cindy's world

I don’t get it. I got up an hour earlier today than I have the rest of the week, and I’m later than I had been all week. What happens with the time in between getting ready and getting into my car? Do I step thru some warp zone? [Super Mario Bros. theme song plays]

I was re-reading my last post and I realized, I so can’t show my parents my blog! The way that entry reads, it seems just taken for granted that dating these days involve sexual intimacy before emotional intimacy. Can I make a louder announcement of “Hi, I’ll be in bed with you before I’m in love with you, if I ever fall in love with you at all, that is.” ?!

I thought that last entry was all rosy and shimmery, too. Maybe it’s just time to go home from work. Have a good evening, peoples. I LOVE YOU ALL!

A DA friend and I were conversing on the topic of the ease (or difficulty) with which our separate genders fall in love. (It was also a work-related phone call, I swear! Something about the 7-defendant murder and attempted-murder case he continued in my courtroom this morning.) I originally said without much thought that girls, the emotional creatures that we are, fall in and out of love all the time; we always think we’re in love. He said he feels it’s a rather rare thing because he’s not referring to the druggy intoxicated infatuation you have in the beginning with a new person, he’s talking actual deep love love. Which got me thinking…

How do you know when you’re in love? Is there some gradient scale your emotions can be measured against, like when you hear people say, “Well, I like him a lot, but it’s not quite there yet.” Or, “Just when I was starting to fall in love, he messed up and I’m back down to just liking him now.” Can you then say, “Whew, that was a close call! I almost fell in love but then I caught myself and now I’m cool!” ? I think I’ve said things like that.

Or do you know you’re in love when you pass that one test question, the litmus paper that defines you the way a pregnancy test does? “I love him so much I’d give up smoking for him.” “I love him so much that if someone shot a gun in his direction, I’d push him away and take the bullet myself.” An ex once said that to me (swapping out the “him”s for “you”s, of course). I found out soon thereafter that he was a compulsive liar by nature. Do you love him? Do you see yourself marrying him? Would you have kids with him? When you imagine a permanent future with him, are you happy or scared? If a magical dragon were to come out of the ground and grab him in one claw and all the chocolate in the world in the other and make you choose, would you choose him? What if it were him versus your pet? Him versus your figure? Him versus all your current assets and your money? What if he put on 60 pounds, went bald but everything else was the same?

The pressure! Good Lord, I’m stressed. *pant, pant*

But maybe it’s just like this. You open your eyes one morning, you see him peacefully sleeping next to you, you smile, your heart smiles, and the words just form in your head. “God, I love you.“

All Network Users:

ISTB Deputy Director for Infrastructure

I (along with the rest of courthouse employees county-wide) have no outside email, I’d left my cell phone at home due to my mad dash to work this morning, and our desk phones won’t let us call out of LA County except for a few geographically closer cities of Orange County.

I must say, it’s kinda nice. Kinda like a technological Walden’s Pond.

WARNING: Do not read this if you are in your 40s or 50s and sensitive about that fact.
(more…)

It’s cold out there, I have cramps, I’m fatigued, I got off of work late. I’m skipping jujitsu. But I’ll think about going to the gym. I was going to finally catch up on my Cancun entries, but now that I’ve logged on to everything and made myself available to people’s cyber arrows, I’m in a foul mood and I don’t feel like it anymore. I think I’m gonna just sit around in my bathrobe and read, or watch TV.
*smolder*
I love it when people start crap just so they can pin it on you. Real mature.

** Update 7:46pm **
I just had a very nice IM conversation with my godbrother. I haven’t talked to him in a while, and it wasn’t like we talked a lot before. But it’s really nice to find that you’re related, even if not by blood, to someone who makes you laugh so hard you cry, and who has the depth to be a good friend and tell you in a dark moment that he loves you instead of lecturing at you. That makes my whole logging on worthwhile. That and my other IM conversations with good friends. =)

I went back and forth about whether to post this for fear that Mr. W will get mad at me (or at the very least, be uncomfortable about it), but I figure heck, Diana recently posted her first and only photo on her blog and wrote something about the cute boy in her photo…

On Friday, I found myself alone across our hotel lobby bar from a cute guy. I figured there’s no harm in taking a photo, you know, for the women who read my blog, so I did. Unfortunately, the photo does not do the guy justice. Oh well. I tried, girls.

It occurred to me that as the flight back from SF lands at 2:55p, I could totally still make my usual visit to my parents’ house Sunday evening and they didn’t even have to know I was out of town all weekend. So I didn’t tell them. When I arrived, both parents were knocked out on various couches in the living room. We had dinner, then again, I fell asleep at their house in the living room and did not leave to go back to my house until about 1:30a. What is it about that place?! I should have the air checked.

I got home about 2a, took a shower, and since I was wide awake, I unpacked and downloaded my photos into my desktop and chose a few to put into my image hosting site online. Then at 3:30a, I finally felt sleepy enough to go to bed. I laid in my own bed for the first time in what felt like forever. But it made me smile to be back. I even let Dodo sleep on the ground next to my bed, since he seemed concerned that I’d be leaving again and wanted to be underfoot.

Today, back at work, same ol’ car accident trial. Spacey attorneys, awkward witnesses, irrate judge. Ah, home sweet home.

We wandered around the civic center location around the hotel in the morning (City Hall, courthouse, Asian Art Museum) and explored the Farmer’s Market across the street. The above photo depicts a bird picking up human trash in front of carved quote “We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.” This fountain was next to the Farmer’s Market across from our hotel. I liked the irony.

We had breakfast in our hotel lobby restaurant, checked out, missed our shuttle, hailed a cab, and got to the airport without further ado. In the security line, a guy about my age in front of me turned and asked if we were there to attend the USC-Cal game. I said we weren’t, and then said I’m a Bruin. He stopped talking to me and turned his back to me abruptly, rather snobbily. We all laughed, and then he said he was attending the UCLA-USC game in December. The rest of the overheard conversation at the airport was seemingly a bunch of Trojans talking trash about the game, we won, blah blah, we’re awesome, blah blah, we showed them, blah blah, we’re overprivileged and undereducated, blah blah.

Oh yeah. I did remember to give Mr. W the window seat on the flight back. I got to sit in the middle of the section next to a mother holding an infant with very healthy lungs. No, actually, the little baby girl was very cute. She was only loud for a couple of minutes.

Saturday started at like 7am. We were going to take the trolley ride to Pier 39/Fisherman’s Wharf, and see how we could fit Alcatraz into our day. The line at the trolley was way too long due to the SEA OF CRIMSON all over the freaking place. Yup. USC at Cal Saturday around noon. I could not believe the number of Trojan fans in SF for the game. No wonder the flights were booked, hotels were booked, and the traffic was horrendous. We ended up walking to the edge of Chinatown and grabbing a taxi to Pier 32. The line for Alcatraz was hideous, too. They were booked up all the way thru Monday, despite the fact that a ferry leaves for Alcatraz every half an hour. But here’s what we discovered. We can get a stand-by ticket, get in the very short stand-by line, and be on the very next ferry. Must be a well-kept secret. Of course, there were the usual disclaimers of “seating is not guaranteed,” etc.

Alcatraz was actually very interesting and pretty. The audio tour of the jails was pretty good. I guess. Except that I still feel “turn left and keep walking” is confusing because “left” is so subjective, and they should’ve stuck to “walk down the aisle toward the clock.” For those who have never done the audio tour or know anything about it, you wear a headset that plays a tape of the tour, and when you get to a particular spot in the jail, you press “play.” The tour begins to play and has really cool interviews with former inmates and sound effects of the jails, with some trivia information as it tells you where to walk and where to look as it introduces the jail to you. I found the escape attempts particularly engaging.

After Alcatraz, we explored Pier 39 and Fisherman’s Wharf. We walked by an oxygen bar place where for $20 you suck up scented oxygen for 10 mins as someone gives you a backrub, head massage and heated shoulder wrap (with props they sell and try to peddle off on you), and 10 minutes in a water massage chamber. I can’t say I felt much different after the oxygen, altho I hear it’s great if you have a hangover (which I still have never had). I didn’t buy any of the products because I have most of the stuff they sell already, or some version thereof.

We walked to a meeting spot outdoors by a giant Xmas tree in an open square closer to our hotel and met up with Diana and The Same Mystery Date from the nite before, but they were wearing different clothes, so I assume nothing inappropriate happened when we left them. =} Mr. W and I got to watch these 2 attorneys bicker about some insignificant thing that they’ve apparently been bickering about for the past 2 days, and then The Date was excused to attend his own dinner as we had dinner with Diana at an outdoor French restaurant called Cafe Bastille. Excargot, more wine, good entrees. Diana then gave us a car tour of the city. Mr. W’s camera snapped away at the Golden Gate Bridge, the Palace of Fine Arts (a gargantuan Greek-inspired structure with lots of pretty Corinthian columns), and we ended up at Diana’s favorite dessert place, a gourmet bakery-restaurant called Citizen Cake. There, the Mystery Date returned and Diana and I shared stories of our years living together, over dessert. Diana and Date shared, again, the same bickering argument they had earlier over the same topic. The bartender and I shared a conversation about how freaking cold it was for me in SF that weekend with the drizzle on Friday that we walked in, and the sunny but clear but cold low 60F weather on Saturday and Sunday. They all laughed at me for monopolizing Mr. W’s giant heavy coat all weekend, and the bartender (who was from Pasadena) said sympathetically that it took him years to adjust to the weather up north, too, altho this weekend was considered “warm and nice.”