed and said, “I know, really.” I told her she should go buy a lottery ticket, cuz what are the chances? “But she has bad luck,” her brother pointed out.

In Westwood, we dropped by Diddy Rease’s, where they’ve been selling 2 freshly made cookies of your choice and a gob of ice cream of your choice to make an ice cream sandwich for $1, for as long as I’ve known of them. There’s always a line, which goes by fast because the people behind the counter spit out orders like nobody’s business. (I have no idea what that cliche means, but it seems appropriate here.) We’ve always marveled at the low price. Obviously, they make money off volume, but to have that price for over 12 years was impressive. (They sell a dozen cookies of your choice for $3.75, which the older boy bought.) However, we saw a posted sign that says they will be increasing their prices for the ice cream sandwiches to $1.25 starting June 5, so the 5 ice cream sandwiches we got today for $1 each would be our last time. 🙁 But heck, even at $1.25, I’d buy. You can’t get just a scoop of ice cream at any ice cream shop for that price.

I can’t believe it’s been 8 years since I went to school there. Time flies so quickly by when you don’t have midterms, finals and quarters to mark its passing.

This is the entry I would’ve posted yesterday had the site been up and running.

There is something about watching X-Men Friday night, then X-2 on Saturday afternoon, and then the newly released third X-Men movie in the theatre yesterday evening that just makes me feel so…ordinary. This imperfect affliction they call homo sapien. When I was a little girl, I fantasized about having special powers. Making water shoot out of my fingertips, communicating with animals, psychically locating lost objects. I think I most often wished I could turn into a spider and disappear around a table leg so that I could be there without people knowing I was there. I don’t know why I’d never wanted to be actually invisible. Also, something about watching Halle Berry in a tight bodysuit and Rebecca Romjin naked except for some blue body paint and scales inspires me to lose weight.

The continuity between the 3 movies was great, very entertaining.

Between the two phone conversations I had with my friend Dwaine (whom I’ve known since junior high) today, we talked in depth for 2.5 hours. We don’t talk often, but when we do it’s major catch-up and we’re on the phone forever. He’s a bit tough on me sometimes, but that’s okay, I believe him when he tells me that he just wants to see me happy, that my happiness is what he truly desires for me. With the assistance of his tough love, I realized something potentially monumental. He’s damn right that I’m generally unhappy right now. But here’s the twist: what I think I’m unhappy about is not what I’m actually unhappy about, but rather the symptom of a more deeply-rooted discontent on a larger scale that is so huge that I’d formerly just pushed it back, pushed it back, not dealt with it even in thought. Every time it began to rear its head in my mind, I’d hammer it down out of sight like those plastic gophers you slam with a padded mallet at Chuck E. Cheese’s.

My life is not fulfilling. My life is stagnant. It is in the exact same place today as it was when I was 23, 24. That was the last major thing I did for myself — I bought real estate. It may have been a great accomplishment in my early 20s, but now that I’m approaching 30, everyone else has caught up and surpassed me, and what does it really matter that I’ve had this house for this long already? Only that the years on the mortgage are less. My low expectations for myself when I was in high school was “college, then job, then marriage and kids.” Well, the marriage and kids ain’t jumpin on silver platters and sliding themselves over to me, so here’s the real ideal: a career that I’m passionate about, that truly taps my talents and benefits others. Nothing neutral like the job I have now, which position is by law required to be exactly that — neutral. I want to make my mark and I want to contribute. My want my handprint on Planet Earth to truly matter and mean something to the future inhabitants of this planet. I want to write. I have been writing since I was 6 in the nonsensical limitations of a language I was just learning and forcing to fit around the shapes of my limitless imagination. I’ve been fooling myself when I’d tell myself, “My life is great, it’s low-maintenance, I can do and can afford to do whatever I want, it’s stable, it’s great, it’s everyone’s envy.” That is not me. I don’t like complacency. I got lazy somehow, or maybe I lost direction. This was supposed to be a temporary job while I figured out what to do next. I’m restless and antsy as a hermit crab (I AM a Cancer, ya know) in a shell that I know I’ve already outgrown. I also fooled myself when I said this job is gonna be the low-maintenance, easy money, great benefits provider as I do what I really want to do, which is produce The Great Asian American Novel. Have I written one short story since I’ve been hired on in 1999? No. The thing that fuels my poetry is the need to write for emotional therapy, and I’ve published one poem since I’ve been out of school. Who am I?!

Who I want to be is someone proud of her career because she knows it’s a good fit. Creative advertising, copywriting, writing a regular column or contributing wide-range articles and features to different publications, commercials, TV shows, counseling/advice columns, short stories, novels. That’s me. Anyone who has known me awhile knows that’s me. Since day 1 of my hire in the job I have now, I have been told by peers, supervisors, managers, that I’m too good for this job and they don’t know what I’m doing here, and now what they’re saying is that they’re surprised I’m still here and I need to get out and do better for myself, because I can. I love most of the people I work with and respect them immensely, and I in no way think I’m better than they are and therefore need to get out of “the rat race,” as one retired coworker had always put it. But I don’t think this job is a fit that maximizes on my fortes.

And perhaps I obsess over minute details of a bland life as a distraction so that I could continue to blind myself to my lazy complacency. Perhaps I nit-pick and overdramatize on non-problems because there is nothing else to feel anything about. Idle hands are the devil’s playground, right? I focus on stupid shit because I can’t step up to the big shit.

Everywhere I look around me, people are coming into their own. Diana, the young lawyer just tapping into her potency in an area that’s new but that she’d always felt an internal gravitation toward. Vicky, the doctor pharmacist with her interest in medicine and talent toward sense and order. Karen, who just passed the bar exam (congrats!). Other ex-classmates of college, in prestigious positions that inspire them to rise to new heights and challenges. A security guard buddy downstairs who just passed the sheriff’s department exam and is finally on his way to realizing his current goal of becoming a deputy sheriff. Brad, who just bought a new house. Dwaine, in his recently-purchased new house, in a relatively new career in which he’s climbing the success ladder so fast he’s skipping rungs, with eyes still on totally different and higher ladders in the near future. The list is endless. Even other women who are newly engaged or planning their weddings, they are on their way to their own dreams. Each time I hear of wonderful news of people around me, I’m happy for them while pushing away a feeling in myself that can only be described as feeling left behind. And I have never been left behind before. I led the pack. I used to always have a next goal. Get the class, get the grade, get the college applications nice and juicy, get into the college I want, get the grades there, get the job, get the house, get the financial security. Now that I’m there, I’ve stopped reaching because I’ve stopped dreaming.

When I turn on my cell phone, you know what it says? It says “Peace is being calm in your heart.” It used to say “NEVER stop daydreaming.” When I was in elementary school, every open house in school my parents went to, the teacher would say what a well-behaved kid I was, if only I could curb my bad habit of “daydreaming too much.” First grade, second grade, third grade, all the same thing. In indignance a few years ago, I celebrated dreaming. And now, focus on the dreams have been replaced with focus on emotional recovery from the recent trauma. I began this blog in therapy, hoping that I could achieve inner peace and stability again. I think it’s time to start dreaming again.

My old friend Vicky (hugging the bunny [me] below) turns 30 today!

In 3rd grade, I came home from school one day and told my mom that there’s a new girl in my class who’s Chinese and she has a younger sister who’s in kindergarten (Karen, left in the above photo). My mom strangely became very interested and started asking all sorts of questions like where they live and whether her mom works. It was strange. But nevertheless, I went to school and relayed the message to Vicky that my mom would like to meet her mom. We kids were very excited to become family friends. And that’s how the business deal was struck. My mom would wake me up way early in the morning and drop me off at Vicky’s house before school on her way to work, and I’d hang out there until Vicky and Karen were up and ready to go to school, then we’d get dropped off by either their mom or dad. As the weather got nicer, we’d walk to school. And after school, we’d walk back to her house, where I’d hang out, cause trouble, do my homework, until my mom came by to pick me up at 5:30p or so.

For awhile there, my mom called Vicky’s mom her best friend. Vicky and I declared ourselves mortal enemies. Decades later, I was sitting with Vicky in her mom’s kitchen before going off to play Bingo at our alma mater high school, and her mom said how she hadn’t seen me in so long and how I’m always welcome in her house because she watched me grow up and I’m like her “second daughter.” There was an small silence, broken by Vicky: “But mom, you already have a second daughter.” Now the silence was awkward. “Oh!” gasped her mom, “I forgot about Karen!”

Happy 30th to Vicky, my long-time friend since 3rd grade, with whom I fought like sisters and still ended up being her bridesmaid at her wedding, just like a sister. (Her actual sister was maid of honor.) I’ll see you on Friday!

(Sorry for the bad quality in photos…all I have is my cameraphone cuz the digital camera was even worse!)

I’m making major, major progress in organizing my bills. I finally grit my teeth and tossed years of statements for my utilities, cell phone, satellite TV, auto insurance bills. Just now I’m going thru a year’s worth of credit card statements and trying to match them to the year’s worth of receipts I’ve collected. I don’t know how I let my finances slide like that, but at least I still pay my bills in full on time, it’s just the organizing that’s behind. So I figured the quickest way to find receipts to go with the statements is to divide the receipts up, within their current categories of “food”, “gas”, and “miscellaneous”, into subcategories of which credit card they went with. There are some restaurants I can remember going to based on the dates, but I came across one for El Cholo Cafe in late August that I can’t imagine why I’d go to. It was just a couple of days before Mr. W and I rediscovered each other, and it was months after the ex and I stopped hanging out. So I thought, “I’ll check my blog!” Sure enough, there the answer was. I was having a miserable weekend having recently ending a potential something-or-other with someone, and my old trainer/roommate Brian had come over to my house to replace my garbage disposal for me, and I’d taken him out to dinner to thank him.

Ahh, the memories. =)

I love this blog thing.

Mr. W just emailed me a photo of me taken on Saturday that he’d manipulated. The photo was taken when the photographer was behind me, then she called my name and I turned to look over my right shoulder, and that’s when the camera snapped. Mr. W cropped the photo so that it’s my head down to part of my shoulders and back, and then he did some special effect on it that made it look like abstract green, yellow and black bold strokes comprise the photo. I don’t like how I look in that photo, even before he artsified it. My bailiff agreed, after looking over my shoulder, that it was not a good picture of me and it looks like I have a big jaw. I have other problems with this picture that I’m too embarassed to say on here. Mr. W, however, loves this photo. In his words, it’s “a photo [he] absolutely love[s].” And it’s now the wallpaper background on his gigantic-screened new laptop. Which he brings everywhere with him. Including work. Great.

I remember that Grace’s high school boyfriend Edgar (still one of my good friends now) took a close-up photo of her face that she hated. She was laying down on a couch or a bed or something and laughing, and the angle of the camera to her face made her have a massive double-chin. And Grace was skinny; she was always a size 0/1. She did not ordinarily have a double-chin. I’ve seen the photo and I had to agree with her that it is the most unflattering shot of her, ever. EVER. But she couldn’t get Edgar to get rid of it. He loved that photo, even had it framed and set it up next to his bed. “She looks so cute!” he’d said.

I don’t know. Maybe these men love us with or without external flaws, and don’t see us with the vanity-aimed eyes through which we view ourselves. Maybe they don’t even see the flaws we see. Or maybe they love our flaws — big jaws, double-chins, and all — because these flaws are part of the appearance they have learned to love in looking at their significant others.

And they say men are visual.