cindy's world

I fell asleep watching TV, and woke up to The Mask of Zorro. I watched it till the end, when Dodo looked up at me and meowed. I patted his head, looked at his black coloring over white. I used to call him the BatCat because his black fur goes from the back of his head over his little ears to the tip of his black nose like Batman’s mask. Now I noticed how his back is black to the tip of his tail, like a cape. “Who is that masked cat?” I asked him. “It’s ZoDodo!”

I feel like poo. The 3 pieces of fried chicken I ate at 5p are sitting in my stomach like 3 fatty overcaloried, oversodiumed rocks. Why do I always feel like poo late at nite? I wanna go to the gym but when I feel this yucky, I’m extremely antisocial. Maybe I’ll just do some crunches, pushups and lunges or something. Actually, now’s a good time to reinflate the balance ball.

I gotta remember to work on the jujitsu beginners’ flyer when I have access to a printer.

I just got back from the chambers of another department, in which we were all gathered for a birthday celebration for one of the judges. The topic of Brokeback Mountain came up because director Ang Lee had just won Best Director in the Golden Globe Awards this weekend, and quite a few of the judges had seen the movie. One judge who had not seen the movie said that he’s waiting for the sequel. “The sequel?” I asked. “Yeah, two cowgirls,” he said.

My judge just told me that Michelle Williams (“Jen” from the WB Series Dawson’s Creek), who played Ennis’s wife in Brokeback Mountain, was actually married to Heath Ledger in real life. And then I remembered. I did hear that Michelle Williams was pregnant with Heath Ledger’s child, but I didn’t know who Heath Ledger was at the time. I wonder if they met in that movie, or whether they were already together when they agreed to take on the project.

My staff hasn’t seen the movie, and it sounds like they won’t. It’s too bad that one’s social queasiness robs them of the appreciation of, well, just a really good story.

The thing with having a blog that one is in the habit of updating daily (or as close to daily as possible), is that when there’s nothing to report, I feel sorta incomplete. Like my day was meaningless. Sure, I can tell you guys that I didn’t go to work out at lunch, and I didn’t eat lunch either, and there were no hearings today in my courtroom and all I did all day was process family law divorce crap, and that I’m sore on the outside of my hips and I’ve acquired some impressive-looking fabric burns on my body, but why would you guys want to read that? Or I can get into the really personal juicy stuff that would probably be TMI for some, get me in trouble with others.

So I guess I’ll tell you guys a joke.

Q: What do you get if you throw a white rabbit into the Red Sea?
A: A wet rabbit.

Yeah, you’re right, I should’ve left the joke out completely. Now it’s worse than having no entry; I have a lame entry that wasted your time.

Sorry.

This article was circulating this week among the sheriffs in the building. It starts off okay, slightly old-fashioned but in a rather fond, sentimental way, and THEN it just goes all awry. Published in Housekeeping Monthly, May 13, 1955 issue:

The Good Wife’s Guide

* Have dinner ready. Plan ahead, even the night before, to have a delicious meal ready, on time for his return. This is a way of letting him know that you have been thinking about him and are concerned about his needs. Most men are hungry when they come home and the prospect of a good meal (especially his favorite meal) is part of the warm welcome needed.
* Prepare yourself. Take 15 minutes to rest so you’ll be refreshed when he arrives. Touch up your makeup, put a ribbon in your hair and be fresh-looking. He has just been with a lot of work-weary people.
* Be a little gay and a little more interesting for him. His boring day may need a lift and one of your duties is to provide it.
* Clear away the clutter. Make one last trip through the main part of the house just before your husband arrives.
*Gather up schoolbooks, toys, paper, etc. and then run a dustcloth over the tables.
* Over the cooler months of the year you should prepare and light a fire for him to unwind by. Your husband will feel he has reached a haven of rest and order, and it will give you a lift too. After all, catering for his comfort will provide you with immense personal satisfaction.
* Prepare the children. Take a few minutes to wash the children’s hands and faces (if they are small), comb their hair and, if necessary, change their clothes. They are little treasures and he would like to see them playing the part. Minimise all noise. At the time of his arrival, eliminate all noise of the washer, dryer or vacuum. Try to encourage the children to be quiet.
* Be happy to see him.
* Greet him with a warm smile and show sincerity in your desire to please him.
* Listen to him. You may have a dozen important things to tell him, but the moment of his arrival is not the time. Let him talk first — remember, his topics of conversation are more important than yours.
* Make the evening his. Never complain if he comes home late or goes out to dinner, or other places of entertainment without you. Instead, try to understand his world of strain and pressure and his very real need to be at home and relax.
* Your goal: Try to make sure your home is a place of peace, order and tranquility where your husband can renew himself in body and spirit.
* Don’t greet him with complaints and problems.
* Don’t complain if he’s late home for dinner or even if he stays out all night. Count this as minor compared to what he might have gone through that day.
* Make him comfortable. have him lean back in a comfortable chair or have him lie down in the bedroom. Have a cool or warm drink ready for him.
* Arrange his pillow and offer to take off his shoes. Speak in a low, soothing and pleasant voice.
* Don’t ask him questions about his actions or question his judgment or integrity. Remember, he is the master of the house and as such will always exercise his will with fairness and truthfulness. You have no right to question him.
* A good wife always knows her place.

Man, if I married someone worthy of this and we don’t need dual incomes and he would like something like this, no problem. But if he’s an ass at all or a cheater or liar or doesn’t meet me halfway in effort, FORGET IT. I am not helpless or codependent. P.S. I think it needs “keep yourself in good health/shape and keep him in good health” in there. I guess in the ’50s people weren’t as health-conscious.

At lunch, on my drive to the gym, I listened to a voice mail that my jujitsu instructor left apologizing for not enrolling me correctly in the class and assuring me that the problem’s been fixed. I got to call him back and say, “Not only did ‘SC lose to Texas, but ‘LA won against Arizona!”

I could hear him practically hang his head over the phone as he responded, “I now know what humility feels like. I guess I’m a Longhorn fan now.”

The hot pot was a success. I still put a raw egg in my bowl and now I’m thinking maybe I shouldn’t have. I’ve had stomach cramps off and on since dinner. Mr. W scored major brownie points by bringing a bottle of strawberry champagne (my mom doesn’t like the taste of regular champagne) to ring in the new year, plus a magnetized algae scraper for my dad’s fish tank. Right now he’s showing off his techie side by giving my parents a tutoring session on the software he just installed on my mom’s new laptop. I’ve snuck away upstairs to play on my dad’s desktop. It was so funny. After I installed GoogleTalk on my mom’s laptop, my dad came upstairs to sign in to his account so that they could plug in their respective microphones and IM each other voice. “Now we can chat with each other!” my dad said happily to my mom. I could just picture it now. It’d be like 2:30 a.m. and my dad would be dozing downstairs in front of the TV in the family room, when suddenly, the drone of some infomercial is drowned out by my mom’s voice blaring from the laptop on the coffee table. “Too noisy! Come to bed!” she’d hiss in that sleepy irrate voice that all moms have when they awake from slumber to yell at you.

Turns out that the printer/copier/scanner doesn’t include a printer cable, so we’ll have to come back some other time to set up the printer and to link it to a network so that all the computers in the house may print. Good thing those old people downstairs get along. 😀

Oops, gotta go…my mom realized I was missing and is now calling me downstairs to look at their photos from their Sedona trip on her new laptop.

Public service announcement: The next time you guys run 4.5 miles and think, “Gosh, a cold Wendy’s Frosty would be a great treat right now,” don’t do it. The ensuing nausea, cramps and freakish bodily sensations as your stomach struggles to warm up the Frosty in your stomach and pulls the blood from where it’s really needed is NOT worth the delicious taste and feel in your mouth. I’m glad I’m going home after work. I just wanna lie somewhere face-down. Preferably somewhere soft.

Well, the New Year’s plans have been laid. No suicidal sucker-consumer plans this year. No siree. (If you think this post sounds lame, blame the Frosty for sucking the blood out of my brain.) It’s to mom and dad’s house we go, for Chinese hot-pot (“shabu shabu” in Japanese) dinner, early enough that Mr. W can play Techie Superman and set up my mom’s laptop and my parents’ new printer on a wireless network. My mom’s looking forward to introducing Mr. W to this Chinese winter traditional meal in which a large pot placed at the center of the table keeps broth boiling and each person gets his/her own wire ladel to hook onto the edge of the pot, and raw veggies and thinly sliced meats and meatballs are dropped into the broth, the more delicate items isolated within our wire ladel/baskets, to cook in the broth until we take the items out to enjoy in a sauce formulated to individual taste in our separate bowls. The food keeps going in and coming out, and soon the broth is nicely flavored with the combination of tofu, mushrooms, beef, pork, chicken, seafood, etc., and we enjoy the remaining broth as soup. It can go on all night. I personally don’t care for this, as the food comes out tasting the same. But it’s a good way to keep people centralized for optimal conversational purposes. Kinda like a fondue. Oh, and I’m sure my parents want to show off the photos they took Christmas weekend from their trip to Sedona. Mr. W said it’s beautiful there, with lots of rocks to climb. My mom had already emailed me about their attempts at climbing.

There’s supposed to be 2 storms coming this holiday weekend. One is to hit tonight through tomorrow, and the second one, the big one, is expected to drop 2 inches of rain between Sunday and Monday. I guess there won’t be a lot of spectators spending the night on the street in Pasadena this year for a good spot to watch the annual Rose Parade march by. A headline in a local newspaper read, “Hoping That The Floats Don’t Have To.” I’m excited about the rain. My skylight makes the rain plops sound like the tapping percussion of nature’s orchestra. I’m thinking about lighting my fireplace tonight. Just me and my cat. I used to be afraid that Dodo would walk into the fireplace in a temporary light-show induced hypnotic state, but I’ve come to find that cats are not moths, and curiosity has yet to kill this cat in a big fireball of fur. Maybe I should do laundry and vacuum, too. It’s amazing how little time I spend at home messing it up, and yet when I am home I spend more time cleaning than doing anything else.

Mr. W and I are trying to set up game nite this weekend with some friends. I hope it works out.

Due to the hysterics involved in playing board games on Saturday night, I had no resistence when Mr. W and I wandered by a games store inside the Aladdin hotel’s shops and saw that every game in the store was 25% off, and some were 50% off. Board games are freaking expensive these days, since they involve electronic questions and/or DVDs. I managed to haul 4 games back with us for under $100: a 90s decade Trivial Pursuit type game; an expanded special edition of Loaded Questions, one of my favorite games; a “Friends” DVD Trivial Pursuit type game; and Cranium.

Any of you local friends want to hook up for game night hysteria, let me know!

I just received an email from my mom asking me to go home tomorrow so that my parents could give me my Christmas present before they left for the weekend for an out-of-state trip with their friends. My dad had emailed me some time ago asking what I want for Christmas, but I didn’t give him any gift suggestions, only saying that I’m not in need of anything. I’m actually really curious what they got me, not only because they manage to surprise me annually by how great their presents are (last year they got me my digital camera, which I had really, really wanted but didn’t have time to research, even tho I’d never expressed this desire to them), but because more and more lately, I am disappointed by how little they — well, my mom especially — know me.

When my parents returned from their touristy visit to China, my mom’s souvenir to me was 2 bracelets. Cute little casual things, pretty girly, nothing I’d wear. They’re still in their box. I guess she hasn’t realized that the only jewelry I wear on a regular basis is my wristwatch. I don’t think to put on a lot of glitz. For one, I think it looks pretentious. Two, it gets in the way of my work, typing and whatnot. I have to remove it before I work out and hope I don’t leave it in the gym locker. Three, it reveals too much about me. I prefer to control people’s impressions of me, and jewelry says a lot about a person. Take a ring, for example. Which finger a ring is worn on, what kind of ring, how gawdy it is, how many rings, how real/fake it appears, how in keeping it is with current trends. People infer information like status, priorities, level of gold-digger-ness, marital status, taste, lifestyle. Yes, lifestyle. You can generally tell whether someone’s alternative, straight, gay, prude, artsy, conservative, etc. by their jewelry.

Anyway, after my mom had handed over the bracelets, she unpacked the rest of her loot. She whipped out a great cloth fan. Open, the diameter of the semi-circle was probably a good 2 feet. White fabric stretched over mahogany-colored wood boning. On the right half of the fan was a hand-written Chinese poem in black ink, in old-fashioned brush strokes, or “mao bi“. On the left half of the fan was another poem in a different handwriting, also written with mao bi. My mother explained about the legend of a nobility class young woman in love with a lowly poet in ancient China. The woman was later arranged by her family to be married to someone in the same high class level, and she met up one last time with this poet in their secret mountain pagoda. One poem was one that she had written him, and the other poem was his response to her poem. Oh! *heart breaking* “But you wouldn’t like this stuff, so I’m giving it to my friend,” my mom said, folding up the fan.

?!?!?!!!!!!!!

Have you guys ever had difficulty being able to distinguish between a genuine relationship/friendship, and one that’s more etiquette-based in which someone is just being fake to get along? I never thought I did.

There’s a guy I work with whom I thought I was on pretty friendly terms with, something beyond just a mutual work location thing. We used to hang out after work or chat about pretty personal stuff. It occurred to me yesterday that maybe I think we’re better friends than he does. Well, yesterday wasn’t the first time it’d occurred to me, it was just the first time I really considered it as a possibility. And with that possibility, I felt bad that I may have been a bit presumptuous in my friendly behavior and comments to him. Maybe I should’ve just left him alone and stopped initiating the goofy, teasing contact. Call me sensitive, but I can only initiate so many times and be unacknowledged (he doesn’t exactly ignore me) before I start thinking that he doesn’t care to hear from me. This wouldn’t even have been on my mind except that apparently, my subconsious was disturbed enough about it to have created a dream last nite that resolved the issue. In the dream, we were at work and some holiday party function was going on, and we hung out and chatted and enough personal opinions and info were exchanged to make me comfortable that we were still in each other’s confidences.

Oh, well. I’m sure he’s busy, too.