cindy's world

Mr. W and I got back from Vegas on Saturday just in time to meet up with Vanessa and Jay at our house and the four of us had a great time sipping beer (the guys) and sangria (the girls plus Mr. W) at the Lake while Johnny Lang conducted his concert there. I have no idea who Johnny Lang is, even now. I was too busy chatting with my friends! Since we weren’t around to reserve center-stage spots this time, we didn’t have a great view of the stage and I didn’t take photos. I probably should have. After the concert, Vanessa and Jay came back to our house and hung out in our backyard on our new round outdoor loungebed, and told us stories of their current house renovation projects. They bought a home for a great price, but the work they’re putting into it made me dizzy. Mr. W and I talked about it a bit afterwards, were impressed with and happy for the couple’s home progress, but we were thankful we didn’t have to go through that with our house a year ago. I’m just not that handy of a person, and Mr. W had other priorities at the time (such as moving us in and getting married). Vanessa took photos of our entertainment backyard for “inspiration” as they start to design theirs.

Now, on to yesterday, my first furlough day. In the current world-wide financial straits and the California budget crisis, the Courts are trying to stave off lay-offs by spreading around the dollar cuts earlier rather than later. In our county, the courts will shut down most of their functions the 3rd Wednesday of every month. The categories of employees who are not exempt from this budget cut (me) have that day off without pay. Of course there was audible dissent among people about this, but I’d personally rather do my part and lose a day of pay a month than have 1/4 of our workforce laid off next year. Plus I looked very forward to my free day. This first one, Mr. W (who still hasn’t returned to work yet after his mid-February heart episode) and I met up with Dwaine and a friend of his, Sophie, at Huntington Beach.

We were all off work for different reasons. Mr. W is on workman’s comp/IOD; I’m on furlough; Sophie played hookie by calling in sick; Dwaine lied and said he was out of the office in meetings all day with clients and pseudo-worked off his Blackberry phone. It was a blast! We met at Sharkeez Bar on Main Street, had a few drinks, Dwaine claimed he could pull off wearing my girlie sunglasses and still look cool and I said the only way he could look cool in those glasses would be if two girls were also in the photo looking interested in him, and I was WRONG. See for yourself.

Hi, here’s me with my sensitive friend, Dwaine. He was at the Pride Parade in San Francisco last month.
After I retrieved my sunglasses from Dwaine, we laid out on the beach for awhile.

See that red bikini behind Dwaine’s right shoulder? That’s the best photo of me you’re gonna see from the entire beach day.

Dwaine decided to come by us and do a fobby pose.

Friends don’t let friends be fobs alone.

I stayed out of the water as ankle-deep in I realized I did NOT want to freeze my goose bumps right off my body, but the three of them frolicked in the waves for a bit. Back on the sand, Dwaine waged war with a bee as Sophie and I prepared to run should the bee dig its way out of the giant sand pile Dwaine pushed on it.

Of course Dwaine kept digging the bee back out just to see where it was, but when it came out he’d freak out, pour more sand over it, and pound it with a fist or a towel. And then he’d dig it out again to see if it survived, and wig out when it did.

I innocently dug around for seashells that Dwaine could take back to his mom.

After a quick and very delicious dinner at Dukes off the pier, we went our separate ways.

It’s too bad not ALL my furlough days could be like this. I already know this, because I went ahead and scheduled two dental appointments on two upcoming furloughs. *sigh* It was fun while it lasted.

I was looking through my old emails to find a contact regarding the Orange County criminal case we did, and stumbled upon a whole gob of emails I hadn’t opened because I was away on vacation going nuts with Jordan and James in Florida. Among those were some photos taken by the secretary at the Service Awards Ceremony. Here’s me trying not to cry outwardly at having been here 10 years…

In the audience of my courtroom with another clerk, Star. Star was honored, too, but had quite a bit more over me in seniority.

Here I’m being roasted by the boss.

The big wigs (courthouse administrator, presiding judge of the district aka my Family Law Resource Judge, district court administrator) and li’l ol’ me.

These are the honorees who DIDN’T ditch the ceremony.

Yesterday afternoon, work had an Employee Recognition Service Awards Ceremony, which they held in my courtroom since it’s the largest courtroom in the building. (That’s why the pilot episode of “Shark” and a courtroom scene of Ray Romano’s movie “Eulogy” was filmed in here.) Luckily, my back hallway walls were repainted in time for this. Earlier in the week the wallpapers were ripped off, revealing this underneath:

That’s directly behind my courtroom’s back door which exits into the employee hallway and elevator. Here is a closeup.

That’s right, that’s what every employee, judge and commissioner read for a week when they keyed and waited for the employee elevator on our floor. Our own little piece of history. Since the building’s built in the 60s, could it be written by someone dating back to that decade? And it’s a secure back hallway; what employee was so bursting with this statement that he had to memorialize it in writing? The world may never know. (Personally, I think the handwriting looks like that of my first bailiff. Ha.)

On to the afternoon ceremony. My courtroom was decked out.

Above, you see the bar of my desk on the left, the long counsel table on the right.
Below is a shot over the bar of my desk toward the audience. People are starting to gather.

A shot from the audience. This is the supervising judge of our district, also known as my Family Law Resource Judge. He’s wonderful.

I had been dreading this day, because I was among the employees being honored for “benchmark” employment spans, i.e. 10, 20, 25, 30 and 35 years. To my own surprise when I received the memo, I’m at the 10-year point. To me, that meant I was here 7 years too long. Complacent much? The memo had with it a 4-question form that we were supposed to fill out so that something could be said about us. Things like, “What is your most embarrassing or memorable experience while working for the County?” Well, let’s see. The time when I was in an empty back hallway adjusting my pantyhose in a way that showed way too much leg and way unfeminine actions, and THEN looked to my left and up, and saw that unbeknownst to me, SECURITY CAMERAS had recently been installed shooting down the hallway? There was another time when I was walking toward the building from the parking structure and my gartered thigh-high on my right leg just folded over and fell down. I fidgeted with it unsuccessfully, trying to be discreet, then ran back into the parking structure for privacy in repairing this the way I had to. A bailiff later told me security cameras were aimed at me and they had even focused in. I no longer wear hosiery. “What are your future goals with the Courts or with your personal life?” Um. Addressing that honestly would be, to quote Chandler Bing, “Can open…worms everywhere…” “Where/what various positions have you worked while with the County?” Well, THIS one. That’s it. For the last 10 years. With this staff, and this judge. I didn’t promote from within, I came “off the streets” from college straight into the position. I can’t even remember the last question, but it doesn’t matter cuz I left the entire form blank. The administrative secretary told me if I left it blank, the supervisors would just make up stuff about me. That was fine, I told her. I had too much going on in my head to write anything inspiring, anyway. (You can tell this from the lack of inspirational posts on this very blog.) My supervisor came in last week with the blank form. “Write SOMETHING, will ya? At LEAST in your personal and professional goals and where you’ve worked, you can do THAT. I can make up stuff for the other two, but you gotta give me SOMETHING.” Fine.
Professional goal: To stay employed in this current economy.
Personal goal: To never look my age. I gave it a second thought, knowing my supervisor, and added for his benefit: (Meaning YOUNGER than my age, Brian, not OLDER.)
Court work experience: Departments H (criminal calendar), C (civil law & motion), E (trials/long cause).

When I was called up by my supervisor for the award, he roasted me. I instantly regretted not filling out the form and letting him instead make up some bogus story about surprising me one morning when I strolled in to work an hour 20 minutes late, coming upon him after he’d finished the crossword puzzle while sitting at my desk waiting for me. “The look on her face was priceless. It was great for me, but it was quite an embarrassing moment for Cindy.” I should’ve given THIS experience as my worst court experience instead…

Earliest bad experience. I was still in training class, which was downtown so given the distance and horrific SoCal morning traffic, I had to get up very early to allow for a 2-hour commute. One morning I woke up late, and this happened to be a horrid bad hair day. I’m not used to bad hair days; my hair’s usually no-maintenance, wash-and-go, or even get-out-of-bed-and-go. I don’t even bother brushing it. The photo a few posts ago of me in the purple camisole top? Hair still damp out of the shower, did NOTHING with it. I have no idea why my hair revolted that morning, but knowing I’ve always looked normal before, what’s one day? Big freakin’ deal. So I pulled half of it back in a clip and left. It still looked crappy, but I told myself nobody notices this stuff but me. I got into class just a couple of minutes late, just as they announced that today was picture day! What picture? For our ID badges! Of course. I was right, this was the absolute worst picture I’d taken, so I just didn’t wear my badge much. And then September 11, 2001 happened. Memos went out in our public building, ORDERING us to ALWAYS have our employee badges worn in plain sight on our person. Wonderful. To this day this late bad-hair-day morning haunts me, and I have to wear it like a red badge of shame.
I’ve received comments on the picture through the last 10 years, too. Vicky once saw this badge in my car. “I don’t like this picture,” she announced. “You look much better than this in person.”
A coworker Andy said another time, “This picture makes you look like a foreign exchange student from China majoring in Math at CalTech.” That is NOT a compliment.

It wasn’t all roast yesterday, though. My boss did give me an unexpected gem of information. “You’ve been her coworker for 10 years, but there are things about her you may not know. She’s a published poet.” He went on to say that he’d attempted to obtain a copy of the poetry anthology in which something I’d written years ago had been published, but was unsuccessful, so he ended up photocopying the pages, had his gifted wife copy the poem in calligraphy, then had it framed and mounted in his home office. I had no idea, and until that point I’d forgotten I’d ever shown him the book. He used some very flattering adjectives in describing the piece. Totally made my week.

Some weeks are so bad that all you can find for the lowest common denominator between the week and motivation to not leave heavy-duty stapler dents on a coworker’s corpulence is to learn SOMETHING from the week and hence redeem the waste of life that is what the week felt like. Was that mean? If you could read the list of f-ups I had to deal with and correct just this week alone, you’d be feeling bad for me. I actually found myself wondering if I ought to throw the hole-puncher at the giant tumor sitting at the other desk. What I learned:
* Physics: burp stench travels way across the courtroom
* Sociology: don’t take certain people’s word for anything, especially when certain people have proven rarely to deserve the benefit of the doubt
* Chemistry: combining pizza for 3 consecutive meals, 1 donut, 3-4 pumpkin white chocolate chip cookies, 2 vanilla sandwich cookies, and agitating the mixture at the gym creates massive, MASSIVE acid reflux
* Math: Transitive Property of Equality… new civil trial (a) = loss of lunches this week (b); loss of lunches (b) = loss of gymming (c); therefore new civil trial (a) = loss of gymming (c).
Algebraic Calculation…C X 5d(cookie dough + pizza + cookies) + PMS bloat = +2% body fat and +6lb scale weight. Fuck me!

Mr. W skipped town Friday morning while I was at work to hang with his family, especially his Gamer Bro, in Vegas. He’ll be back sometime Monday. I took the opportunity to go straight to the gym after work on Friday, hit the weights hard. That makes one (weak) cardio session and one strength-training session this week. That is NOT enough. The morning broke brilliantly today, and I geared up with the newly revamped iPod and hit a 5 mile very hilly run. I didn’t expect it to be a great experience, considering it’d been awhile since I hit the actual streets for a real run, and there was already direct sunlight. I normally can not run in direct sunlight, it seems to sap my energy. Turned out the morning was crisp and cold enough to still give my ears windburn (and hence a headache), and the sunrise was filtered by the hilly raise to my east. I am normally anemic around this time of month, so exertion isn’t easy and cardio would soon have me doubled over in severe cramps. This never happened today. The music triggered endorphins and adrenaline, and I powered through long uphills, never running out of breath nor feeling the need to stop. (I mean, aside from the 3 or so red lights at intersections that I *had* to stop at.) Now I know. I can push myself harder next time. Or maybe it’s just that I have decent calories in me for once, built up from my week of eating refined white sugar and carbs. This bloat sucks, though, I’ll not be doing THAT again anytime soon (high-sodium, high-sugar consumption for a week straight).

Lily had invited me to a 5K run in Seal Beach this morning, but obviously I didn’t go. (I also ran farther than that on my own.) They’re doing a barbecue afterwards, but I think it’s weird going — it sounds sort of like a couples thing — without a husband. =P Anny is around the neighborhood running household purchasing errands, and invited me to call or text her if I’m bored. Gym Trainee’s birthday is today (HIPPO BIRDIE, GYM TRAINEE!) and she had been considering inviting people over to her home for lunch, but that fell through and I spoke to her on the drive home last nite, sounds like some individual friends of hers have invited her to other things. My godson has abandoned her (his mother) to go ATVing anyway. But James is coming through! He just texted me that he’s on his way to an eye appointment and is free afterwards. I invited him over to the house since he’s never been here after we moved. I have no idea what we’ll end up doing, but I’m sure it’d involve food, cuz the guy eats ANYTHING and enjoys it!

Speaking of which, here’s where James and I went on Wednesday for an early dinner:

Photo Sharing – Video Sharing – Photo Printing
Revolving sushi at Kura Sushi in Costa Mesa! The sushi wasn’t the best, but it was quick eating. The conveyor belts carry various food items around each table in the entire restaurant, and if you see something you want running by, you just grab it. Prices are tracked based on color coding of plates. Food on blue-rimmed plates are $1.75; yellow plates are $2.25, etc. It’s great for fun and variety and quick eatin’. It’s also cheap.

We sat at the bar so we could also order straight from the sushi chefs as with any sushi bar. We special-ordered a spicy tuna handroll each. I was STUFFED afterwards. Check out my plates!

Since we’re talking about James, here’s a video from back when he and Daughter collaborated on one of her songs. (I’m so glad Mr. W finally registered Daughter’s music; now I can share all this stuff.) You see James playing on his “virtual drums” to a pre-recording of Daughter’s singing and guitar. This video shows a work-in-progress where the loudest sound is, unfortunately, the metronome ticking. If you want to hear the finished version, let me know, I’ll email it. It’s TERRIFIC.

Photo Sharing – Video Sharing – Photo Printing

I skipped four straight meals and broke the streak today, when I was talked into eating a salami sandwich for lunch. I skipped the gym for even longer — today would be the 10th weekday in a row. Not coincidentally, that’s about as long as our current civil trial has lasted. Today the judge forgot to take a morning break and went straight through, and into lunch (again). If one of the attorneys hadn’t said something, we might’ve been on the record all through lunch. I thought my poor reporter was going to pass out. If I wanted to count other dry spells, there are plenty to count. Days since I’ve been home before 8pm, weeks since I was truly comfortable, days since I’d seen daylight, days since I’d had something to blog.

I am looking forward to the sun, though. I’ll be counting down the days until getting away — to Florida.

Ugh, I am nauseated to an extreme from konking out early in the spare room and having a fitful, restless sleep haunted by conversations that never happened. *choke* You’d think people could just shake this stuff off, but I’ve so far been unable. So I thought I’d blog.

Work: We’re now engaged in a 3-4 week civil jury trial on a product liability case. The female plaintiff is suing the manufacturer of a pallet jack machine (kind of like one of those lawnmowers you can ride on, only it lifts pallets instead of cuts grass. You’ve probably seen one at Costco.) for taking off her feet. (You think YOU’ve had a bad day at work…least you got to keep your feet!)

Home: Mr. W is a defiant patient. He can’t sit still, doesn’t want to, and has been in an unfriendly mood due to the side effects of his medication. I was directed to tell him a story a judge in the building told me this morning, about just why patients are ordered not to exert themselves after a stent is put into a heart artery. Apparently, a new stent that hasn’t incorporated itself properly into the body yet can dislodge with strenuous exercise and “torpedo” into the heart. Instant death. Mr. W’s response: “Don’t tell me stuff like that! I was going to go back to the gym in a couple of weeks regardless of what the doctor said!” *sigh*

Dodo: Adorable. Furry. Perfect.

Me: Exhausted by day, insomniac by night. I’ve been aiming for a 9pm bedtime as in my short-term goals, but it feels like there is just not enough time in the evenings to get anything done! I’m usually able to be in bed by 9:30ish, but sleep doesn’t come just because I’m horizontal. I have been able to get out of bed by 6ish. Anticipation of a long drive in my great car listening to great stuff coming out of my speakers helps a lot. I’ve lost a couple of pounds on the scale, which really isn’t the goal, but I’ve also dropped some fraction of a percent in body fat, so I’m okay with that. (Yeah, my boobs are shrinking. Oh well.) I’ve managed to hit the gym every lunchtime this week except for today, when I had to work through lunch due to case complications. I hope to get in a long (3+ mile) jog this weekend to make up for it. I wish I had the iPod tuned up, but I’ll deal.

It’s not even 9am yet, and this is how the day started:

* We left late. (My fault, cuz I suddenly remembered that I have to dress up since I’m assigned to a criminal court today.)
* After getting to work, I realized I don’t have my court keys or my badge. (Mr. W’s fault; when I had the day off yesterday for Lincoln’s birthday holiday he drove to work on his own and moved my stuff in his car and didn’t tell me.) So I couldn’t retrieve my stamps from my desk (locked), get on the employee elevators (special elevator key needed) or get around at all. I was SO PISSED because this has happened before and it’s always a major inconvenience.
* Someone had been at my desk yesterday and moved stuff around, and made a half-ass effort to return things to their original locations. Things were misplaced, and my photos on the corkboard were moved and someone pushed pushpins through the center of photos and through other photos! I NEVER puncture my photos, especially not ones I don’t have the negatives for and therefore can’t reproduce. And they pushed a pin through a Polaroid!! *grinding teeth*
* After finally getting to the criminal calendar court I am assigned to today, I tried unsuccessfully to log in the computer but realized that the keyboard did not work. At all. Totally nonresponsive. A slew of cussing later (I think I bewildered a bailiff who was just passing through), I traced the keyboard line and reset it manually and got it working.
* I have cramps. Owie.

The bailiff who caught the fire of my morning came through a few minutes later to check on me, and after I apologized for his seeing me in a non-professional moment, he reminded me that today is Friday of a long weekend, and that it’s also payday. He promised it’ll be better from now on.

He also pointed out it’s Friday the 13th. Figures!

Since I started this post I was involved in solving the mystery of 3 defendants in custody that the sheriffs department brought to this courtroom who aren’t on calendar.

Victoria’s Secret is giving out a little box of Godiva chocolates free with any $60 purchase. That seems cool and romantic, especially for those guys wanting a little sweetness for Valentine’s Day. “Look honey, I got you skimpy lingerie I want you to wear in the middle of February AND chocolates!” But to me, it’s just sort of an odd combination that feels mutually exclusive. Either you want me to look hot in “fabric” held together by four molecules of nylon and lace, OR you want me to eat chocolate. You can’t have both.

This is like the “emergency meeting” called yesterday at work, which was announced via email only hours from lunch, that required us to meet 15 minutes before the close of our regular lunch hour. That means I had to skip the gym again, so I sat at my desk and worked on divorce cases through lunch. More time was spent passing out gourmet cupcakes to all the coworkers than on the actual meeting; our supervisor wanted to give everyone a treat for upcoming V-day because today (Thursday) is Lincoln’s birthday holiday and many people took Friday before Vday off, opting for a 5-day weekend with Vday on Saturday and Monday’s President’s Day holiday. I just eyed the huge chocolate cupcakes with pink frosting that easily doubled the height of the cupcake itself. I had to skip the gym to be here; I can’t eat cupcakes, too!

My courtroom assistant enjoyed her cupcake, as did the front of her shirt.

This was something new this year. The judges in the building each donated big bucks to make an off-location Christmas party happen. Our administrators and some volunteer coworkers rented out a rec hall on Friday from 11:30a to 2p and we had an impressive catered lunch (turkey, ham, all the trimmings, cakes) along with tons of raffles. SANTA walked in to hand out the prizes.

It was a pretty convincing acting job, and if I hadn’t been told shortly before his appearance that Santa is one of our judges, I would’ve been tempted to sit on his lap and tell him I’ve been a good little girl this year. Of course, knowing who it is and THEN doing that would be sexual harassment.
It soon became a pattern that each winner of a prize would go up, collect his/her prize, and then stay to take a photo with Santa, and then it’d be on to the next prize. It soon became apparent that all the pretty girls were being directed by Santa to sit on his lap as the photo pose. That was when I shrunk down and prayed, “Don’t pick me. Don’t pick me.” I got my wish, by the way. A lot of my female coworkers who were dragged by their hands onto Santa’s knee looked embarrassed. And then there were the judges, like the presiding judge and MY judge, who pranced up when called and threw themselves on their colleague’s lap for the photo op. My big boss even raised both his legs up and sat across Santa’s lap as if Santa were about to carry him over the threshold. Everyone shrieked with laughter and camera flashes went off.
As much as I enjoyed being a spectator, I was happy to have averted disaster this year. I was in a fluffy gauzy and, in some coworkers’ opinions, very short skirt.

Ooh, look, I clicked on the “write a new post” button!

Speaking of posting again, some people suggested that my compulsion for blogging may have waned because my life is too good, too stable. There’s no single-life drama to report. Well okay, here’s some drama from this week reminiscent of the single days. For the past week, we’d been engaged in a medical malpractice jury trial. It was an unusually grueling trial because some of the testimony was just ridiculous, and it became quickly obvious that the jurors are HATING the plaintiff. (She’s suing her chiropractor, and chose to represent herself instead of hire an attorney, and she was unable to process the proceedings at all. We’ll say she was of sub-average intelligence. Without getting into examples, it was very frustrating to sit through.) One juror in particular, a motorcycle-riding man in his 30s who was always fashionably late, had the least impulse-control I’d ever seen in an adult; he wise-cracked from the jury box, openly sighed and laughed at the plaintiff’s ineptitude, and once in awhile I’d look up in surprise when the plaintiff did or said something shockingly inane and accidentally meet this juror’s eyes, who seemed to try to share a moment with me silently. You know, that “OMG she’s RETARDED, isn’t she?” communication look. It is my job to be impartial, so I never acknowledged the look and would look down at my work again instead. (One such time, I looked down and used my left hand to hold my layered hair out of my face and leaned into that hand. It occurred to me a few seconds later that as my left hand faced the jury, it appeared like I’m deliberately displaying my wedding rings after incidentally meeting this juror’s eyes, but I wasn’t.) The last day of testimony, this irreverent juror actually whistled as if in boredom while we were in session. My judge said that he gave this juror such a deathly glare that if his eyes were laser beams, the juror would have holes in his body already. I’d always thought something was kinda familiar in an unpleasant way about this juror; other jurors would snicker when he did, I got the sense he intimidated them with his mannerism so they’d rather be on his team than be subject to being one of his mocked victims. It was very playground. And I soon realized why he was familiar to me — he reminded of that asshole I almost got into the physical altercation with at Cirque du Soleil; he was too attractive, too witty, too confident, and was being a jackass just because he could and because he’d always gotten away with bullying others into submission.

After the verdict, the jurors were dismissed but told to go to back up to the jury assembly room to turn in their juror badges and to check out of jury duty. About an hour after their dismissal, I got a call from the jury room coordinator. “So you got your verdict,” she said gleefully. “It sounds like a crazy trial; one of the jurors was telling me about it.”
“Yeah, it was pretty bad,” I admitted. She told me some of the negative stuff the juror had hung around to tell her about, and I asked if it was Juror 10, the jerk. Indeed, it was him.
“AND,” she continued, her audible excitement telling me this is the real reason of her call, “He let something slip. He said ‘…and that cutie — oh, I shouldn’t have said that, huh?’ ” I was about to say that he could’ve been talking about anyone, but she mentioned some castle or something I had behind me. There is indeed a castle on the filing cabinet behind me; it’s a 3-D puzzle of Cinderella’s Castle that my dad put together for me. It was at work because when I was packing for the move to our current house, I knew that Mr. W would consider it space-stealing clutter and would probably make me throw it away, so I brought it to work to liven the courtroom up. I’ve gotten a lot of admiring compliments about the castle since. The jury coordinator said, “Well, he said, ‘Tell her that she and I spent A LOT of hours together in that castle.’ ”

I was confused. What the hell does that mean? I was too big to fit in the castle and I certainly would’ve noticed of I’d spent time with a stranger inside a 3-D puzzle. And then I understood the fantasy, and laughed. I thanked her for making my day, and we hung up.

I turned to my courtroom assistant. “Hey, do you have Juror 10’s notebook still?” I asked. She was ripping the jurors’ notes out of the spiral stenopad we provide to the jurors for note-taking, getting the pads cleared and ready for the next trial.
“Yeah,” she said and walked it over.
I flipped through the book. The first thing I saw that wasn’t notes about the trial was at the top of a blank page. Three lines of handwriting read:

Is that a castle up there? [arrow pointing up]
Up on the file cab.
It’s my Happy Place. She’s already in there w/me.

I laughed. I flipped some more, skimming the pages of his thoughts for the past week with us. There were a lot of smart-ass things written about the plaintiff, a couple about the defense attorney. I noted with amusement that a lot of the rude things I’d thought about the plaintiff or noted was said by her, he’d caught as well and had them written down. “What an ass,” I thought to myself, realized with a gasp, “That means I’M an ass!” He and I disturbingly appear to have the same sense of humor. I saw another line, buried in his notes about the defendant chiropractor’s testimony, and was unsure whether he referred to the doctor or to me when he wrote:

Showing wedding ring on purpose.

The comment was pretty gender-neutral.
I turned a couple of pages, laughed at his other comments about the words that the plaintiff would misuse and mispronounce. Testimony about back vertebrae problems, annual tears, disk bulges. And then, the worst comment EVER:

I’d like to get my hands on the Judge’s Assistant’s bulges.

I felt my face get hot. And yet it was oddly flattering. And equally oddly was how Mr. W was completely unaffected with this story when I told it to him. He didn’t even understand how that last comment was any big deal, certainly no bigger than the other comments in the notebook, despite the fact that I had major difficulty bringing myself to be able to even say those words aloud to him. Mr. W suggested an even more crass play on words that he felt would’ve deserved the embarrassed reaction that Juror 10’s line created in me.

…That must mean it’s okay that I keep the notepad as a souvenir.