cindy's world

I made corn chowder last nite for dinner after jujitsu and settled down with a “Friends” DVD in the living room. The next thing I knew, it was 7:15am. I went upstairs, turned off my beeping alarm clock, and ignored the nearly audible voice chanting “Don’t lie down on the bed. Don’t lie down on the bed.” Next thing I knew, it was 8:15am. Argh.

This hampers my lunch plans. I didn’t get my morning shower in, so I’m gonna (this is so lame) go to the gym at lunch and shower there. Then I’m not going to work out, because I need to renew my passport at the local post office at lunch. Usually the post office is closed by the time I get off work. I am going to skip jujitsu tonite – even the simple back falls last nite hurt my back severely – so I can go to the gym after work. Then I’m gonna go home and vacuum the house, maybe tidy up a bit, sort and file my paid bills.

Ooh. Watch out, Cindy. You’re livin’ on the edge of the fast life.

I added a bunch of pages to this blogsite. See bar at right. Let me know if you guys enjoy them! They took me forever to put together and format. Especially the Latin one.

Both my wrists are tweaked and the right side of my lower back, an injury I’ve had for weeks, is now aggravated. Now add to the casualty list my left shoulder. I know what’s better for me is to skip jujitsu today and maybe even tomorrow, and just do cardio at the gym at lunch. I thought about doing this, and then I imagined not having anything on my plate in the evenings for the next 2 days if I skip jujitsu. The extra free time scares me. I had gotten to a point where I viewed my few hours of free time not as emptiness, but welcomed relaxation and opportunity to catch up on chores. I’m not sure whether it’s that my state of mind is not there anymore and has regressed, or that I can only deal with so much free time before I feel lost, lonely and scared in the vacuum of emptiness.

When I was a sophomore at UCLA, my cousin’s then-boyfriend Johnny was a freshman there and we were good friends. Johnny had this little Korean girl (also a freshman) who used to be his shadow. People would come up to me and ask what was up with Johnny and this girl, and I’d tell them nothing, they were just friends and they studied together a lot. I did personally suspect that at least one of them had other intentions about the other, tho. One day, Johnny and I were walking back to our respective apartments after class, and he seemed a bit down. Since I can’t remember that girl’s name, I’ll just call her Susie. “Susie told me today that she likes me,” Johnny said. We walked a few more paces. “That sucks, because now we can’t hang out anymore.”
“Why not?” I asked.
He looked at me in surprise. “Because! I have a girlfriend! I’m not going to be hanging out with a girl who has a crush on me, that’s just ASKING for trouble.”
At the time, I had never had a boyfriend before, and was unable to fully appreciate what Johnny was doing. I sensed that he was making a morally sound decision that did not serve him hedonistically, but that to him, it wasn’t even a matter of making a decision. It was one of those natural, common sense things to him; even tho it made him sad that he was losing a friend, he respected my cousin’s feelings and his relationship above all else. And my cousin didn’t even have to fight for or force this loyalty.
I often think about that conversation, less than a minute in its occurrence, and its enormous impact on me now. Now that my eyes have been darkened a bit more by life and experience, that moment with Johnny glows all the more ethereally in contrast.

We did free sparring today. I lined up with the instructor, got a few good hits in, he got a few good kicks and hits on me, and after a few rounds, I went in for a low punch, made the mistake of ducking my head doing that, and he grabbed the back of my head and pushed my head downward. “What’re you gonna do now?” he challenged. I did a front kick straight up and the back of my foot met with his left cheek. I dropped my foot but in my shock and horror at making this contact with his face, I just froze, wide-eyed, with my hands around my open mouth, and barely managed to gasp out “I’m sorry!” before I fell backward on my ass, having forgotten to regain my balance.
He at first looked shocked himself. “I didn’t expect you to be able to kick that high!” he said, and then he looked so proud.
“I thought you’d dodge it!” I declared accusingly.
He came up to me a few times after that in private and kept giving me props on my seeing an opening and taking it and getting the hit in, but I still feel bad.
Funny thing about backs – just when you think it’s healed, you fall on it a few times (unsuccessful jump kicks when the opponent’s captured my other heel in his hand) and now it’s giving me the sharp pains again. Oomph.

Yesterday while at work, I ate 3 giant cookies (m&ms, peanut butter and chocolate chip). That was my entire edible nutriment content from waking till 4:30pm. I got home, ate some of my mom’s fried rice that she made over the weekend and had me take with me (Asian moms are so good about trying to feed their kids for the week when the kids visit on the weekend), rested a bit, then flew off to jujitsu. On the drive back from jujitsu, I called up an old friend and we met at a Thai food restaurant where I had a red bean drink (whole milk tastes like creamer!), and we shared steamed mussels and some sort of steamed Thai spring rolls. For the small volume of food I ingested, I estimate I took in 2300 calories. Good gawd! I told myself that as I’m already bloated from the In-N-Out Burger I had on Sunday, I need to take it easy on food for the remainder of the week.

So this morning when I got to work, I only ate one giant cookie. Chocolate chip.

I think I AM making progress in jujitsu, despite what my bruises and missing hunks of flesh seem to say about me. There were some new people in the class last nite and I found myself giving them instructionals and quick tutorials as we were going up for a throw or a spar against each other. I have a natural “teacher” in me, but it’s that I felt competent enough to pass on some knowledge that I was kinda surprised about. We learned a few new defensive-turned-offensive moves which ended with arm bars placed on the attacker, and as I was watching 2 people in my sector practice this move, the main instructor walked up to me and said discreetly, “I want you to learn some of these moves for use in competition.” Well, I have a year. Should be no problem. I haven’t even been in class a month yet and I’ve already got some moves I could do in my sleep.

* I watched “Dance With Me” this weekend. Altho I enjoyed the choreography, I was NOT impressed by the presentation of the love story between Vanessa Williams’ Ruby character and Chayanne’s Cuban Rafael character who worked in the dance studio Ruby was competing for. The pivotal scene was set at a finals ballroom dance competition in Las Vegas (Vegas has been popping up EVERYWHERE lately, it’s been making me sick) in which Ruby hooked up w/her old dance partner to compete, and the partner is a jerk but the father of her young son, and at the last dance her legs were cramping and she couldn’t continue anymore but she looked out into the audience and saw Rafael and their eyes met, and she started crying, and he encouraged her by swaying gently to the music as if he were dancing with her and she closed her eyes and imagined she was dancing with Rafael instead of her actual partner. She looked horrific in this scene, really scary, with her mouth open all teethy and her raccoon eyes stage makeup and her shiny tears all messing up her face. But I sobbed and sobbed and sobbed, and I didn’t know why. Cuz I certainly couldn’t relate.

* I also watched some other TV show, a sitcom, I believe, that was so unimpressionable on me that I can’t remember what it was, but there was a declaratory love scene that made me cry. I remember sitting on my couch going, “What is WRONG with me? This is a freaking comedy, for gosh sakes!”

* Driving home from work today, “I Still Believe” played over the radio and I started singing along to it, but soon I welled up and couldn’t continue singing. Just listened to the song with tears running down my cheeks.

* After “I Still Believe,” the radio thought to really bring it up with some R&B song I’ve never really listened to the lyrics before, but basically it’s some girl singing about how she heard a friend calling her name the other day on the street and she turned and was surprised to see someone from her past. They went for lunch and they caught up on each other’s lives, they reminisced about his old habits when he was with her, his bad habits now, and he showed her photos of the girl he’s now with. She thought she was over him but all these feelings came back and she thought to herself, “I’m still not over you,” etc. Does anyone know this song? Anyhow, I cried thru that one, too.

* I keep having very vivid dreams of being involved in a new but very safe, loving, romantic situation with men who are already in my life. It’s very confusing when I wake up.

If I connected the dots, what picture is my subconscious forming here?

Sunday afternoon, I went to the Shoshin Ryu Region 1 Kata Contest that 2 teams from my jujitsu dojo were competing in. I’m so proud of them – they competed as green belts (they were initiated green belts just before the contest) against brown belts and took away first and second place in the adult division. It was fun to see what the competition is like. They were egging me on to compete for next year.

I took a bunch of photos, but here’s my beef with the digital camera. 1.) The delay between clicking and the actual photo taking is over a second, and by then the move’s already done and I ended up with a bunch of photos of them getting up from a fall, not of them in mid-air. 2.) I put in fresh batteries when I got to the site, and 38 photos later, I was running out of juice and the battery symbol was flashing. 3.) It takes too long for the flash to recover in between shots. Not that the flash works well anyway; it barely illuminates to the middle of the gym.

As I was driving out after the contest, I got a call from my instructor asking me to join the other instructors for an In-N-Out burger. I was craving In-N-Out because I saw a bailiff walk in with it at lunch last week, so how could I resist? I am now so bloated that it looks like I have puffy ciabatta bread dough wrapped around my lower abdomen.

Sandy and I were sitting at the bar at BJs Restaurant Brewery in Brea, pigging out on loaded nachos, spinach-artichoke pizza, margarita and beer. I was listening to her tell me, all aglow, about her new boyfriend. And then we were interrupted by an older (mid-late 40s) white guy sitting on her left (she had her back turned to him to talk to me) who tapped on her shoulder while we were in mid-conversation, and when she turned, he asked if he could take the menu that was sitting on the bar. Why couldn’t he just take it?! It was on the rack at the bar, it wasn’t in front of her. I knew he was doing the lead-in and I rolled my eyes. We went back to talking. He tapped her again. She turned. “I’m sorry for interrupting you,” he apologized to her. She said, “Oh, it’s okay” and waved it off dismissively. I glared at him. We went back to our conversation. He let almost half an hour go by this time before he tapped her on the shoulder again. I couldn’t hear their conversation over the bar noise, but she told me when she turned back that he wanted to know her situation, whether she was with anyone because he didn’t see her talking to any guy. No shit, she was talking to me. She told him she does indeed have a boyfriend. This guy was seriously on my nerves now. I would never interrupt 2 strangers’ conversation to ask stupid questions. He couldn’t talk to her when I had gone to the bathroom?! About 10 minutes before we left, he once again tapped her shoulder. They talked for about a minute, he handed over a scrap of paper. She told me he said, “I know you said you have a boyfriend, but you never know what the future will hold. If your situation changes or if you want, call me.” Now I was so annoyed (PMS helped) that as we stood to leave, I said extremely loudly as I walked by him, “What a LOSER! Why doesn’t he just open with ‘Hi, I’m desperate and old and have an Asian fetish’?” It’s men like this. Have some self-respect! And do you really want a woman who’ll cheat on her boyfriend?! Sandy said, as she wadded up his name and number and tossed it at a trash can, that he’s just thinking with his dick, he’s not looking for his next wife, and that there are plenty of women who would indeed call a man like that when she’s fighting with her boyfriend or when she’s bored and a man like him would say, “Hey, it’s not my problem. She called ME, I didn’t tell her to cheat.” THIS is why I have no faith in people and relationships.