cindy's world

Returning from lunch gymming, waiting for the elevator to pick me up earlier, I ran into my head supervisor.
“How’re you feeling?” he asked me.
“Okay. Just some residual coughing, but that’s normal –”
He looked at me meaningfully. “No. I mean the OTHER thing.”
“Oh,” I said, somewhat embarrassed, because he’d been on me to schedule my LEEP procedure last month and I’d kinda brushed him off saying that my doctor said as long as it’s done within 6 months, I’m fine. And I still hadn’t scheduled it. The elevator doors opened behind me and I backed into the elevator gratefully, shrugging at my supervisor sheepishly and saying I’ll get on it.
He firmly placed his forearm against the side of the elevator door, keeping it from closing, eyeing me very deliberately. “Cindy. This is serious. Get on it.”

When I walked into my courtroom, the phone was ringing. As I still had a few minutes until lunch was over, I didn’t pick it up. Then my cell phone rang and caller ID showed an unfamiliar number. I picked that up.
“Hello, this is Cathy from Dr. [K]’s office. We did a biopsy on you a couple of months ago with instructions for you to schedule a LEEP procedure, and don’t see on here that you have an appointment set up yet. Can we schedule that right now?”
*sigh*

So the LEEP procedure, based on doctor availability and my current menstrual cycle, will take place December 19. I filled out the time-off request form and walked it downstairs to my supervisor. After I told him about the call, he said, “You know what my nickname was as a kid, right? I’m not kidding — my friends and my dad called me this until I was a teenager.”
“No, what is it?”
“God.”
*sigh*

I’d been dragging my feet for the past 4+ months since my engagement, cuz wedding planning is so not something I’m remotely interested in. The most I’d done was buy and flip through (sans enthusiasm) two bridal magazines some months ago. I haven’t even sent in the ring to be resized, yet. I had two small epiphanies in Vegas that kick-started things. One, I “realized” how to make a guest list. Two, I “realized” who my bridesmaids are. The latter happened in the shower, as with many of my great ideas.

After coming back to California, I called my three girls, the women who’ve known me the longest, the best, know what I’m thinking at a glance, have physical and emotional history with me. They all surprised and touched me and said yes, despite the fact that I have no wedding date or location to give them and I assured them this isn’t a commitment and they could back out once I’m able to give them actual solid dates and venues.

This morning, I flipped through my third bridal magazine which I’d purchased in Vegas and started reading a monthly check-0ff list of things that have to be done each month in a sort of count-down fashion, starting 12 months from the wedding date. It was so fussy and details were so expensive that I had a little mental breakdown. I guess I’d been in a sort of denial about how many freaking stupid little overpriced details go into wedding planning, and I’d thought I could just pull it off with minimum work, money and stress. How hard could it be? I just secure the location, date, wedding party, dress, food, and I’m done. But no, the checklist told me to do wedding planner interviews, and DJ/MC/band member interviews, and view photographer and videographer samples, and book appointments for cake and food samplings, and pick invitation themes and colors, and select save-the-date cards. And that’s just the beginning! I wanted to cry. I cursed wedding etiquette and traditions and what they entail. Mr. W offered to elope but I can’t do that to my parents as an only child. He finally asked me what aesthetic details are actually important to me at the wedding site, and I pictured my tranquil place and named three things: Chinese lanterns, bridge(s), water. And he came up with this:

I’m not disclosing the location yet because I’m not committing myself (and I don’t wanna jinx things), but I did some research and turns out this place DOES do weddings:

The location appears to be available for booking next summer and the summer after, and their wedding package includes ceremony, reception, setup/cleanup, sound system, candles around the pond, lanterns around the garden, plus a separate day for rehearsal. I think it’s reasonably affordable for me considering with everything in one place, I don’t have to worry about 2 separate location bookings and transportation. Keepin’ my fingers crossed…if you recognize the location, shhh for now!

A week without a post. I think that may be some sort of a record for me. Except for, wait…when I was on vacation and didn’t have internet access. That’s sort of what happened here, too. I went to Vegas for Thanksgiving and had the entire following week off for vacation. Since I didn’t have my own laptop with me, I haven’t been at work to use my work desktop, and I’ve stopped accessing this blog from Mr. W’s computer, you have this week-long gap. (The post in Vegas was written on Mr. W’s dad’s computer.)

We left for Vegas after work the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, got there wee early Thanksgiving morning, and our plan was to hang out there for 4 days and leave for Yosemite (where Mr. W has never been) on Sunday or Monday, hang out there for two days, and spend the rest of the week at home running errands, Christmas shopping and watching “Buffy” and “Angel” on DVD. But what actually happened was that after arriving to Vegas, we discovered that Mr. W’s gamer brother (as opposed to Rocker Brother who’s a guitarist in a band, and Chicago Brother whom I’ve never met cuz he’s in, duh, New York — I mean, Chicago) had the same week off work that we did. So Mr. W nixed the Yosemite plans and we instead hung out in Vegas with his family until Wednesday. That was great for me, as I was hacking and dying from my ailment and I think a few days in the very cold climate of Yosemite would’ve killed me.

Vegas: We walked the Strip, watched “The Mentalist” show, went to my first hockey game at The Orleans (totally thought about Flat Coke and Bat, the hockey freaks that they are), checked out the fairly-recently opened Hooters Casino (not impressive), hung out with Mr. W’s parents, played Wii and other games at Gamer Bro’s house, hung out with Gamer Bro and Wife, attended Rocker Bro’s band performance at a local restaurant bar. Ooh, I have a picture of that:

Sorry about the grainy photo; all I had was my cameraphone. I also got to see Mr. W and bros when they were little pesky children as Mr. W’s mom shared boxes of old family photos with me. It was only slightly disturbing to gloss over formal professional photos of Mr. W cuddling with his psycho ex #2 (the one after his kids’ mom) and her kids, if “slightly disturbing” means I want to reach back in time by reaching into those photos and squishing her obnoxious little head with my fingertips until her brain pops like a bubble of caviar, or that may be the monthly hormones talking. It is liberating to know he doesn’t read my blog anymore, tho. It is comforting to be able to write that I winced inside when his mom, showing me old photos of her other sons’ weddings while talking about preparing to make a separate album just of everyone’s wedding photos, said none of her kids had big weddings, except for Mr. W, who had two of them. Grrr.

Well, on to brighter things, like MY goddamned wedding. See next post.

I’m in Vegas doing the same Thanksgiving I’ve done in the past 2 years. Mr. W’s brother came to Thanksgiving dinner this time with the XBox360 game “Rock Band” in tow. Remember how hooked I got on “Guitar Hero” last year? Well, this is two guitars (one bass guitar), a microphone for karaoke AND a drum set. The drums even have a foot pedal. Man, this game is harder! It demands more precision on when you hit the notes on the guitar parts; a millisecond off and you don’t get the point. The drums are tricky because you have to hit in the center of each drum and there are 4 drums, plus foot, and you’ve got 2 hands and 2 drumsticks. I’ve always secretly thought I could be a drummer cuz I have rhythm, and it turns out that’s not nearly enough for this game. Oh well. Needless to say, the house was noisy that night.

The day after Thanksgiving (Friday), I was enjoying a leftover turkey leg, and commenting on how meat just tastes better on a stick. It’s good fun to pull chunks of turkey off a bone to eat. And then I had an idea. Christmas should be on a stick! We can have candlesticks lit, roast marshmallows on a stick in the fireplace or a firepit, have candied apples on a stick, eat shish-kabobs, popsicles, lollipops, celebrate our savior-on-a-stick (I know, eternal hellfire). Even the Christmas tree: needles on a stick. Maybe I can expand on the stick thing and pour leftover candied apple caramel on myself and make things stick to me. I can refuse to stick to a diet but yap at everyone else’s diets like I had a stick up my butt. And when I get attacked for that, I’d have to stick up for myself all by myself. The stress would make me lose weight and get sick all over again, and I’d become a stick figure.

Stick holidays. Could happen.

The last few posts of my blog have sounded like pages from a big grievance log you’d find in the property of some bitter geriatric patient in a hospice, so I figured I wouldn’t post an update on my eye issue. I was surprised to see comments on the last post with actual concern for my health, so now I decided to talk about my condition again. If you don’t want to read about that, you don’t have to; it’s a free blog.

Yesterday, I went into my primary care physician’s office again (can’t see an opthalmologist unless he writes me a referral), and they checked my vision (fine) and my cornea (fine). By the way, they check the cornea by dropping in a flourescent dye and then looking for differently-colored areas in the eye with a special blacklight. If I ever had doubt that my eyes were connected to my sinuses, I don’t anymore, as my right nostril was leaking bright yellow highlighter fluid for the next half hour. The doctor prescribed an eyedrop called “Sulfacetamide Sodium” to instill 4 times a day in the affected eye. He said it was either a bacterial or a viral infection in the eye, more likely bacterial, and probably secondary to the sinus/upper respiratory infection I have going on which was secondary to the original flu bug.

I put the drops in the right eye, and then by yesterday evening, the same beginning stages of the infection started occurring in my left eye. Great. I have no immune system. I totally thought the crazy fever I endured last Thursday night would’ve made me completely sterile, but apparently, it just somehow attracted more bacteria do to the monster mash in my body. I asked myself in passing, “Why am I so immuno-compromised?” and it briefly occurred to me that maybe I have HIV or something. But no way, I had a full physical with all standard STD testing when I had my pap smear a few months ago and they would’ve told me something like THAT.

So I was looking forward to feeling better for Thanksgiving, taking my oral antibiotics, dropping the stinging eye crap in both eyes, listening to my doctor’s advice to not wear contacts or eye makeup for week or so. I look and sound and feel like shit, but it’s temporary, right?

And then my ex, the optometrist, called. Basically, he said, the eye drops are some weak antiquated antibiotic that isn’t going to work. The bacterial resistence to it is very high and if I don’t nip this eye thing, it’ll spread to my other eye (which it has) and then the bacteria, which has already claimed my lungs and sinuses and eyes, will next claim my inner ears in an inner ear infection. My inner ears HAVE been itching and sometimes a hard cough makes it feel like I’m scratching them. I wanted to cry right there which, as the ex explained, is all that the eyedrops I have in hand do anyway — sting you and make you cry so that your tears flush out the bad stuff. So now he’s going to fax over a prescription for an eyedrop called Zymar and instructed me to take it to my regular health care’s walk-in hours and ask them to rewrite the prescription on their end so that my insurance would cover it.

*hacking coughing fit*

I haven’t made it back to work yet. Watching TV and doing laundry last nite, my right eye kept getting blurry. I finally went to examine it in the bathroom mirror, and I had sticky little clumps floating around my contacts. After removing the whitish clumps, they kept returning and increasing. Great, if I’m getting an eye infection, maybe the Amoxicillin would take care of it. So I popped two and went to bed. This morning, the right eye was sealed shut by the clumps. When I finally managed to open the eye, my eyelids remained red and swollen, and still is. So of course I freaked and called my doctor for another appointment later today at 2pm. I can just see his face. “You’re back already? What now?” Dude, look at my EYE!

Is this gonna ruin Thanksgiving?

Childhood friend Sandy and I were discussing how men go quiet when you call them on something that they messed up on, and then you find yourself hurt AND talking to yourself. Her analysis was too funny not to share:

sandy: sometimes they’re quiet .. because they’re not nearly as quick in response as us..
sandy: they’re really thinking…
sandy: it’s not obvious to them…
sandy: it’s … “uh oh.. i fucked up”… “what should/could i say now?”
sandy: hence quiet.. while we’re like.. i can’t believe “YOU” have nothing to say..
sandy: and we come up with a whole bunch of things..
sandy: they they feel even stupider…
sandy: so they’re quiet again… now they have 2 thoughts to process.. not just one

Right upon waking this morning, I had a hacking coughing fit. My mouth tasted really funny in a gross way as soon as I hacked, so on the next coughing fit I spat into the sink and blew my nose and examined the tissue. I was coughing up semi-coagulated greenish mucus globules. I hadn’t decided whether to take the day off work yet, so I figured I’d call my supervisors and see what the chances are of getting a relief clerk to babysit my jury today, and if they told me there was no coverage and that I couldn’t take the day off, then I’d just go in. My tonsils are still swollen and painful and now I was coughing and my lungs were covulsing, but my body isn’t in pain anymore like it used to be. Having spent 45 minutes unsuccessful in reaching any of my 3 supervisors, I called my court reporter to tell her I may not be coming in, and she said I sounded horrible and asked about my symptoms. Upon hearing about the green phlegm, she said that it’s likely to be an infection and that I need to see a doctor. Eventually I reached a supervisor who freaked out when I told him I had a fever for a week and an extreme fever on Thursday and he told me I had, HAD to stay home and see the doctor. The earliest same-day appointment I could get was 5pm, so I went in.

BTW, my pretty purple Sesame Street digital thermometer won’t work, and I’ve only used it once, when I bought it for my ailment in February. I think it’s out of battery, but I can’t tell how to open up the little thing and replace the battery. What a waste of money.

So it turns out I STILL have a low-grade fever (100 deg) but it’s so low compared to what it had been that I can’t even feel it. The doctor said what I had started off as a viral infection, like a cold, but that it’s now likely to have evolved into a secondary bacterial sinus infection, but it’s a bit too early for him to tell for sure whether it’s a sinus infection or whether it’s me overcoming the initial viral attack. To be on the safe side, he prescribed me a 10-day dose of antibiotics, Amoxicillin, anyway. I asked if it would be okay if I waited a few days to take the pills cuz if I just get better, then it’s just the virus, but if I get worse, then I guess I have a sinus infection. He said that’d be okay, but he didn’t see the harm in taking the antibiotics anyway.

The harm, which I didn’t tell him, is that the last time I took Amoxicillin, it didn’t cure what it was supposed to, but killed all the “good” bacteria in my body and I ended up with a yeast infection. EW. So I had to use over-the-counter yeast infection medication on top of another drug to take care of the initial infection. And then to rebalance my body, I took a bunch of probiotic supplements to put the necessary symbiotic bacterias back in my intestines and other areas. I’d just like to avoid all that.

After some won ton soup and moo shoo gai pan and rice I got at a local Chinese food restaurant on my way home from the doctor, I sat and stared at the Amoxicillin bottle, poured out all the pills, looked at them, put them back in, read the enclosed information sheet, opened the bottle, closed it again, and decided to hold off. Once I start, I’d have to take 40 pills, 4 a day. I don’t want to be popping pills all during Thanksgiving break. Hopefully it’s just a virus, even tho the secondary infection thing happened to me February, too.

P.S. My 1st fortune cookie said: “A romantic interlude is in your future.” Pssh, doubtful.
P.P.S. My 2nd fortune cookie said: “Judge one not by his charms, but by his qualities.” I’ll keep that in mind if I come across a charming man I find myself judging.

I’ve been up since like 3am watching “A Shot at Love” on MTV. I woke up to the show on the living room couch and the station kept playing back-to-back episodes of the reality series, and its current drama at the Tila Tequila mansion. For those of you who’ve never heard of the show, Tila Tequila is a Vietnamese model/actress (?) who just came out of the closet as bisexual and is doing a “The Bachelorette”-style elimination dating series but with equal numbers of male and female suitors. Yeah, it surprised me, too, that I’m watching it. Since I’d first found the show some weeks ago, I have become of aware of some friends’ serious dislike for Tila Tequila and/or the show, and now that I’m seeing it again, I find myself thinking, “They’re right, her face isn’t all that attractive.” But if I had her figure, minus the fake boobs, I’d be showing it off, too. Plus she has a good hair stylist. And I’m in awe at her mansion. The show presents it as HER house, and if she really does own it, whoa…

I think the reason I kept watching the series this morning, though, is because 1) there are suitors who so get on my nerves that I’m rooting AGAINST them and I keep waiting to watch them get voted off; and 2) my sleeping pattern is so jacked up right now that I wake up every morning between 2am and 4am and remain wide awake thereafter, hacking and coughing and trying to swallow past the painful swollen tonsils in my throat.

This catfight is the end of the last episode on this morning. BTW, I rooted against Vanessa (the curly-haired brunette in the polka dots).

Obviously Mr. W’s thinking and the way he handled things at Cirque didn’t and doesn’t sit well with me. So I’ve been analyzing him and his actions in some still-unsuccessful attempt to force things to make sense, as if a Looney Tunes light bulb would suddenly light on top of my head and all the pieces would fit properly again and we’d be back to the happy picture we were just days ago.

So far I’ve had two theories going…
1) He doesn’t understand and therefore doesn’t respond to cultural social cues.
He did say on more than one occasion that he’s “antisocial” because he doesn’t know how to act in a public environment and prefers to be “a loner” and is a “social retard.” So maybe he didn’t get just HOW some guy confronting a strange girl with “is that a PROBLEM?” or pointing at the girl while saying “shut up” repeatedly is offensive, so he didn’t respond the way everyone else instantly did upon reading about it. In other words, others may see the actions and hear the words and say, “Them’s fightin’ words!” whereas he just sees them as neutral responses from some guy. He also doesn’t understand how shushing your girl is condescending in general, and when that shushing is done in front of strangers who are verbally attacking her when she’s just holding her own, it becomes — yes, I’ll say it — a public betrayal. (I just got a mental picture of him rolling his eyes at the dramatic way I characterized it.)

This theory was making sense, until I asked him some questions about it in a roundabout way yesterday when he called me after work to ask me to go over for the weekend. Turned out, he DOES know when a stranger may be silently, on body language alone, challenging him to a fight, stuff like that. But he says those societal cues are stupid and if some guy eyed him down trying to trigger a fight, he’d just ignore the guy and break eye contact. He said it’s stupid to go along with some stranger’s challenge because he broke a guy’s nose at a bar once and has since regretted it. Except when he’s at work, he says, and people challenge him or get difficult and bickerish, he’d verbally and sternly nip it in the bud right away and if the challenger refuses to be nipped, “then I’d jack him up.” Okay, so he DOES know, and he IS willing to get on the defensive to a challenger. Then why doesn’t he do it to protect ME? Which brings me to theory #2:

2) He has to do it so much at work as part of his job in a type of work environment that’s aggressive and bickerish, where he may constantly have his authority challenged, that he’s just sick of having to put out fires when he’s NOT at work. So he’d prefer to sink into the extreme side of complacent and low-key when he’s among strangers outside of his job.

I guess I can see #2 making sense. But I haven’t had the opportunity to run #2 by him so I don’t know for sure. Even if I did run #2 by him, he likely wouldn’t know cuz he doesn’t analyze himself or his actions much, and okay, NOBODY analyzes people like ME unless they’re getting paid or are writing research papers.

When I was running #1 by him on the phone last nite, altho he played along for a little bit, he did get irritated again because he said he didn’t want to go over the Cirque episode yet again. I told him I’m not trying to rehash, I’m just trying to understand elements of his behaviors. He said fine, if I really want to talk about that, then “we can talk about it tomorrow.” So to thank him for agreeing to open up the discussion forum, I finally agreed to see “Beowulf” in 3-D with him at the Imax this morning. He’s been on my ass to see it with him for awhile, and I’d refused to because I don’t want a cent of my hard-earned money to go toward supporting the posterchild for dysfunction, angelina jolie.

So anyway, this morning, we dropped my car off at the dealer for an oil change (I’m used to my cousin, a Honda specialist, doing the oil changes for my Accord for $24. So when I picked up my Lexus at the dealership an hour ago and $170+ later, I decided to never get servicing done at the dealer again. Now I know, and at least I got a free carwash out of it.), had breakfast at an early-opening sportsbar/restaurant, watched “Beowulf,” went to Costco so he could buy groceries, came back, watched “1407” on DVD, I picked up my car, and he still didn’t bring up talking, and I was sullen the whole day. I found myself wondering, “Am I just deliberately hanging onto this anger? And if I am, then why am I? Why can’t I just see it as, he did something that pissed me off, he didn’t piss me off on purpose and was trying to do what he felt was the right thing, I let him have it about how crappily I felt he handled the situation, and he has since then agreed to ‘try to consider my feelings over his training and instinct’ the next time, so what else am I to expect? What else is there to talk about?” Should I just let it go at this point? Oh, I forgot to mention, that earlier he tried to drag me into his bed to nap with him, and I asked if he was really sleepy, he said yes. I got up and said I’d let him sleep, and then he offered, “Fine. Talk.” I said I learned never to have “a talk” with a man when he’s either hungry or sleepy, and that being said, I left him to his nap and came up here to blog.

Man, it’s too bad you guys don’t read my blog much on the weekends. *waiting by the computer for comments*

P.S. It’s been a long time since I’ve been a little crazy, thanks for indulging me. But I am nowhere near as crazy as I or another girl out there could be…