cindy's world

Happy Friday! All’s quiet on the Western Front. I came back today to find that our trial is over; the jurors returned their verdict yesterday while I was at graduation. Unfortunately, the floater court reporter took the original verdict home with her. Who does that?! But according to the floater clerk, he’d already tracked her down and she’s going to mail it back to us.

I may join my coworkers for happy hour tonite at Outback Steakhouse. Tomorrow, my gym trainee volunteered to come to my house for a much-needed closet cleaning. After that, if Dwaine doesn’t poop out after his San Diego 10K Mud Run on Saturday, we’re gonna hang out and cook. “You can come over and prod what’s left of me with a stick after the mud run,” was how he put it.

Mr. W is already in Vegas with his kidlets. They’ll be back Sunday. I’d planned to give his son this cool gadget as his graduation gift, but it turned out you can only get this online, so I ordered it today. Now it’s gonna end up being more of a birthday present than a graduation present, his birthday being only 2 days before my own. Oh yeah. Mr. W, if you’re reading this before I give your son his graduation gadget, don’t tell him what it is! I figure this’ll come in really handy when he’s deciding whether to drive from school all the way to his mom’s house after class, or to wait out traffic at Mr. W’s house or in school. Or to take an alternate route. Here’s a review on the product.

Kids are great, aren’t they? Here’re some anecdotes my dad email-forwarded me:
WHEN MY THREE-YEAR-OLD SON OPENED THE BIRTHDAY GIFT FROM HIS GRANDMOTHER, HE DISCOVERED A WATER PISTOL.. HE SQUEALED WITH DELIGHT AND HEADED FOR THE NEAREST SINK. I WAS NOT SO PLEASED. I TURNED TO MOM AND SAID, “I’M SURPRISED AT YOU. DON’T YOU REMEMBER HOW WE USED TO DRIVE YOU CRAZY WITH WATER GUNS?”
MOM SMILED AND THEN REPLIED….. “I REMEMBER!!”

A new teacher was trying to make use of her psychology courses. She started
her class by saying, “Everyone who thinks they’re stupid, stand up!”
After a few seconds, Little Davie stood up. The teacher said, “Do you think
you’re stupid, Little Davie?”
“No, ma’am, but I hate to see you standing there all by yourself!”

My gym trainee and I were emailing about a phone call I had to handle yesterday with an irrate (and apparently deaf) litigant. After I described that I had done all I could reasonably do and the caller was still being, okay, I’ll say it, a bitch, the email thread turned into something like this:

Gym Trainee: That’s when you pull out your magic wand. See if I had a magic wand my arm would be hurting, I would have waved so much already today. Several toads would be sitting at desk and on the counter.
Me: If I had a magic wand, it would have a star on the tip, just because it’s pretty. And you’ll start seeing LOTS and LOTS of people walking around with star-shaped bruises on their foreheads. That’s what I’d use my magic wand for. WAP! Just imagining that makes me feel better already.
Toads, eh? Hmmm. Maybe you can turn them into chocolate. The world could always use more chocolate.
Gym Trainee: ok, they will be chocolate toads with peanut butter filling. most will have marshmallow for brains. the wand can only transform so much, after that is what exists in the real world.
Me: We’re gonna get fat from eating the real-world toads!
Gym Trainee: I’m not crazy about marshmallow so I won’t be eating the brains cause there will be more marshmallow than peanut butter around.
Me: some will have lots of nuts in the peanut butter, too.
Gym Trainee: True, Hummm I didn’t think about that.
Me: you think some would have glass shards in them, too? That may be hard to swallow.
Gym Trainee: Well I can always wave my wand again and smash them. A thick Harry Potter wand so it won’t be too heavy for me to wave.
Me: maybe we can use a thin wand and use it to stab people. or feed the glass to other toads.
Gym Trainee: nope, if you can’t get it together while you’re a toad, you gotta go. I don’t want to overcrowd the toad population. I like rabbits so I thought about turning some into rabbits but, my rabbit is smart so many wouldn’t live up to his standards. So we’re back to toads.
Me: how about just some rocks? like Jordan almonds or something.
Gym Trainee: No, if I turn anybody into a rock it would be like coal, granite, marble, soapstone.
Me: we’ll turn everyone except ONE into coal, and we’ll leave one last person as a person, and we’ll take the coal and shove it up where the sun don’t shine, and get ourselves some diamonds!
Gym Trainee: [much later] I just finished waving my imaginary wand again. Will it ever end?
Me: it’ll end if you wap them on the heads with it. Some people are less annoying when they’re unconscious.
Gym Trainee: [today] that’s what the back of the wand is for. The front is for major change. I was just informed that [another clerk] is out next week. So on top of me waving my wand on her replacement I’ll be wearing a homemade purple heart from all the knife wounds in my back.

I hope I don’t get in trouble for “advocating violence in the workplace”. But I guess I can’t expect everyone to simply know what context to read things, especially things coming from me. My gym trainee apparently read it right, cuz this afternoon during trial, my courtroom door opened, she poked her head in, then silently and quickly shuffled over to my desk and stealthily plopped something down, and just as quickly she raced out again. It was this:

It’s a butterfly top with rotating flashing multi-colored lights, which would leave a prettier bruise than the star I’d originally had in mind. Is my gym trainee not hilarious?

I walked into my court reporter’s office for some coffee and saw her in tears standing in the middle of her office, staring into space. She’d been trying to write a thank-you note, she explained. Her daughter won the scholarship, and they’d attended the award ceremony recently. She said the giver of the scholarship, the mother of the deceased girl, deliberately did not attend that award ceremony because she didn’t feel she could hold up emotionally. The presenter talked about how my reporter’s daughter and the deceased girl had been close friends in parochial school, and my reporter’s heart broke listening to this speech. “I was trying to write the note to her [the mother] describing the look of happiness of my child’s face for the scholarship, but I just felt that she must be in so much pain, and I just couldn’t write, I didn’t know how to write it,” my reporter said, eyes misting up again.

Please drive carefully.

You know I’m bored when THIS is the highlight of my workday. Written in a Marital Settlement Agreement by a private attorney, no less, the soon-to-be ex-wife and ex-husband agree that in the raising of their 8-year-old daughter,

“Neither party shall use corporate punishment on the child at any time.”

So they’re basically agreeing that if the child misbehaved in school, for example, they’re not gonna say, “You’ve been a bad girl! That’s it, no more stock options or 401K contribution matches for YOU! Go to your room!”. Lucky kid.

Turned out TurboTiger was right, the nicer hotels in China had in-house gyms. That’d be 2 out of 3 or 4 hotels we stayed at. I’d worked my ass off (well, not really, that sucker’s hanging on tight to my hip bones) before the trip in anticipation of not having access to any gym, but between the 3 workouts we had in the hotel gyms and the 2 hours of climbing the Great Wall of China and the daily walking from, to, and within sight-seeing locations, I didn’t do too badly. I think I lost weight.

PMS bloating set in within a few days of the trip, as I weighed myself obsessively in each hotel we stayed in (and then multipled the bathroom scale number by 2.2 to convert kilos to pounds). I was also nervous about the three, sometimes four meals we’d get a day. It seemed like every time we got off a bus or off a plane, we were taken to a restaurant and fed. If we were in a plane, Air China also serves full hot meals with every flight, even those only 2 hours in duration. I ate guiltily, thinking of the cliched starving kids in China, and looking out the windows for them. I did see a few begging kids, but I can’t say it wasn’t a tourist trap scam put on by their nearby and slyly-grinning parents.

After returning to California, my body started its thing on time the day after I got back, and now that I’m debloated, I seem to be a pound or two less than before I’d gone on the trip. So maybe there really IS something to that “eat six meals a day to keep your metabolism up” thing.

Just to be safe, I still hit the gym whenever I could upon my return. Monday at lunch, full workout, weights and cardio. Tuesday at lunch, we had a meeting that took half an hour away from my lunch, so I did a quick gym turnaround and ran 3 miles on the treadmill, the most effective workout I could do in the shortest amount of time. Grumpy at the loss of lunch hour, I declined showering and simply wiped off, deciding they can deal with smelling me if they’re gonna make us give up our lunchtime for a meeting. (Altho I don’t think I do smell, even after massive sweating.) Wednesday, I’d forgone the noon workout to have a birthday lunch with a coworker. Thursday/yesterday, I did weights at lunch and no cardio as I had a late start, but made up for that by going to the gym with Mr. W in the evening and doing a 65-minute run with hills on the treadmill, plus a 2-minute cooldown. Today I’m certainly going to the gym at lunch.

I’ve been munching on portions of meals here and there, whatever being full-time in trial allows time for. Half a protein bar here, some coffee with a piece of fat-free angel cake there. Leftover albondigas soup here, leftover meat loaf there.

I know if I were anyone else, I’d see results in the form of 5 lbs lost in a week. But because it’s me, I’m just treading to keep my head above water.

When I returned to my desk at work on Monday morning, I pulled open a drawer to get a paperclip and saw a misplaced note covering everything in that drawer. My courtroom went through many relief clerks in the 2 weeks of my absence, so I don’t know who shifted this paper. Or maybe it shifted itself. The handwritten note reads:

I am bereft!
I was promised a Cindy-fix this morning! Oh, the agony of promises broken and expectations shattered.
But I am NOT defeated[,] I shall return, and CLAIM what is mine, opposing forces be damned!
Are you going on vacation too? (I saw [Mr. W] this morning.)
XXO
F. Tuck

Clipped to this note are some random scraps of notes and 2 poems I’d written on scratch paper 3 years ago when I was in major emotional turmoil. The second of these poems alluded to when I’d wished for death as a relief, and yet had been denied that escape. The lines read, “I have begged you thrice this year for relief/Threw up my hands and my life in defeat/And I am still here.” And it is relevant and fitting and yet ironic that these two things are joined together.

No doubt if a coworker who knows about Mr. W were to chance upon this note, he/she would’ve thought it from an admirer. Cindy having an affair? With some F. Tuck guy? No. The note is signed off with a joke nickname, short for Friar Tuck. Because Steve, the author of the note, had referred to himself as “Friar Tuck” a few times in his comments on this very blog. He had also commented a few times as “Stevie Wonder.”

Steve passed away two days before we left for China. He was a Spanish language interpreter in the building, who had become something of a personal friend. His dramatics are often funny and sardonic, his theatrical background and training coming through in his interpretations of heated family law testimonies. They were really reenactments of the parties’ bickering arguments in open court. He was also amazingly perceptive, clever, witty, and philosophical. Plus, he had good taste in men with his little crush on Mr. W.

Rumors of the situation of his death flew rampant in just a day. “Died tragically” was all the “official word” told us. We knew he took 3 days off work to mourn the death of his beloved Georgie, we knew the day he was due to return, he did not. We knew he’d passed away the night before his scheduled return. Beyond that, was speculation. His neighbors heard a gunshot, called the police, who kicked in the door and found his body, claimed one rumor. I went around saying it just doesn’t sound like Steve to have, much less use, a firearm. Another rumor claimed he’d slashed his own throat. Although this is slightly more believable than that he’d shot himself, it’s also not like Steve to leave such a mess. I pictured his immaculate home, and how traumatized he’d described himself regarding the death throes of a lobster he’d stabbed alive years ago.

We were unable to attend his funeral, which took place while we were in China. Many people from work went, and described the event as a “very classy” affair. Well, Steve would have it no other way. He was reportedly dressed in a tuxedo and white gloves in the open casket. That put both rumors to rest, although it brings up the likelihood that he’d slashed his wrists instead.

The judge’s secretary brought back a music CD that Steve’s parents had given out to funeral guests, a collection of love songs arranged and sung by Steve some time ago. I listened to it while doing some grocery shopping yesterday, and mourned the incredible talent lost. The album, entitled “Love in Our Key,” was Steve’s contribution to the gay community of slightly gender-altered love songs that he’d grown up on and sang constantly, “the songs we have loved so long and waited so long to hear in OUR key, no ‘transpositions,’ no apologies.” Such was explained in his CD jacket. Classics like Gerschwin’s “Someone to Watch Over Me” and Les Miserables‘s “I Dreamed a Dream”, sung in the male voice, about love for another man. The album is quite ingenius.

I couldn’t sleep until nearly 5 a.m. when the sun was already coloring the skies. I walked the halls earlier and imagined seeing him in the back corridor of a courtroom as I had so often seen before, seeing his beaming face as he cooes “Dahrrrrrrrling!” at me in greeting, rolling the Spanish “r”s in a way that I’ve never been able to do. I imagined him smiling at me over the top of his glasses and pointing at me up and down while humming in musical accompaniment to his approving gestures, and saying, “The outfit works for you!” The sight and sound of him are so clear in my head I can’t believe I won’t see it acted out in 3-D anymore. We were supposed to give him another ice cream commission to try out. I just wish he’d given things a chance to get better, and given himself a chance to heal.

In loving memory and commemoration:
Post #494 re watching Brokeback Mountain with him, and a dialogue in Comments with him. This one hits me a little roughly because I had told him, written right there in black and white, that I’d pull him out if he got too emotionally sunken, and I had failed to do just that. I had no idea he was going through stuff until it was too late. If only I hadn’t been so busily rushing somewhere every time I saw him recently…
Post #521 re the ice cream he made at my commission.
Post #525 in which he left nice comments.
Post #572 in which I referred to a funny thing he said. This is chilling as the joke he made was about slashing his wrists.
Post #580 in which he left nice comments.
Post #583 in which he left nice comments.
Post #584 re resolving an issue with Mr. W in which Steve left nice comments.
Post #597 in which he loaned me the movie “Iris.”
Post #599 in which I reviewed the movie “Iris.” He was disappointed in the way I didn’t enjoy Iris’s character the way he had worshipped her, altho he didn’t comment on this on the post.
Post #623 with a brief summary of Georgie’s situation.

As the imminence of being gone for 2 weeks rolls in like a thick sea fog, I scurry around my second home, my courtroom and courthouse, making frenzied preparation. Life may be easier if I had the typical county worker mentality this week — lazy, spoiled and nonchalant, confident in the job security that a friend of my parents had once called “a metal rice bowl” in Mandarin. Instead, I am in hyper-drive. After the unusually complicated hearings this morning were held and their records and orders processed and entered, I went about the afternoon tasks I assigned myself. The dense stack of civil harassment files I received this morning must be calendared in the redbook; the Civil and Criminal computer systems must be checked for any upcoming hearings that I may have missed in my hand-calendaring; wrote a quick “Daily Tasks” list on a post-it and stuck it to the monitor to help the relief clerk out; I turned in my mileage claim (77 miles claimed) for my Hell Day a couple of weeks ago; I discussed with my supervisor and judge regarding having a consistent relief clerk in my stead here for the next 2 weeks; I did a (fruitless) hunt and investigation for 2 divorce cases that were “allegedly” assigned to me in January but which I’d never received; I set up courtroom statistics sheets for the next month so the relief clerk won’t have to dig too hard in my file drawers for those forms; I got answers on how to deal with a few “problem children” divorce cases.

I’d delved into my gym work with the same desperate conviction. Stepping up the intensity of my programs, I took my gym trainee with me as our workouts were elevated to 20 minutes of cardio and 20 minutes of heavier resistance-training on all major muscle groups every lunchtime, leaving her sore and painfully aware of the weight of her purse and of the court files on a daily basis. This we had done the past 3 weeks. I’d forgone group lunches, birthday celebrations, in favor of hitting the gym every lunch. Today was a hitch; a meeting was called at 1pm which robbed me of 30 minutes of my lunch period. I snuck out of the courtroom 15 minutes early, as soon as our last case was done, and hit the treadmill for a 3-mile run with my frenzied rushed state feeding into my energy level. I dashed into the meeting room only 3 minutes early, still sweating despite my cool shower.

Just a few more divorce cases…just a few more under my belt, and I can go home for the evening and resume my laundry and packing. Tomorrow after work, a happy hour party is being thrown at a local pub to say goodbye to 3 district attorneys, who are transferring to other courthouses. I’d decided early in the week to get my packing done throughout the week so I’d be free to attend at least for a little while, since two of the DAs are people I consider myself on extracurricularly friendly terms with. The presence of upcoming events like the meeting today and the happy hour tomorrow feel like looming deadlines to me and the pressure has had me on a sort of “panic mode” all week.

Just a few more files and I can get back to cleaning house and packing. I feel like I’m forgetting something, or will forget something. Ack, I need a vacation.

My court reporter’s daughter had applied for some college scholarships. One of them almost made me cry.

A little over a year ago last January, a Jeep or SUV type vehicle was taking a turn off a freeway in Long Beach too quickly, and skidded out the side of the circular ramp, broke through the chain-link fence, rolled over a few times on its way down the slope, and landed top-down at the bottom of a cement-lined ravine. It had been raining heavily those weeks, and the ravine was filled with water. Only the tires of the car were above the water line. Witnesses rushed down to the overturned car and struggled to get the doors or windows open, but were unable to; the doors were jammed. By the time the police and medical team had gotten there and were able to get the driver out, she was floating in the backseat of the flooded car, unconscious. Resuscitation efforts on the gurney were ineffective, and the sixteen year old girl passed away. They say she may have been trying to get out of the vehicle herself; her seat belt was undone and she was no longer in the driver’s side. Within an hour of seeing this on the news, my court reporter’s daughter got a call that this was her friend. They went to the same high school, and used to spend the night at each others’ houses when they were younger.

The mother of the deceased girl is a court reporter in Long Beach, and the girl was the only child. The girl’s father, a district attorney, had passed away suddenly (heart attack or something like that) only a couple of years prior, and now the mother was attending her daughter’s funeral so quickly after having to attend her husband’s. My court reporter was at the girl’s funeral, as with some attorneys from the building. They said it was the saddest funeral they had ever attended, and among the mourners were many young people, friends of the daughter’s.

The girl’s parents had set up a college fund for the girl, and when the girl passed away, the mother put the money in a commemorative scholarship as a memorial to her daughter. I can’t imagine what making that decision was like; knowing that the money meant to go to your only child would never be used, but deciding instead to put it toward furthering some other child’s college dreams; to help with some good in the world instead of being bitter that your child’s future had evaporated senselessly overnight whereas other people’s children got to go on to bigger and better things.

There really is so much sadness, and it’s inspiring to see good things grow out of acidic soil.

Being in the wrong court at the wrong time (Friday) nearly ruined my weekend. Courtroom hours are typically till 4pm, and they shut down after 4 to give the staff a chance to finish their work, do whatever running around they need, so they can get out of there by 5. The judge in Santa Monica on Friday stayed in trial on the record until 4:50p, after which he thanked the court reporter for “staying late” and didn’t even look in my direction, and got off the bench. Hello! The court reporter lives nearby and that’s her regularly assigned courthouse, whereas *I* had a 3-hour drive ahead of me now due to rush hour traffic! So instead of driving home and sitting in traffic, I called up childhood friend Karen (grew up with her since she was in kindergarten and I was in 3rd grade), who lives in nearby West Los Angeles, and we had a nice boat sushi dinner followed by Pinkberry frozen yogurt. It’s fun to catch up with someone whom I see, like, once every other year. Altho I did see her last summer when she treated me to dinner for my birthday. She’s always got tons of stuff going on and I live vicariously through her for a couple of hours until I’m dizzy. Ah, to be young and energetic.
me and Karen almost exactly 2 yrs ago:

Saturday, Mr. W and I went to the Irvine Farmer’s Market, an outdoor “swap meet” style setup with fresh produce, organic groceries and baked goods, and hand-made crafts and clothing. We bought a package of whole wheat pita bread, two types of flavored hummus (spicy red pepper and kalamata olive), dolmas (finger-sized appetizers of seasoned rice wrapped in grape leaves), then went to his place, packed everything up with beverages and an avocado, and we headed off to Irvine Park to have a picnic. After eating our fill of fresh healthy Greek food, we fell asleep on a blanket over grass and under trees. After awakening, we took a nice long walk around the large park and its equestrian, pond, and picnic areas, then went back to his house to watch Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift while eating homemade pizzas made out of toasting the leftover pita bread and ingredients around his house. Now THAT drifting in the movie is cool. We watched the making of the film, and drifting appears to be more complicated than I thought. Yeah, uh, I’m not gonna be doing it with my car. I also can’t afford to go through 3 sets of tires a day. But I do think I’m at least a drifting fan now.

Sunday, Mr. W and I spent lots of quality time together in the morning, then hit the gym. In the early afternoon, Vanessa came over and she and I headed out to our massage appointments at Glen Ivy Day Spa in Brea. This was her induction into a full-facility day spa that had steam rooms, whirlpool, rainfall showers, complimentary sugar scrubs, tea and apples. I hadn’t seen her smile that big in a long time. We both booked 80-minute full body massages, it was much needed, especially after my Friday the 13th. After we split up after the appointments, I visited my parents, pigged out at their house, and then decided that since it was early, I was going back to Mr. W’s. We watched Pursuit of Happyness starring Will Smith featuring his real-life 5-yr old son, which is a pretty good movie. Will Smith’s son Jaden did a phenomenal job. Nothing he said sounded rehearsed, it was all sincere and convincing, even his tantrum. After the movie, I realized, “Hey, if this movie is set in 1981, and the little boy Christopher was 5 in this movie, that means he’s MY age!” And then suddenly this movie seemed to tell a story from so long ago, and I suddenly felt old. So I went to sleep right away like an old person.

My judge chose today to take off work and accompany his son on some university visits as son decides which college to attend this fall. Unfortunately, procedures would then leave his staff to the mercy of the wind. My bailiff was told yesterday that he would be the bailiff for the courtroom next door. Not too bad, although it’s busier than our courtroom is. My court reporter and I joked yesterday that we’d be left alone to enjoy coffee in her office all day. It really looked that way for me this morning, as at 7:30a the assignment charts didn’t have me listed to go anywhere else. At almost 8:00a, my reporter entered the courtroom and started packing up her stuff. “They’re sending you out of the building?” I asked in surprise. “Yes, they’re sending me to Downey,” she said miserably. Downey Court is about 5 miles away, but it’s never comfortable entering a strange courtroom with strange people calling strange cases with different rules and ways of doing things that we’re not aware of. And then, there was one. Me. At 8:30a, my supervisor approached me in the Clerk’s Office, where I was putting away some documents. He looked apologetic. That can’t be good. Turned out, it wasn’t good. They sent me to Santa Monica Court, over 30 miles away, and that’s not the worst of it. It was close to downtown Los Angeles, through the most hideous driving conditions on the freeways. You think of LA rush hour traffic, cars honking, stop-and-go (mostly stop) parking lot of cars on the freeway, that’s what I sat through to get to a strange courthouse with the strange courtroom with strange people conducting strange business.

I walked in the courtroom in mid-trial. Civil medical malpractice lawsuit, it seems like, tons of paper documents about operation reports, dental records, billing records, specialist diagnoses, photos, basically a paper exhibit nightmare. I didn’t know who people were, who was talking, who was on the witness stand, and no copies of the complicated-looking exhibits. GAH!!

So I’m faking it the best I can. It’s only for a day. I introduced myself to the judge at a break earlier, and he was very nice, offered to let me into an in-house gym they have downstairs. Unfortunately, I’d left my gym bag at home since I didn’t think I’d be working out at a strange location. *kicking self* Luckily, I’d worked out twice yesterday.