cindy's world

Sometimes the weekend comes and goes, and if I don’t blog about it, I don’t blog about it. But I’d been meaning to memorialize this weekend because it was special to me in a few ways.

On Friday evening, I touched base with Navy Girl Vanessa as I drove home, and learned that she and her boyfriend (whom I had heard a lot about, but not yet met) were at Jamba Juice across the street from the Brea Mall. I got home, changed, and met them there. Then the three of us went to Brea Mall to buy our jujitsu friend Gloria a bday present for her party on Saturday. Since Vanessa paid for the present (a compilation of really cool massage oils, scented candles and lotions from Bath & Body Works), I paid for dinner to pay her back. We had a nice meal and laughter-drenched conversation at a Japanese restaurant close to the mall. Then we came back to my house and hung out in Vanessa’s room where we talked about roommates, cats, the history of religion and of the US as it concerns the middle east, and yes, I was schooled. Vanessa’s boyfriend is a well-informed guy. They left at about 1:30 a.m., right after Vanessa presented me with a 4-pack of Happy Bunny ankle socks. I laughed and said I love Happy Bunny! So now, underneath my black outfit and inside my black ankle boots, I’m wearing pink and turquoise socks that depict Happy Bunny saying, “Like I need YOUR approval.”

Saturday was a friend’s birthday party. Actually, it’s more Mr. W’s friend than my friend, altho I know her too and have met her even before Mr. W and I started dating. It was a beautiful day in Huntington Beach at her house with lots of people there, most of whom I’ve met before at other get-togethers, and a lot of whom I really like. I had a great heart-to-heart bonding conversation with an old friend and her husband. And even if there are troubles on my mind, nothing melts me and puts a smile on my face as surely as when Mr. W sat behind me on the raised stone BBQ pit I was using as a seat and put his arms around me and his face next to mine. There are 6-7 sequential photos of us taken at this time. I’d like to print them out and put them in a long frame that holds several photos so it looks like a filmstrip.

Sunday, my childhood friend Sandy brought her Costco date (she popped his Costco cherry that day so he could buy an Ipod Nano at a great Costco price) to Mr. W’s house and, as Costco date played XBox shooting games, the 3 of us set up our 3 laptops and networked, completing Sandy’s Raytheon project with Mr. W’s expertise in various programs that she and I don’t have and don’t know how to use.
At some point of this process, Mr. W’s daughter popped into the kitchen and complained about being hungry. So as Mr. W was finishing up the project with Sandy, I thought it’d be a good opportunity to take the daughter to grab dinner. I walked into her room and said, “We’re all gonna go eat Indian food for dinner.” She looked concerned. “But I’m not gonna subject you to that,” I continued. “Oh good,” she said, relieved. “So while they’re finishing up, I’m gonna take you where you want to get dinner, and we’ll just bring that back for you.” She choose McDonald’s, and we chatted all the way there, and all the way back, as she told me about her most recent social dilemma at school. And then the 4 grownups headed to a local Indian food restaurant.
The first and last time I tried Indian food was in high school. I was the officer of “International Club,” a social club aimed at exploring cultural diversity and awareness. The first year I was officer, we had a monthly social that would be organized by club members of a particular ethnic background. The month it was India, we watched a portion of a popular Indian soap opera, got a presentation and fashion show on Indian garb and jewelry, and of course, had their homemade Indian food. No one who attended the social that I know of could bring themselves to give Indian food a second chance. I verified this with Grace 10 years after the event. Nevertheless, I’d been saying that I’m willing to reopen my palette. Mr. W was also unenthused about eating Indian food, but agreed to give it another go, provided we find people to come with us who knew how to order. Turned out, Costco date and Sandy loved Indian food. And we had a great time, and yes, great food! I’m so glad we tried that again.

Remember back in the day before the epidemic of cell phones and caller ID, when the phone would ring and you’d run to it all excited cuz you’re hoping it’s someone interesting? And sometimes it’s a person you happen to have a crush on, and then there’s the surprised “Oh, hi!” with a smile so large the other person could hear it? And that’s how you know someone was genuinely happy to hear from you, cuz they don’t have enough time to fake it between the first pensive “hello?” and your responsive “hey, it’s ___.”

There’s no romance and mystery anymore.

When I was in high school, this guy I was friends with (and whom I had a big crush on who ended up breaking my heart for a friend, but that’s a whole other Oprah) said to me that he wished some big emotional disaster would befall him so that he could get depressed. I asked why he would want to go through that. He said, “Because. Being depressed is so artistic.” I thought it was an asinine thing to say back then. But I know that he’s right in theory. Sometimes to drown in emotion is the muse people need to write amazing poetry or music, or to draw passionate images. Creativity (or creation, rather) is often the only outlet that keeps me sane.

The irony, of course, is that when I was really young, I would watch soap operas or TV shows like “Beverly Hills, 90210” and wish my life were more interesting like that. I would watch boy/girl drama unfold with my friends and I’d follow the events and all the he-said, she-saids, sometimes even participate in someone else’s issues, with fascination and envy. I would read about characters in books or watch actors on TV being so stressed when they had to choose between multiple suitors. And I remember actually thinking, “That’s so cool! I wish I had a bunch of boys who liked me. I wouldn’t be stressed, I’d be excited!” But that was before the days of actually dating someone and having other men knocking on my door to give lavish arguments about why I should date them instead. That was before the choices of men got complicated beyond a simple and obvious “this one’s better because he’s a nice guy, and that other guy’s a big jerk.” Somehow, in my youthful, naive wishes for excitement and drama, I got just what I wished for and then I couldn’t stop the flood. And now, I’m flood-damaged and am conditioned to react to drama even tho the drama isn’t like it was.
Hell, sometimes I’m not even sure the drama is existent. But it all feels acutely real, now. My brain has been rewired. Call it post-traumatic stress syndrome.

Oh, those sweet, sweet naive days when I had no idea what a blessing it was that boys were too shallow to like me. My mom had told me, when I was a junior in high school, not to worry about the boys in school who don’t like me back. She said that there ARE guys who like girls like me, I’ll meet them eventually, and that these high school boys just aren’t suitable. She said to just be patient. I cried to Grace on the phone after finding out another one of my crushes that I had thought was going somewhere, met my friend and decided to pursue her instead. Same old story back then. She told me that boys can’t appreciate me yet, and that one day, they will. They just need to grow up first.

I think that’s why I’ve always enjoyed going up north to visit college roommie Diana and her friends so much. It’s a mixed-gender group that is just happy-go-lucky and not incestuous. We hang out, goof off, have silly battles of wits, do active stuff, and I think we really do trust each other. We trust that we’re all good people who’ve proven to be good shoulders to cry on or good sounding boards to troubleshoot with. Gosh, and I’ve only known some of them for 11 months so far. But it reminds me of high school. I’ve had a back-stabbing friend, too, but when the group hung out in high school, the chemistry was fun and simple, just like hanging out with the Northern Cal people.

I do miss high school. Wow, it’s been 12 years. Maybe in another 2 years, I’ll miss college in the same way.

I spent a few hours with my dad at my parents’ house last nite. My mom wasn’t there, she was, from what I could gather, at some political event banquet with my grandmother (her mom). My dad was watching some Chinese-English hybrid movie that was kinda like classic Chinese horror meets “The X Files.” I was totally creeped out driving home alone.

The movie reminded me of when I had to walk through UCLA alone in the dark. There’s a portion of a tree-lined walk on the edge of campus between one side of the fenced-off football practice field and the tennis courts. I’d always get the heebie jeebies walking thru there (it’s usually fairly isolated) at night cuz I’d be picturing dead people hung on the trees and dropping down, various supernatural nightmare creatures watching me and planning their moment of strike, etc. To make myself feel better, I’d remind myself of what my dad had said to me. “You’re scared of ghosts?! There’s nothing scary about ghosts! Now people, THEY’RE scary!” People are more vicious and cruel than any ghosts, but people are less intimidating in my head, so I’d feel better. I usually could keep myself from breaking into a panicked run.

A long time ago, in my second year of college (well, it’s long enough), I had creeped myself out reading a horror novel about a supernatural murderer that reached its victims through chain letters. And then I got a really strange chain letter via email that seemed identical to the one in the novel and this email did not behave like a regular email, either. So I freaked out, called Grace (who was attending UC Berkeley in northern California), and then decided while on the phone with her to simply delete the email, altho it may be cursing me as I do that, in order to stop the chain with me and not let bad karma or whatever get to my friends. (The fact that I still refuse to pass on threatening chain letters to this day dates back to that instance.) I don’t think Grace was ever superstitious, and she certainly didn’t read the horror novel I had then just read, but the fact that I was distraught was enough for her. She called up the girl who sent me the chain letter, an acquaintance from high school (I don’t even know how Grace got her number), and chewed her out. I didn’t know about that phone call until a year or two later when I had occasion to talk to that girl, who told me what Grace had done for me. It had never occurred to the girl that, even if she herself weren’t passing it on due to superstitious fear for her own selfish well-being (which she was), that she may be passing it on to someone who IS superstitious. Every time I get an evil chain letter and make the same decision to delete it lest I pass it on to someone superstitious, I think of Grace and that incident.

I keep my plastic bags, twisted into its own knot, in the lowest drawer next to my kitchen stove for use later to line my trash cans or to bag things in. This morning, I opened my plastic bag drawer in the kitchen and pulled out a white and royal blue plastic bag that I didn’t recognize. I had bypassed a white grocery bag with Chinese lettering for that blue bag. I dumped an apple, an avocado, and a Chinese veggie bun into the bag and brought it to work with me. I ate the apple during an afternoon break in our trial, and 5 minutes before beginning this entry, I took the still unripe avocado out and placed it on my desk. Then I removed the bun. (I had lunch with Mr. W and a friend of his today so I didn’t eat my stuff.) When I took the bun out, my hand on the outside of the bag felt something else in the bag. I looked in and saw a receipt. I looked at the bag. “WORLD Duty Free”, it reads in white lettering. Did I buy something duty-free at an airport recently? I had bought some salt water taffy waiting to come back from Florida last month. (Geez, was it only last month?!) I figured that’s where I got the bag. The receipt, however, reads:

WORLD DUTY FREE EUROPE LTD
130 Wilton Road London SW1V LQ

…WORLD DUTY FREE HEATHROW TERMINAL 3

And then it shows the purchase. Two Sheridans Cream, 100C, for 14.30 pounds. I have never been to Europe. But I did receive a bottle of Sheridans liquor for Christmas a few years ago… from Grace. I had introduced her to this vertically-split bottle of coffee liquor and cream liquor when I visited her in Berkeley our junior year of college. I got her a small bottle (she had recently turned 21), showed her at her studio apartment how to pour it over the rocks with the bottle completely inverted so that the bottle pours precisely a 2/3 coffee, 1/3 cream floater drink. I remember her lying on her back on her bed, 15 minutes after downing this drink (she loved coffee-flavored stuff), and saying, “Oh man, I am so buzzed.” I remember laughing at her. She remembered, at 12:38:50 on November 1, 2003 according to the receipt, that Sheridan’s remained one of my favorite liquors. I didn’t see her that Christmas, she was in New York going through some chemo treatment and her doctor wouldn’t let her travel. Her sister, who had just returned from visiting Grace in New York, had met me at a Starbucks in Brea and handed me this blue bag, Grace’s Christmas present to me. Inside was a bath kit nestled in a porcelain bowl of sorts, with yellow roses (my favorite color and my birthflower) painted on the porcelain. This bowl was next to a large bottle of Sheridans Liquor. Grace’s sister and I discussed Grace’s wedding and bridal shower plans, and then we parted ways. I called Grace to thank her for the presents. “Where’d you find the Sheridans?” I asked her. “I’ve been looking for it everywhere but I guess no one carries it around here anymore.” She said, “Actually, I saw it in London!” I think she may have told me that she bought a bottle for herself, too.

It’s amazing the things we take for granted, and the things we keep in our hearts. And the things we didn’t know we kept, but will treasure forever now due to unfortunate circumstances. This crumpled receipt will be tucked under my transparent desk blotter at work. Call me superstitious, but I believe Grace is telling me that she’s still with me.

My childhood friend Vicky, who has always sworn to hate running, has signed up for the San Diego marathon, running for the cause of the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. She has a progress page that documents her runs and the amounts of her donations, how close she is to her goal. I put in $100 just now. The site takes care of the donations online, it was really easy.

You guys may have heard me talk about Grace here and there. She was one of my best friends. We met waiting for the school bus an early September morning when we were 14. She swore I gave her a dirty look that morning and that she never would’ve thought then that we’d be friends. Not only did we become friends, but that friendship stretched across great distances as she went to Berkeley for undergrad and I went to UCLA, and when she moved from there to New York to take a job offer with Merrill Lynch Risk Management (consulting, something to do with the stock market). She met Justin while training for Merrill Lynch. He was sent down from the Great Britain branch for training in the New York branch. She caught his attention when she kept dropping the ball during one of their getting-acquainted exercises in which everyone in that group sat in a circle and whomever got the ball had to say something about themselves and throw the ball to someone else. They fell in love and the plan was that she’d move to London after their wedding. “You keep moving farther and farther away,” I’d once told her. But she was so happy, and I was so happy that she was so happy. I was to be one of her bridesmaids. She never made that move to London because leukemia made her move even farther. I donated to the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society then and also sponsored her when she did a walk across some bridge event for the Society, and registered as a bone marrow donor, but did little for the cause since.

I’m glad to be doing this for Vicky, and I’m glad that she’s doing this for the Society. And I’m so proud of her for completing her first 8-mile run this past weekend.

I had this toy when I was a single-digit-age kid. It looks kind of like a hammer or a mallet, except instead of a metal piece on the top of the “T”, it’s soft plastic, with accordian-style fold creases, such that when you hit it against a surface, it pushes air out and the toy squeaks. On my little plastic hammer toy, one side of the hitting thing was green and the other was yellow.

I bring this up because that toy is what I want to HIT YOU GUYS WITH when I go to your blogs in desperate need of entertainment and you guys haven’t updated in days, some of you in WEEKS. This trial is so painful and grueling, mostly from the defense attorney’s lack of brain cells, that the Spanish interpreter here today said to me upon my return from the restroom, “I was going to ask you whether you had gone to the restroom to kill yourself by slitting your wrists, and I wanted to ask you to leave a blade for me.”

Come on, guys. Lean your heads down. *WAP!* Squeeeeak! *WAP!* Squeeeeak!

I read something in another blog that made me focus on an occasional fluttering in the back of my head. A lot of us, probably most, have something in our personal histories that we wish never happened. Certainly we don’t want to admit to its existence, which feels like glaring proof of our embarrassing past idiocy. I have a few of those. Sometimes something would remind me of one, causing me to wince uncomfortably, and my brain would try to change to subject. (Along the same lines, Diana just wrote to me in an email, “i would never to admit [my] awful experience except to those who already knew. i would comment on [the other blog entry] but it reminds me of too many things that i rather just forget. “)

Cirque du Soleil my junior year in high school, for instance; I allowed myself to get caught up in Grace’s enthusiasm to ditch the show during intermission and walk across the street to South Coast Plaza so that she could buy her then-boyfriend an anniversary present and surprise him. Thinking only of being a good friend and not a responsible officer of the high school club we had taken out there by 3 chartered buses, I offered to carry the goody she bought so that her boyfriend wouldn’t suspect she got him something, and subsequently she and I got in the biggest trouble of our lives for a stupid decision, and I was blamed for leading the decision, which I did not deny, all in the name of being a good friend.

One day, I’m supposed to look back on that day and laugh. Today is not that day. Maybe if Grace were alive, we’d be laughing at it tomorrow. She would tell me, though, that that incident is but a small eddy in the tsunamis of our lives. And she’d be right. There has been larger things since; stupider decisions that impacted me in more detrimental ways than a scalding lecture from some teachers, embarrassment in front of my peers, and a Saturday Swap (detention) at the high school. I look back at my decisions and wonder if I knew better at the time. I’d like to think that I knew what I was in for but just gritted my teeth against the hope that it’d turn out in my favor as I stepped into a calculated risk. I’d like to think that I don’t stumble clumsily, without cognition, on a tightrope while grinning like a dope, a froth of drool hanging off my lower lip. Of course that’s not me. I think way too much about life to have that ever be me. But is it better to see a pitfall and register a pitfall and fall into it anyway?

No one likes to look back and diagnose their past experiences as just a symptom of stupidity. And yet on the larger, more recent hurt that I’ve endured, I know I’d always suspected. Maybe even expected. Then why was I there? Why did I constantly talk myself into thinking it’d all be okay?

Maybe because it is. I look around me, and the shit I had to sift through has become fertilizer for my riches in life now. Great new friends (from one of whom also springs this blog), great life, new appreciation, clearer eyes. I can’t say I didn’t know what “bad” was before I had to learn it the hard way. Sure I knew. But it’s better defined now, and I can smell it a mile away like the ammonia- and sulfur-emitting rotting carcass of some unnamed evil. With the clearer definition of “bad” came my clearer recognition of “good.” I have that in my life now, too. I used to say, “I don’t need to be cheated on to know that cheating’s bad; why did I have to learn this lesson myself?” Au contraire. There are so many gifts that spring out of the manure that we couldn’t ever see before for the stench of the manure.

And maybe, that’s the meaning of life.

I don’t think I’ve blogged about this, and if I didn’t, then the proper context was missing from the campfire story. Mr. W doesn’t like “real” fires in his fireplace because he doesn’t want to deal with the soot and the ashes afterwards in his immaculate designer-looking house. I love burning stuff. I love to stare at the phase changes and listen to the crackling and watch things get devoured and moved. When Mr. W started turning on his gas fireplace for me shortly before Christmas, I found little satisfaction in the predictability of gas-powered flames lapping futilely at metal imitation wood. I whined and reasoned and bargained for burning stuff in the fireplace, to no avail. Finally, perhaps having his heartstrings pulled at watching me piteously watching the fake fire devoid of meaning, Mr. W stomped over, grabbed a decorative cinnamon-scented pine cone from a basket by the fireplace, threw it unceremoniously on top of the fake log, and said, “There.” My whole face lit up as bright as the burning cone while Mr. W shook his head at me and called me a pyro as he walked away.

I’ve been waiting months to blog this. Months!! Now that it’s finally December 25, 2005, I’d like to take you all back, back, to Christmastime in December, 1982. My first Christmas experience, 4 months after my arrival to the United States.

I was 6 years old, in first grade in a new country, new school, with new customs and a new language that I did not understand. I was, of course, an easy target for teasing, cruelty, theft, basically being taken advantage of. I don’t care what you child-lovers say, kids are damn mean. In this first grade class, we were about to do my first gift exchange. Each child had brought in a wrapped gift as according to instructions given to the parents. All the gifts were randomly tagged with a number, and a corresponding number was put in a hat. We were sitting Indian-style on the floor in front of the classroom, and each child by turn walked up to the hat, drew a number by lot, and the teacher handed that kid the present marked with that same number. I had drawn a 6, and a rather large box was handed to me. I sat down with my wrapped present. The distribution continued until one girl, who drew a 9, was given a small gift, one that fit in the palm of her little hand. She had a fit and insisted that I was given her gift, and that the 6 and/or 9 was reversed in error. Because I was not one to protest, the teacher appeased the other girl and apologetically took my large box and gave it to her, while handing me the smaller box in exchange. I remember being confused, too confused to feel violated. We were then given permission as a class to open our presents. My little gift turned out to be an adorable little plastic Christmas-tree shaped box in which the lid of the box can be removed to become a Christmas tree pin; a pair of tiny Christmas tree earrings were pierced through the lid/pin to be worn as earrings or decoration for the tree pin; inside the box was a matching Christmas tree necklace. The girl who had my original present tore open the wrapping to uncover…a box of AlphaBits cereal.

Thus went my first experience with the meaning of Christmas, the American me-generation spirit, the squeaky-wheel-gets-the-grease concept, the be-careful-what-you-wish-for cliche, and karma. I’m sure I don’t need to elaborate on the moral of this story.

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Holidays, everyone!