cindy's world

I’m making major, major progress in organizing my bills. I finally grit my teeth and tossed years of statements for my utilities, cell phone, satellite TV, auto insurance bills. Just now I’m going thru a year’s worth of credit card statements and trying to match them to the year’s worth of receipts I’ve collected. I don’t know how I let my finances slide like that, but at least I still pay my bills in full on time, it’s just the organizing that’s behind. So I figured the quickest way to find receipts to go with the statements is to divide the receipts up, within their current categories of “food”, “gas”, and “miscellaneous”, into subcategories of which credit card they went with. There are some restaurants I can remember going to based on the dates, but I came across one for El Cholo Cafe in late August that I can’t imagine why I’d go to. It was just a couple of days before Mr. W and I rediscovered each other, and it was months after the ex and I stopped hanging out. So I thought, “I’ll check my blog!” Sure enough, there the answer was. I was having a miserable weekend having recently ending a potential something-or-other with someone, and my old trainer/roommate Brian had come over to my house to replace my garbage disposal for me, and I’d taken him out to dinner to thank him.

Ahh, the memories. =)

I love this blog thing.

Hey, yeah, I’m alive.

Today, I woke up at 9:30a and got out of bed with my radio alarm cranking out a morning show with 3 on-air personalities that I’ve come to be familiar with, and I walked into the bathroom intending to take a shower. Suddenly, hearing something interesting, I paused and backed out of the bathroom and went back into the bedroom to listen. Since I was just standing there, I may as well lay back down on the bed. The next thing I knew, I was waking up at 11:30a. Oh well. But I did manage to get lots of stuff done. Went to the bank (where I was told by the teller that a letter accompanying my new ATM card telling me all PIN numbers remain the same did, indeed, “lie”), went to Trader Joe’s and picked up stuff for my parents, Mr. W and for Jordan (all my loved ones get flax seed meal, haha), got a smog check for my car, went to the post office and got stamps, mailed out some bills DMV registration renewal and sent a package of flax seed meal out to Florida for Jordan, hand-delivered other stuff to Mr. W, went to Home Depot and got a garage door spring, and am halfway done with my Mother’s Day project.

I’m putting together this big photo collage in a multi-dimensional frame for Mother’s Day. Photos of my mom, proud with a month-old infant at age 24; laughing with her adult daughter pouncing on her back in front of a famous memorial in Taiwan; holding her young daughter up between herself and her husband in a national park. I’m going to do a counterpart for my dad for Father’s Day, also. I already some photos set aside of him sitting on a large rock with his year-old daughter asleep across his knees, rowing a boat with his young wife and daughter sitting at the other end… It wasn’t until starting this project that I realized how few photos I have of myself as an adult with my parents. I am so not hanging out with them enough. We should do more on my weekend visits aside from watching TV and having a home-cooked dinner. Maybe I can take them out and take some nice photos soon.

Nope, don’t miss work yet. I did call my coworker over the weekend to check up on him. This would be his first weekend without his girlfriend in a long time. He says it’s rough at home because it’s so quiet without her, but he’s hanging in there. Being at work helps because he can laugh and joke with people, but it’s a different story when he’s alone. I remember those days. I was so scared of the weekends and of the silence. That was one of the main reasons I took up jujitsu.

I just found out this morning that on Monday, the day when immigrants supposedly all ditched work to make a point about their impact on the country (altho around here, the only immigrants that participated that I know of are Hispanic), the traffic was so light due to their disappearance that the news did a segment on it. Los Angeles traffic that Monday was compared to the traffic of the previous 2 Mondays, and the previous 2 Mondays were light already due to Spring Break. But that Monday, it was even lighter than those days. I’m not sure if this is the impact on our community these immigrants meant to highlight.

It kinda just hit me this morning that my vacation is NEXT WEEK. Which means, after today, I’m off!

Vanessa’s not gonna be working next week, either, so we’ll probably goof off all week and, like, repair the garage door spring (that broke last nite) and do laundry and vacuum and stuff.

And Vicky, I gotta go up there and give you your bday present! Lemme know when you’re free.

P.S. Remember that one post about how I wish I could gripe about someone not doing something good, and then that someone would do something good and make me eat my negative words? It happened yesterday! Yay! I felt appropriately bad. I was griping to Jordan or Vanessa on the phone about how I got to Mr. W’s house to meet up before yoga and he was on his computer talking on his headset and didn’t even acknowledge me, and I’d been out in the living room for like 10 minutes and he still hadn’t come out even tho I’d nudged his chair 10 mins prior. When he did come out, he brought with him a 3-red-rose bouquet and said, “This is for you.” I asked what the occasion was, and he said he just chose Thursday because he knew I’d be going over for sure to meet up for yoga. Awww! I would’ve thought he got the idea from that prior blog entry, except that he doesn’t read my blog anymore and hasn’t for weeks, so I guess he gets full credit for that one.

Happy Birthday, Sandy!

Sandy is the very oldest friend I have in the world. She’s 30 today.

Wait. That came out wrong.

Sandy is the longest-time friend I have in the world. We go way back. She is my first friend in the United States, we met through my cousins Diana and Jennifer’s parents when Sandy and I were 6. We’ve seen each other through a hell of a lot of roller coasters, and even tho we may not talk all the time, we always pick up right where we left off when we do talk. Our parents used to have get-togethers for dinners, karaoke (during which we’d retreat upstairs and talk about boys), and fishing. We still have fishing horror stories that we share with our boyfriends when we all meet up. And sometimes one of us will recall something we had not reminisced on before, and trigger the other’s memory, and we’d laugh like a couple of lunatics.

At 30, Sandy, you’re more successful, more wise, more beautiful than you have been at your previous years. Regardless of what you may feel. Happy birthday.

Man, I should dig out an old photo of us at age 6 and post that. I’ll make that a project soon. Altho…nothing comes to mind. Did we not take any photos back then?! I can’t wait for Vicky’s bday around the corner. I KNOW I have photos of THAT!

Our trial yesterday ended at 4p, but I stayed at work till almost 6p to do more divorce files. I’m almost at goal. Blech. I didn’t get home till 6:30p, and by then, especially since Vanessa was home, stressed from work and wanted to treat herself to a nice dinner and drinks, I found it impossible not to ditch jujitsu again. I was starving and had a headache, anyway.

So we went to Market City Caffe where I had way too much wonderful fresh crusty bread, way too much creamy delicious Italian pasta, and way, way too much pinot grigio wine.

Obviously, we were too wired by then to just go to bed or something, so just as I was thinking about maybe watching a movie at home, Vanessa asked, “So what do you wanna do now?” I said, “Let’s go to Bed, Bath & Beyond!” It’s only a few blocks from my house. So we went there, learned it was closed, and instead went to…WalMart! Woohoo! Entering the megastore, Vanessa made a joke about oh no, we’re not gonna get out without spending hundreds of dollars, and altho I laughed, I had no intention of buying anything.

$150 later at the checkout (between both of us), we were remarking astoundedly to the friendly register lady how neither of us really expected to buy the massive quantities of scented candles, tea light holders, large mosaic photo frames, standing glass vase, DVD movies, long-necked lighters, Gatorade, low-rise panties, knee-high hosiery, incense holder, and other stuff I can’t remember cuz we were probably a little tipsy giggling down the aisles and admiring all the REALLY COOL and REALLY CHEAP STUFF that we NEEDED to buy RIGHT NOW in case they RUN OUT and we find we REALLY NEED THAT STUFF later on when it’s TOO LATE. It may be safe to infer that our judgments were a bit impaired. But that’s the beauty of WalMart. Sure, you can’t leave without spending a bunch of money you didn’t expect to spend, but you get, like, a billion items for the price. Costco works that way, too, but at Costco, you get a billion of the same products, in industrial-sized packages.

At one point, when I was clinging onto the shopping cart (we walked into WalMart without one, and I realized at some point early on we should have one; that was the beginning of the end), I had a moment of clarity and said, “I can objectively step away and observe that we are being really lame.” She said something about how being lame with someone else being lame is what’s fun about it. It reminded me of being a lame teenager running thru Thrifty (now Sav-On) with my friends Sandy, Vicky, Ling-Ling, cousin Jennifer, whomever was with me at the time, laughing and looking at all the really cool stuff we knew our parents would never let us buy. Like makeup and razors.

When I’d first gotten home and Vanessa had finished telling me about her most recent work drama, I said, “Boy, we picked a good time for moving in together.” She agreed, as the drama had been rotated between me, then her, then me, and then her, and having a friend at home made things so much easier.

Oh, I’d forgotten to mention in the post about the weekend that on Friday, we decided Vanessa would stay with me another month until her boyfriend moved down and they could find a place together. Yay!

A coworker found out some stuff yesterday that his live-in girlfriend had done on Monday, he was furious, and last nite went home and broke up with her. Just like that. Canceled their upcoming vacation cruise and flight and everything at nearly a $1300 loss. Today, he is fully functional, and when we search his face carefully and ask how he is, he says with no more than a rueful smile that it’s done, it’s over. He’d already taken her key and garage door opener back, she’d taken her stuff out of his place and left. Knowing her, she took the day off from work and is going thru emotional hell at her parents’ house.

I’ve always been astounded by and yet envious of people who can end a major relationship in their life and yet appear to shrug it off and move on immediately. How do they do that? I used to watch the characters on “Friends” break up with people with a hug and an “I’m sorry it didn’t work out,” “I’m sorry, too” exchange and they’d walk right back into the apartment, the other Friends would come give the breaker-upper a hug and a sympathetic rub on the back, and they’d move on to the next thing, just like that. I used to think, “That’s cuz it’s just a TV show, they only have 20 minutes to tell their story, they’re not gonna spend the entire episode on one cast member’s misery,” but then there really are people in the real world like that. The only time I’d been so emotionally nonchalant about a breakup was when I didn’t have much emotionally invested in the relationship to begin with.

Are men just not emotionally vested? It does seem that during times of physical separation, we tend to miss them a hell of a lot more than they’d even think of us.

Mr. W just emailed me a photo of me taken on Saturday that he’d manipulated. The photo was taken when the photographer was behind me, then she called my name and I turned to look over my right shoulder, and that’s when the camera snapped. Mr. W cropped the photo so that it’s my head down to part of my shoulders and back, and then he did some special effect on it that made it look like abstract green, yellow and black bold strokes comprise the photo. I don’t like how I look in that photo, even before he artsified it. My bailiff agreed, after looking over my shoulder, that it was not a good picture of me and it looks like I have a big jaw. I have other problems with this picture that I’m too embarassed to say on here. Mr. W, however, loves this photo. In his words, it’s “a photo [he] absolutely love[s].” And it’s now the wallpaper background on his gigantic-screened new laptop. Which he brings everywhere with him. Including work. Great.

I remember that Grace’s high school boyfriend Edgar (still one of my good friends now) took a close-up photo of her face that she hated. She was laying down on a couch or a bed or something and laughing, and the angle of the camera to her face made her have a massive double-chin. And Grace was skinny; she was always a size 0/1. She did not ordinarily have a double-chin. I’ve seen the photo and I had to agree with her that it is the most unflattering shot of her, ever. EVER. But she couldn’t get Edgar to get rid of it. He loved that photo, even had it framed and set it up next to his bed. “She looks so cute!” he’d said.

I don’t know. Maybe these men love us with or without external flaws, and don’t see us with the vanity-aimed eyes through which we view ourselves. Maybe they don’t even see the flaws we see. Or maybe they love our flaws — big jaws, double-chins, and all — because these flaws are part of the appearance they have learned to love in looking at their significant others.

And they say men are visual.

OMG, I feel SO GOOD now that those posts have been purged out of me! I feel like a huge weight has been lifted. I’m even light-headed right now. I can breathe!

Sometimes the weekend comes and goes, and if I don’t blog about it, I don’t blog about it. But I’d been meaning to memorialize this weekend because it was special to me in a few ways.

On Friday evening, I touched base with Navy Girl Vanessa as I drove home, and learned that she and her boyfriend (whom I had heard a lot about, but not yet met) were at Jamba Juice across the street from the Brea Mall. I got home, changed, and met them there. Then the three of us went to Brea Mall to buy our jujitsu friend Gloria a bday present for her party on Saturday. Since Vanessa paid for the present (a compilation of really cool massage oils, scented candles and lotions from Bath & Body Works), I paid for dinner to pay her back. We had a nice meal and laughter-drenched conversation at a Japanese restaurant close to the mall. Then we came back to my house and hung out in Vanessa’s room where we talked about roommates, cats, the history of religion and of the US as it concerns the middle east, and yes, I was schooled. Vanessa’s boyfriend is a well-informed guy. They left at about 1:30 a.m., right after Vanessa presented me with a 4-pack of Happy Bunny ankle socks. I laughed and said I love Happy Bunny! So now, underneath my black outfit and inside my black ankle boots, I’m wearing pink and turquoise socks that depict Happy Bunny saying, “Like I need YOUR approval.”

Saturday was a friend’s birthday party. Actually, it’s more Mr. W’s friend than my friend, altho I know her too and have met her even before Mr. W and I started dating. It was a beautiful day in Huntington Beach at her house with lots of people there, most of whom I’ve met before at other get-togethers, and a lot of whom I really like. I had a great heart-to-heart bonding conversation with an old friend and her husband. And even if there are troubles on my mind, nothing melts me and puts a smile on my face as surely as when Mr. W sat behind me on the raised stone BBQ pit I was using as a seat and put his arms around me and his face next to mine. There are 6-7 sequential photos of us taken at this time. I’d like to print them out and put them in a long frame that holds several photos so it looks like a filmstrip.

Sunday, my childhood friend Sandy brought her Costco date (she popped his Costco cherry that day so he could buy an Ipod Nano at a great Costco price) to Mr. W’s house and, as Costco date played XBox shooting games, the 3 of us set up our 3 laptops and networked, completing Sandy’s Raytheon project with Mr. W’s expertise in various programs that she and I don’t have and don’t know how to use.
At some point of this process, Mr. W’s daughter popped into the kitchen and complained about being hungry. So as Mr. W was finishing up the project with Sandy, I thought it’d be a good opportunity to take the daughter to grab dinner. I walked into her room and said, “We’re all gonna go eat Indian food for dinner.” She looked concerned. “But I’m not gonna subject you to that,” I continued. “Oh good,” she said, relieved. “So while they’re finishing up, I’m gonna take you where you want to get dinner, and we’ll just bring that back for you.” She choose McDonald’s, and we chatted all the way there, and all the way back, as she told me about her most recent social dilemma at school. And then the 4 grownups headed to a local Indian food restaurant.
The first and last time I tried Indian food was in high school. I was the officer of “International Club,” a social club aimed at exploring cultural diversity and awareness. The first year I was officer, we had a monthly social that would be organized by club members of a particular ethnic background. The month it was India, we watched a portion of a popular Indian soap opera, got a presentation and fashion show on Indian garb and jewelry, and of course, had their homemade Indian food. No one who attended the social that I know of could bring themselves to give Indian food a second chance. I verified this with Grace 10 years after the event. Nevertheless, I’d been saying that I’m willing to reopen my palette. Mr. W was also unenthused about eating Indian food, but agreed to give it another go, provided we find people to come with us who knew how to order. Turned out, Costco date and Sandy loved Indian food. And we had a great time, and yes, great food! I’m so glad we tried that again.