cindy's world

Don’t you love when things like this happen to you? I’d eaten a protein bar in the morning that was so nasty I had to put it aside. After the gym at lunch, I was hungry enough after devouring an avocado to try the bar again. I happened to bump into Vanessa online.

me: dude, I ate one of those yogurt peanut butter bars. NASTY!!! and I have a pretty high tolerance to bad tasting stuff!
Vanessa: I ate one today, too! But I liked it. We should switch some out
me: it was SALTY!
Vanessa: Another koininkadink, or however you write the darn thing
me: which one did you try? the same one?
Vanessa: The same one
me: you liked it? it wasn’t salty to you?
Vanessa: Yup. Not at all. But I have my PMS tongue in action right now and I am craving salt. So that might explain it. I’ll try it in a week and see if I still like it
me: maybe I had a bad bar that used salt for sugar.
Vanessa: But they don’t make them indv. they make batched at a time so it should be the same as mine.
Me: was it gooey to you in the center?
Vanessa: No. Was yours?
me: yeah! omg, what the hell did I eat??? it wasn’t, like, brown nougat in the center of yours?
Vanessa: No. Maybe it was a bad bar! Eewww!
me: you’re sure you had the yogurt peanut crunch?
Vanessa: Wait a minute while I dig the wrapper out of the trash
me: Jeopardy theme song playing
Vanessa: Yup, yogurt Peanut Crunch. See the things I do for you, man?
I went through trash
me: I dug mine out of the trash, too!
Vanessa: Now that is love. LOL
me: koinkidink? we’re both eating bars and digging in the trash during our work hours. nice.
Vanessa: ohh… we are like TWINS. but like the movie with arnold and the smaller guy. Except we are cute
me: danny devito
Vanessa: and not guys. and not old
me: HAHAH
Vanessa: You get my drift
me: and not twins.
Vanessa: Yeah, that’s him
me: and not the same race. and not related. and not polar opposite people
Vanessa: ok… maybe we are not like the movie
me: haha. should I blog this? that’d be funny.
Vanessa: I was thinking that. Do it!
me: OH MY GOSH! Another koinkidink! haha
Vanessa: I love Cilliness. LOL

I’m always the one who gets the gnat in the soup, fly in the salad, worm in the peach. Free restaurant meal advantage aside, it makes me wonder whether I’m just “lucky,” or whether I’m the only one who examines food as I’m eating it.

ARGH! What is wrong with blogger?! I can’t view any blogs that run off blogspot right now! But I can get everywhere else! Why are you guys ALL on blogger?! I can’t get into blogger!!!!

Okay, I’m over it. *pant pant*

When I was a lot younger (like in junior high), my mom told me that the human mind is a remarkable thing. “Have you noticed,” she said, “When you’re asleep and you really have to pee, in your dreams you will run into all kinds of problems in finding a toilet, so you CAN’T pee? Like you can’t find a bathroom. Or when you finally could, all the stalls are taken and there’s a huge line. When you finally find a stall that’s empty, turns out the door’s jammed and you can’t get in. And then the toilet seat cover won’t come up. All sorts of bizarre things will happen to prevent you from peeing because your brain, on some level, knows that you are really asleep so it won’t let you pee.”

I told her that I’d never dreamt I had to pee urgently, because if I had to pee that badly, I’d wake up and run to the bathroom and pee. She said, “Watch, one day you’re gonna have a dream like that and notice that.”

Very soon thereafter, I was indeed asleep when I had to pee. But my dream immediately opened up with me already ON the toilet seat, pants down, ready to pee. I thought, “I shouldn’t pee, I should wake up.” And then I remembered what my mom said. “Oh, wait. I’m not gonna be ABLE to pee. Let’s see what happens in the dream if I’m not able to pee.” So I relaxed and pushed a little.

And wet my bed.

I woke up in a huff as soon as the first drops hit and angrily stormed off into the bathroom to clean myself. And to pee. My mom lost some credibility that night.

After work today, Vanessa and I hooked up to assemble James’ belated birthday present. I’d sent out an evite last week to James’ friends to meet up for a belated birthday dinner on Wednesday evening at Taps Fish House & Brewery. Vanessa and I figured we’d go above and beyond the hostessing of this event by making him a basket of treats, too. Here are some clues as to what we assembled for him.

* There’s a magazine in the collection. To help with his…”hobby.” He probably wouldn’t read it for the articles, tho.
* We included a bottle of performance-enhancing supplements.
* A rapid hand-jerking back-and-forth motion is required to take full advantage of some of the goodies.
* There’s wood involved.
* There are many little packets that you tear open to use the contents.
* There are lots of products meant to make you swell. Real big. And hard. Like a real man.
* Some products may result in frothy, milky fluid production.
* There’s plastic to wrap the wood in.
* We even included a cloth to put around the hips, you know, to catch the drippage.
* There are multiple single-use packages of long items for inserting into moist holes.

We can’t wait to present this big collection of goodies to James! We know he could use it! We just regret that we couldn’t get the inflatable sheep, but it’s on backorder. 🙁

Happy Monday! This is from an email forward I received today.

~ * ~
Last week was my birthday and I didn’t feel very well waking up on that morning.

I went downstairs for breakfast hoping my wife would be pleasant and say, “Happy Birthday!”, and possibly have a small present for me.

As it turned out, she barely said good morning, let alone “Happy Birthday.”

I thought… Well, that’s marriage for you, but the kids…. They will remember.

My kids came bounding down stairs to breakfast and didn’t say a word. So when I left for the office, I felt pretty low and somewhat despondent.

As I walked into my office, my secretary Ann said, “Good Morning Boss, and by the way Happy Birthday!” It felt a little better that at least someone had remembered.

I worked until one o’clock, when Ann knocked on my door and said, “You know, it’s such a beautiful day outside, and it is your birthday, what do you say we go out to lunch, just you and me.”
I said, “Thanks, Ann, that’s the greatest thing I’ve heard all day. Let’s go!”

We went to lunch. But we didn’t go where we normally would go. She chose instead a quiet bistro with a private table. We had two martinis each and I enjoyed the meal tremendously.

On the way back to the office, Ann said do, “You know, it’s such a beautiful day… We don’t need to go straight back to the office, do we?”

I responded, “I guess not. What do you have in mind?”

She said, “Let’s drop by my apartment, it’s just around the corner.”

After arriving at her apartment, Ann turned to me and said, “Boss, if you don’t mind, I’m going to step into the bedroom for just a moment. I’ll be right back.”

“Ok,” I nervously replied.

She went into the bedroom and, after a couple of minutes, she came out carrying a huge birthday cake, followed by my wife, my kids, and dozens of my friends and co-workers, all singing “Happy Birthday.”

And I just sat there…

On the couch…

Naked.

CAUTION: This post contains workplace unfriendly material. DO NOT…I repeat…*DO NOT* click on the “more” below when you’re at work, or in front of your parents, or your children, or other people who may be offended or embarrassed by human nudity. In fact, if you’re related to me or Mr. W, don’t open this further. And if you don’t want to see nekkid men and/or TMI stuff, don’t click on the “more.” You know what? Just close your browser right now. Thanks.

You guys know that I got Mr. W a 3-year prepaid gym membership for Christmas. You know that he started working out with me every lunchtime and sometimes after work and on weekends, and that he’s become even more fanatic about the gym than me. He didn’t have any personal training, except for a few tutorials from me, and then he’s gone and run with it. Here are some “before” photos from last year, and “after” photos I took this weekend, which I’m really proud of, not only because he’s done an amazing thing for himself, his health and longevity, but because I am an amazing photographer. Uh-huh. That’s right, I take credit for this.

Again, DON’T click on the “more” below if you’re at work or could possibly get in trouble for viewing non-PG images. I’m serious.

(more…)

The purpose of this post is two-fold. First, because I got a new Billabong swimsuit that I really like on Saturday. (Mr. W decided that it was my fault we don’t go to his jacuzzi more because I don’t have a bathing suit at his house, so he “decided” unilaterally that we were going to go out and buy one, pronto.) Second, because you guys asked for photos after reading this recent post. So here you go. Don’t say I’ve never done anything for you.

This is the swimsuit worn the way I like.

This is the swimsuit worn the way Mr. W likes.

Side view of, um, swimsuit.

Another side view that better shows off the, um, suit.

Rear-ish view.

Unfortunately, I’m already starting to bloat up again. 🙁 That didn’t last long. But fortunately, the sliding weights scale at the gym Saturday night (after a grueling 3-hour workout, at the end of which I ran a mile just to kill time as I waited for Mr. W and his buddy to pretty themselves up. I’d never run just to kill time before.) put me still in the mid-120s. Yay!

I know it’s a negative Asian stereotype to say we squat, but here are some photos I discovered in Mr. W’s laptop alone…

At a park local to my work, one lunchtime, July 2006:

In San Simeon, July 2006:

Around San Simeon Pines Lodge, July 2006:

more beachside later that day:

At the Huntington Library & Botanical Gardens, hunting for turtles, October 2006:

In Hawaii, a cliffhanger squat from behind, November 2006:

WHY are there so many photos of me squatting?!
At least I’m not *really* squatting here:

Here’s what I look like when I’m NOT squatting:

Just thought this was funny cuz Mr. W handed a guy (brotha’ from Philly, early 20s, on vacay in Oahu) the camera so he can take a photo of US in front of Diamondhead. Here’s what he took:

You all know about my hidden captions, right?

Vanessa had written a post entitled “Lucid Dreams,” and through my comments on there, I was told that lucid dreams are not common and that I’m “special,” which suddenly made my own experiences more interesting to me, so I decided to blog about that.

Lucid Dream (as defined by Wikipedia): Lucid dreaming (lucid from Latin, lux “light”) is the conscious perception of one’s state while dreaming, resulting in a much clearer experience and sometimes enabling direct control over the content of the dream, a realistic world that is to some degree in the control of the dreamer. The complete experience from start to finish is called a lucid dream. Stephen LaBerge, a popular author and experimenter on the subject, has defined it as “dreaming while knowing that you are dreaming.”
LaBerge and his associates have called people who purposely explore the possibilities of lucid dreaming oneironauts (literally from the Greek ονειροναύτες, meaning “dream sailors”).

In 5th grade, I participated in a program called GATE (Gifted And Talented Education), which in one lesson taught us that most or all blind people dream in color, whereas only a percentage of normal-sighted people dream in color. Fascinated, I decided to check my own dream that night. In a dream, I found myself alone in the house I lived in at the time. Remembering the fact I wanted to explore, Dream Cindy walked down the hall to the living room wood coffee table. It was dark in the dream, nighttime, and I couldn’t see very much. I put my hands down on the surface of the coffee table and leaned my face down really close to its surface, trying to see whether the wood grain was in color or black and white. I could not tell, but I didn’t know whether things were colorless because it was dark, or because I was dreaming in black and white. Frustrated, I woke up.

The answer came later as I became nearsighted at the end of junior high. The more my eyeglass prescription increased (hence the worse my eyesight), the more frequently in color I dreamt. I think now, I dream almost exclusively in color.

I’ve had other lucid dreams, mostly in childhood or the early teen days, in which I didn’t like the dream I was in, or I didn’t like the way events were leading in the dream such that the dream was fast becoming a nightmare, so I’ve changed the sequence of events in the dream or lifted myself out of that dream environment into a different dream environment, or simply told myself to wake up out of it. But it seemed that as I did that more and more, I was soon less able to distinguish whether something was a dream. I found myself actually in the dream wondering if I am dreaming. Sometimes I would want to do something in a dream, but then I’d second-guess myself and think, “What if this isn’t a dream, and I end up doing some irreparable damage?” (This quandary was commonly in the form of *really* wanting to kiss some hot celebrity boy who was coming on to me.) And I would err on the side of caution and act conservatively in the dream, turn him down, tell him our worlds could never permanently merge, and then I’d wake up, realize it was all a dream and be pissed that I wasn’t more adventurous. So I developed a rule of thumb. “This is a dream,” I’d tell myself in the dream, “If I can’t remember how I got here, to this point. If I was just plopped into this situation and have no recollection of the process of getting here, then I’m dreaming.” Cuz in real life, I always have clear memories of so-and-so picked me up at my house, we drove down this street, came by this restaurant, and that’s how I’m here chatting and having a burrito. In a dream, you’re just there having the burrito suddenly when the last thing you remember is that you were hanging upside-down from some apple tree petting a sheep. That rule of thumb worked for awhile, and then my dream self started developing fake memories. Dream Cindy would sit there and consider how she got to that situation, to test for memories, and then snapshots of “memories” would appear, and she’d go, “Oh yeah!” when those things never happened to begin with, or they were intermingled with real memories from the day before. And I’d be fooled again.

I think the new rule of thumb should be, “When in doubt, you’re dreaming.” Cuz when I’m awake I never actually wonder if I’m really dreaming.

I heard the murmurings of something that sounded like the word “holiday” today, so I begged for clarification.

I have next Friday off! It’s Caesar Chavez Day! Yay! *rub rub* (It’s also commonly known by non-County workers as, “What the hell is that?! Are you guys just making up holidays to take off?!”)