cindy's world

I’ve got this horrible nauseating feeling deep down between the back of my throat and my chest that seems to be pulling down into my stomach. I developed it on my drive back to work from the gym earlier, probably around 1:15p. I just took my heartrate. My normal resting heartrate is about 66, 67. It’s 103 right now. I feel sick and really, really nervous. Taking deep breaths doesn’t seem to be shaking it.

Am I having an anxiety attack?

I hope nothing’s wrong with my loved ones. That’s what it feels like. Anxiety and dread.

So yesterday, from like 4am to 10pm, the film crew for the upcoming CBS law-drama series “Shark” filmed portions of their pilot episode in and around my courtroom. The director is Spike Lee and the main star is played by James Woods. Apparently, this series is about a defense attorney (James Woods) who switched sides to become a prosecutor after a sports star he successfully got acquitted of attempted murder against the sports guy’s wife went home and then murdered his wife. I heard they turned our jury room into a jail interview room with gray wall panels and a prop door change, and they filmed outside our courtroom in the hallway, in front of the courthouse and downstairs in a hall off the main lobby area. A props woman came by to study my desk and apparently commented on the photos of Dodo I have all over my bulletin board. She told the sheriff here on security that she liked my desk, and how you can’t learn this stuff unless you see the real thing. Maybe in a future episode, they’ll show a clerk’s desk on the camera and it’d look exactly like mine. Little invasive aliens all over my PC and all.

Don’t you guys just want to watch this show now? I swear, I’m not being paid for this publicity.

I spent a few hours with my dad at my parents’ house last nite. My mom wasn’t there, she was, from what I could gather, at some political event banquet with my grandmother (her mom). My dad was watching some Chinese-English hybrid movie that was kinda like classic Chinese horror meets “The X Files.” I was totally creeped out driving home alone.

The movie reminded me of when I had to walk through UCLA alone in the dark. There’s a portion of a tree-lined walk on the edge of campus between one side of the fenced-off football practice field and the tennis courts. I’d always get the heebie jeebies walking thru there (it’s usually fairly isolated) at night cuz I’d be picturing dead people hung on the trees and dropping down, various supernatural nightmare creatures watching me and planning their moment of strike, etc. To make myself feel better, I’d remind myself of what my dad had said to me. “You’re scared of ghosts?! There’s nothing scary about ghosts! Now people, THEY’RE scary!” People are more vicious and cruel than any ghosts, but people are less intimidating in my head, so I’d feel better. I usually could keep myself from breaking into a panicked run.

2 minutes left of the second half. #2 UCLA leads #1 Memphis by (I think) 8 points. I screamed. “You’re really loud when you’re watching your school play,” Mr. W observed. “It’s the only time I’m loud watching anything on TV, so JUST LET ME BE!” I hollered. My cell phone rang. It was college roommie Diana, at the basketball game in Oakland. “It’s crazy here!” she yelled. “There are so many Bruins here! I’m gonna let you listen to this!” I put my cell phone on speaker and got the stereo effect of the stadium chaos through both the TV and the cell. “We’re 2 minutes away from the Final Four!” I yelled into the phone. “WHAT?! I can’t HEAR YOU!” she yelled back.

I thought back to the last time “Final Four” meant anything to me. It was just 3 months ago, at Christmas with Mr. W in Vegas. We were hanging out at his brother’s house playing “Cranium.” The teams were split girls vs. boys, and Mr. W’s brother’s wife, brother’s daughter, and I were playing against Mr. W, his brother, and the bro’s daughter’s boyfriend. The card we drew for our next question had the clue “college sporting event,” and we had to unscramble a word. “They’re not gonna get this,” Mr. W said confidently as he handed us the card and flipped the hourglass timer. We stared at it. College sporting event? Like football? The letters weren’t right. Suddenly, out of nowhere, I heard myself scream, “FINAL FOUR!” The boys’ jaws dropped. Uh-huh. And the reason I knew the answer was because of the first time “Final Four” meant anything to me.

1995. I was a college freshman at UCLA. Bruins Basketball was doing very well, and we just got a ton of merchandise into the Student Store commemorating Sweet Sixteen, Elite Eight, and then Final Four. I considered buying some of this merchandise, but thought I’d wait to see how far we go cuz then, the Asian thrift gene reasoned, I could buy the previous elimination category stuff at a discount. I was doing laundry in my freshman year apartment when we won NCAA Championships in 1995. I had been watching the game on and off between doing laundry, and I somehow missed the final few seconds. I was carrying my load from the laundry room back to the apartment, walking across the outdoor quad in the middle of the apartment complex, when all around me, cheers and screams broke out and echoed all the way to the top level and out of the complex. The next day, I went to the Student Union and purchased my navy blue 1995 NCAA Champions cap. But that year was the last time the Bruins made it to the Final Four.

Until now. The final score was 50-45, UCLA. I was sweating and cheering in my chair at Mr. W’s house watching the TV set explode with Bruin excitement, and I had my UCLA roommate and other UCLA alumni and friends screaming and chanting “FI-NAL FOUR! FI-NAL FOUR!” through my cell phone, still on speaker, resting on the armrest. I said to Mr. W with my eyes gleaming I’m sure, “I’m so glad I went to a major university!”

I am SO fighting the urge to yell across the courtroom at our 14 jurors, “So did any of you guys see the UCLA game last nite?” I can’t seem to stop talking about it with random people who come through the courtroom. The judge and all the attorneys in our trial are at a sidebar conference in the judge’s chambers right now, with the door closed. I’ll keep fighting it a bit longer.

I can’t believe Diana’s gonna be at Saturday’s game! I so don’t expect her to have a voice on Sunday.

It’s been 10 YEARS, Bruins, 10 YEARS. I’m gonna drive up to UCLA to buy Final 4 (and hopefully championship) gear if they make it this weekend against #1 Memphis. My 1995 NCAA Championship cap is feeling lonely!

“I see you’re gloating in your school’s victory,” my judge said just now, walking into the courtroom.

Of course I’m wearing a navy suit with a gold top inside today. Just when you think the Texas win was gonna be “the” big finish of NCAA, UCLA does something even more amazing! Truthfully, I’d lost hope when UCLA could not close the 10+ point gap against Gonzaga (coming in with a 20-game victory streak) throughout the basketball game. It occurred to me that the voice mail greeting I had put on my cell phone before the game, something to the effect of “Hi, this is Cindy. If you’re a UCLA fan, please leave a message and I will call you back. If you’re not cheering for UCLA, don’t even bother leaving a message because I won’t call you back until NCAA is over”, would be retarded when we lost and I’d have to change it right after the game before people started calling me to harass me about the loss. But the first time UCLA took the lead was with less than 30 seconds left in the game, and they kept it through some unlikely moves. CrAzY! Like they say, it’s not about how you start the game, it’s how you finish it that counts.

I also really liked the fact that when Gonzaga’s star player Adam Morrison collapsed in tears on the court floor, it was a UCLA player Arron Afflalo who walked over and helped him up from the floor and made sure he was okay. The two of them almost got into a fight at one point on the floor with the fouls and elbow-throwing, and then when it came down to the end, the victor chose to help instead of rubbing the victory in. At a post-game interview, Adam Morrison (known for not just being a phenomenal player, but also for his trash-talking on the courts) said humbly that “that’s just a sign of great people and great players. It’s more than basketball.”

All right, I’m rounding off this week and just tossing it away as a designated failure. I’ve worked out twice — weights at lunch on Monday and jujitsu Tuesday afternoon. I skipped the gym today at lunch because of some more of the same style idiocy and I felt alone and frustrated in this, and now I don’t think I can go to jujitsu tonite, either. I’ll just get my ass kicked all over the room. So I guess this week’s a loss where health and body is concerned, I’m just gonna buy laundry detergent and do laundry and vacuum and hang out with my cat and veg out.

Last night’s dream:

I received a phone call from Grace. She was gonna come over and visit. Grace! I thought she’d passed away due to leukemia! Or…wait…was that just the prognosis, and not the actual event? I vaguely seem to remember something about a treatment or a misdiagnosis or something…I didn’t want to admit over the phone with her that I thought she’d died because I hadn’t kept up with the news of her health condition. What kind of friend would I be? She came over, and I hugged her, so glad to see her. I may have said something about her ailment, because I felt her tears on my shoulder as she recalled how hard that phase of her life had been. She told me about a turn of events that seemed vaguely familiar, some medical procedure that discovered that she actually didn’t even have leukemia, it was something else that made her sick with symptoms similar to that of leukemia, and they were taking care of that and she was nearly completely recovered. [Interruption: I just realized where I got this memory confusion from. Stevie Wonder’s dog was initially diagnosed with canine leukemia, but through a barrage of tests, they found that it wasn’t leukemia after all, and altho that’s good news, they at the same time weren’t really sure what it was. When Stevie Wonder called me to tell me this most current news, I felt tremendous relief, suddenly followed by, “Wait. Huh? Then what’s going on now? They don’t know?”] So we hung out a bit and chatted, I think her mom — her overjoyed, loving mom — was also there, and an unknown smaller/younger male, who was a family member or a close friend of the family or something. Grace and her mom left, and this male and I were discussing, and then I realized that I distinctly remember knowing that Grace was cremated. I remember Grace’s husband, mother and her close friend who had been at the cremation site had talked about how her husband had removed her ring, but let her bridal bouquet burn with her. I started to see flashes of real-life memory: Grace’s ashes in the palm of my hand as I scattered them in the ocean at her request, at the site where her wedding would have been in Laguna Beach. Her mother standing around the rocky bend from us at beachside, unable to bring herself to watch her daughter being scattered by sister, best friends, husband, father. Altho I wasn’t at the actual cremation, I slowly realized that this girl who acted and looked just like Grace, couldn’t have been Grace. It must’ve been some amazingly convincing robot or advanced hologram. I had no clue who’d try to fool us that way, or why. The boy and I discussed how we couldn’t tell Grace’s mom, look how happy she is to have her daughter back! She’s in complete denial, it’d be not only difficult, but extremely painful, to burst her bubble.

Blech. The whole morning has me rattled and I’m just insecure and feeling…blech. I tried to make myself feel better by putting more effort into my appearance, trying to bring up the confidence level. But still. Blech. I have no idea what the dream means.

My brain has associated certain songs with certain frames of mind. A mixed CD (remember mixed tape days?) I listened to a lot in late 2002, early 2003 when I was single was playing in my car this morning as I drove to work. Cranking up the volume in these songs, I could reinvoke a fraction of the euphoria I felt “back in the day”.

It was a pretty high drive to work…until a DA almost killed me by driving backwards the wrong way up an aisle in the parking structure at a high speed without looking behind her.

And to think, this morning I sat there sadly looking at the low number of entries I’ve written so far this month (sidebar), and wondered what it is I can possibly blog about.