cindy's world

Funniest freaking thing I saw and heard all week.

I was walking back toward the courthouse from the parking structure after the gym. On my right was a small parking lot of reserved parking for privileged people only (supervisors, employee of the quarter, etc). A car blocked the only pathway through it, and a 20-something Hispanic female was standing in the open passenger door, talking to the driver. Finally, she closed the door and walked away from the car. She didn’t get but a few steps away before the entire parking lot and the area in front of the courthouse was permeated with a piercing kid’s wail, “waaaaAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!” I looked toward the car in surprise, as with a bunch of attorneys, jurors, other patrons standing in front of the courthouse and sitting around the large planters. She kept walking. The kid kept screaming. A large black guy sitting on a bench in front of a planter said, “That kid needs a good ass-whoopin’.” The woman walked past him and said something to him, which I couldn’t hear because her back was to me. The man responded, “You don’t gotta do it now, but you OUGHTA do it.” I had to look away to hide my smile.

This was not the wail of an naive infant. This was the tantrum scream of a 4-5 year old boy who has no fear of authority.

I heard some information through the grapevine about my ex, and I didn’t know whether to react with laughter or sadness or scorn or what. Because it’s just so sad and pathetic. The only emotional response I have for sure, is gladness that I’d made the right choice by leaving the relationship. Pat on the back, Cindy, you did right by yourself. I guess I’m always more glad than upset to hear affirmation, just in case I ever think, “Did I make the right decision?” I know I did.

Speaking of rats, I sooooo want this. It’s a hamster in a hamster wheel that plugs into your computer USB port and the faster you type, the faster the little guy runs. So while I’m sitting here at work running the rat race, my little hamster’s wheel will fan me. Since I type pretty fast. I’d wanted this, until I saw the price tag. YIKES!

Speaking of hamsters running in wheels, my coworker Sandy had once said to me that when I’m in thought, sometimes she could actually see the little mouse running on the wheel in my brain, except that unlike other people’s mental mice, mine runs faster, and there are 3 of them, and they’re all running in different directions.

I started the day by hopping in the shower. While I was toweling off my hair, I heard a little “Wah!” coming from outside my bathroom door, which wasn’t pulled all the way closed. A tapping sound followed, the door opened a tiny crack, and then a white paw appeared. Little black paw pads curled around the edge of the door, the furry white back of the paw pulled the door open to a wider crack, and then a furry black and white head, with bright golden round eyes, appeared. “Wow!” Dodo said, running in. “Hi! Hi my little fuzzy wuzzy cootsie wootsie boy! My little black worm! You’re just a big fuzzy black caterpillar, aren’t you? Look at you, you’re so cute! You’re so cute!” I cooed, running my fingers through his furry black body as his tail curled lovingly around my calf. What a way to start a day.

On the drive to work, I saw another Lexus IS 350 (black) pull up behind me. The two of us tag-teamed around other slow vehicles all the way until I had to pull off the main street to work. That was fun.

I thought as I walked from the parking structure to the building, how is it that one of the guys at work who is almost exactly a year older than me to the day, has such a different life? He really admires my car, but can’t afford it for himself. He’s got some kids (different moms, also been thru divorce and is currently remarried) and he has spousal support and child support to pay, so sure, his expenses are higher. It’s strange to think of 2 people about the same age on such different tracks of life. I think the same thing when I see a 28-year-old defendant before us in court facing 25 years in prison. How did I end up in my position with this car? Because, I concluded, I was unfortunate enough to have been screwed over by men in my earlier years. They screwed me over, so we didn’t get married, and now, my reward is that I can afford this car. I guess everything does balance out. “Sorry your exes are jerks. Here’s a Lexus.” “Thanks!”

*Disclaimer: I’m not saying ALL the men I dated were jerks, but the jerks know who they are.

I’d been dying to chop my hair, but held off until after the half-marathon because I needed it long enough to be tied up in a ponytail. So yesterday after work, I went and got it chopped. I showed the lady the picture on my college ID (age 21), she said, “That’s cute! Okay.” and went to work. 15 minutes and 9 inches later, it was done, and I was happy. How refreshing it is to feel the way I did at age 21 again! Here’s a cameraphone pic of me at work today (after a little bit of a large-barreled curling iron):

Is it just me or do I still look tired from my run?

We got a 5-defendant special circumstance preliminary hearing this morning. The district attorney came up to my desk to alert me to the fact that we need 4 interpreters for witnesses, for the languages of Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, Korean, and Arabic. “What is this, a liquor store shooting?” I joked.

“Actually, yeah!” the DA said while a private attorney for a defendant laughed.

I was surprised. “I was just making a cliche statement joke, I didn’t really presume –”

“I like her sense of humor,” the DA said.

“Yeah, just don’t let it get beyond this courtroom,” I said. Before I posted it online for the world to read.

Me: *trying to cram out some last minute divorce cases before leaving for the day* Is there something ironic or inappropriate about divorcing people right before the weekend I run a half-marathon at Disneyland?
Mr. W: No, because these people will be overjoyed to get their divorce papers in the mail and they’ll wave them around and say, “Yay! I’M going to DISNEYLAND!”

How sad. I bet these people would’ve never thought that when they were getting married. Well, not the women, anyway. The men were probably forced onto the altar at gunpoint (or expecting baby-point).

Which reminds me. During warmups at jujitsu on Tuesday, the instructor asked Creepy Guy, “So what’d you do over the weekend? You got married?” Creepy Guy (who can’t even get a girl to go out w/him) responded with “Psh, I wish.” I instantly felt a “what a weirdo!” expression come over my face and looked around the mat to see who else thought Creepy Guy was a total moron for wishing he were married. Simultaneously, my instructor was responding, “No ya don’t.” And then I thought, “How sad is this? The institution of marriage is TOTALLY bastardized in my generation. No one thinks marriage is a good thing anymore. It’s more of a sacrifice you make when you don’t want to lose someone.”

Today, a little cat got into the building and went into the employee restroom behind my department. He lit up a cigarette and smoked a little bit while he was in there, while he sat in his litter box. He may have put out his cigarette in his litter box, too.

I know this because this is what the restroom smelled like when I walked in there earlier, as I held my breath and fought the gag reflex.

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

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

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

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

We will never forget.

Having just returned from our morning 3-mile run (not bad, considering it was freaking sunny and I despise running in the sunlight, but the conversation made the run feel shorter than the half hour it took), I suddenly had a thought and asked Mr. W, “When does that show Shark premiere?” He said, “I think it was this past Thursday, you just missed it.”

WHAT?!?!?! I’ve been waiting for that show FOREVER, since they filmed the pilot episode in my courtroom! Upset, I ran a search on the ‘net.

“THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 21,” I said. HMMPH! So, 10pm in 2 Thursdays, guys! On CBS! Most of the courthouse scenes would be filmed at my work. They used the front of the courthouse entrance, the main lobby hallway, the hallway outside my courtroom and outside the public defender’s office, and they re-did my jury room to make it look like an interrogation room cell. They put up fake walls and stuff. You know what was cool about that film crew? They were supposed to restore the courtroom to exactly the same state it was in before they redressed with their props, but they returned it to us in BETTER working order. They patched sections of our wall, fixed the door so it’d close smoother. My gawd, private industry people are brilliant. It takes me so many phone calls and going thru layers of incompetence to get someone in here thru County to fix my stuff.

Today and tomorrow, I’ve been pulled out of my courtroom to handle Law & Motion, which is a specialized courtroom that not a lot of clerks are trained to handle. I asked the judge in Law & Motion about half an hour ago how he prefers his papers to be organized in the name change files. He said it doesn’t matter, once I’ve checked over the name change requests and verified that all the criteria have been met, the only thing he really looks at is the reason for the name change. I said that the best reason I’d seen in my experience as a Law & Motion clerk is that a guy had to change his name because he changed his gender. The judge chuckled and said that when he was in his last courtroom, he kept looking over papers for this one petition in which they kept referring to the “wife” as “he”, or somehow the pronoun didn’t seem to match the spouse they were talking about. He thought they’d made a mistake on their papers, until the hearing when he learned that the husband WAS male and then he went through a gender change operation and became a female, but they were still married. I said, “Well, that’s nice that they were still able to remain married. That’s an understanding wife to say, ‘You’re gonna make me a lesbian? Okay.’ ”

And then I start reviewing my name change files on calendar to be heard tomorrow morning in here.

Name change #1:
Mom wants to change her name and her 5-year-old son’s name. All they’re doing is adding a hyphenated 2nd last name to their own last name. This is common, they usually do this when the mom gets remarried, so that the whole family has the same last name. That’s what’s stated in the “reason for name change”, too. The petition says that both parents are petitioning to change the minor’s last name. I look at the parents’ names. The first parent, of course, is the mom who’s also getting her own name changed. The 2nd parent, on the line that says “father’s name/address”, they had “father’s” crossed out and they’d written in the name of a woman who has the last name they want added to their last names by hyphenation. It’s a lesbian couple that wants the boy to have their last name. I’m sorry, this other woman is not the child’s biological father, no matter if they consider her to be the 2nd parent and crossed off “father” in the information. The natural father needs legal notice that his son’s name is being changed. So I’m gonna have to talk to them tomorrow when they come in for the hearing.

Name change #2:
A man whose first name is John wants to change his first name to something that looks really gender ambiguous. It’s a name I’d never heard of. The reason for the change states that it’s the name that he was given at birth, and he wants to change it back to that instead of “John.” The criminal assessment report shows that he has an a.k.a. of…Joan.

I don’t work in West Hollywood jurisdiction. This is NOT common for our name changes. I’m not even going to look at name changes #3 and #4 today, so that I’m 2 for 2 today.

James is continously floored by how every time I talk about something, it happens. In fact, we talked about that phenomenon yesterday. And look at this whopper today!