cindy's world

Upon my return to the courtroom after lunch today, my bailiff sauntered up to my desk and said, “So this is the last day you’re 28.” ACK!

That…was…AWESOME!!! =) =D
And when was the last time I used that word? 6th grade?

My dad was right; the first thing they teach you in jujitsu is how to fall. That made me a bit nervous because of how sore I was from overtraining last Saturday. The half-hour stretching and warmups to kick off the class totally loosened me up, however, and I was fine. After drills of falling back, falling left, falling right, and getting back up in fighting stance, we learned how to turn a defense move into an offensive one by using the attacker’s own momentum against him. I’m gonna need more exposure to get the “feel” of movement. It makes total logical sense to me about transferring the momentum in an arc, the arm twists and the regaining of control. I’m just gonna need time for it to become second nature. I’m gonna have plenty of chances to do that, because the instructor asked me to go in tomorrow evening for the more advanced class. I think I will, just to expose myself more.

The chemistry of the class was great. We had a mix of levels, altho it was a beginner’s class, and everyone was very nice and helpful and seemed to have good senses of humor. I put on my open-minded outgoing clowny persona and it faired well with the class. I hung out after the class and watched some of the more seasoned students practice grappling with each other. Their throws and combinations look really cool. (I did some “throws” and was “thrown” a bit too, but those were more like controlled rolls.) The instructor was very nice and seemed to take a genuine interest in my learning.

As a social observation, it is endlessly fascinating to me how in a new environment with complete strangers, we (I assume I’m not peculiar in this) instantly cubbyhole people into caste categories we’re familiar with. There are the girls we’d want to hang out with, girls you know are gonna be at the bottom of the skill level, guys whose skills you admire and would want to hang out with, guys who are around your level and would probably end up being the guys you hang out with, and guys who are creepy and you want to stay away from. One creepy guy stood around too close to my personal space and had his top off for way too long while he was changing between T-shirt and the martial art robe top, whatever those are called. One guy in the “guys you admire” category instantly caught my eye because he looks like a (much) better looking version of someone I had once taken a fancy to. I also chatted w/the instructor and 2 other more advanced students after the class and made some new friendships.

Sometimes you’re somewhere you just know you’re supposed to be.

I had lunch today with a coworker, and across the table at the restaurant, he said, “I was watching a movie this weekend and a character totally reminded me of you.” I asked what movie, and he couldn’t think of the name right away, and said it was a cartoon. I first thought of MTV’s “Daria” because a friend I had long ago had told me that my sullen sarcastic personality is like the Daria character. My coworker said it’s a Disney movie. I said, “Lilo & Stitch?” I’ve had a couple of people mention to me when Lilo & Stitch first came out that in childhood, I must’ve been like Lilo. Imaginative in a twisted sort of way. He said that’s not it. I knew what was coming.

“Oh, it was Mulan!”
“So did the personality of the character remind you of me, or was it the way she looks?”
“It was her looks.”

I told him that another coworker had watched the movie with her husband when it came out years ago, and at a scene when she let her hair down and was again “Mulan the girl,” both the coworker and her husband said simultaneously, “That’s Cindy!” The coworker I was having lunch with agreed but he couldn’t identify which scene it was that it hit him how much Mulan resembled me.

It was probably the scene where she transformed into a man.

What do “gams” refer to, anyway? Butt or legs? Both? Well, both apply.

Wow, I missed a day of posting for the first time since I started this blogsite. I got home really late last nite (or rather, early this morning) and yet I still chose to take a shower before bed, which kept me wide awake so I decided to read Calvin & Hobbes to relax me into sleep. That didn’t happen until 3a.m. and I got up early enough to still be at work this morning just a few minutes after 8a.m. Ugh. (“This early to bed, early to rise thing sucks,” I told a friend this morning. My friend said, “You’re supposed to go early to bed the night before, not the same morning.” I retorted, “Well, they did not make that clear in the quote!”) I think I’ll skip the lunchtime workout today and take a nap. I’ve got 2 hours of jujitsu after work today anyway.

How’m I gonna get thru my first jujitsu class when I can’t even bend my knees very far? Walking down the stairs was so difficult this morning. List of muscles that hurt, bottom-up: calves, quads, hip adductors, middle/lower back, front deltoids.

A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes
From Disney’s “Cinderella”

A dream is a wish your heart makes
When you’re fast asleep
In dreams you will lose your heartaches
Whatever you wish for, you keep
Have faith in your dreams and someday
Your rainbow will come smiling through
No matter how your heart is grieving
If you keep on believing
The dream that you wish will come true

I pick up my mail once every 4-5 days because my annoying neighbors like to sit in their open garage and sometimes their kids’ creepy friends are over and they smoke (sometimes weed) in the garage and stare at me or are rather rude, and I have to walk by all of them to get to the collection of mail boxes. So after a hard day at work, the last thing I want to do is feel self-conscious or fake being social to get mail. So I tell myself I’ll wait till everyone’s back in their house and I’ll pick up mail later on in the evening. Usually I forget.

The mailman today left a note at my front door on which he’d handwritten “IF YOU DON’T START PICKING UP YOU MAIL ONCE A WEEK YOU WILL BE PICKING IT UP AT THE POST OFFICE”. I’m gonna avoid the obvious crack about the “you” and get to the meat of the matter: Can he even legally follow through w/that threat? I mean, don’t they have some sort of legal duty? And I DO pick up my mail at least once a week, but that’s aside from the point.

I had a great workout at the park. Crunches lying upside-down UPHILL (feet can’t touch the ground!), prone cobra raises lying facing downhill, sprints, push-ups, step-up lunges off the picnic table bench w/combined knee raises, side-hops, squats on those air balance disks while on a slope, on and on… in circuits… I only almost passed out once! Great job and thanks, Trainer Guy. Can’t wait to see how I feel tomorrow.

I had a roommate the first half of 2003 who was/is an excellent and creative certified personal trainer at 24 Hour Fitness. He emailed me a couple of weeks ago saying he knows I have a b-day coming up at the end of the month and what would I like for my b-day? From him? What else? I wrote that I wanted free personal training. Of course this is considered theft of 24 Hour Fitness resources if we do it at a gym that employs him. Here’s the email conversation (in pertinent part only):

Trainer: If you want we can do more functional training at like a park or something like that.
Me: I’m game!
Trainer: I think I am gunna find somewhere with big hills hehehehe
Me: sounds good to me!
Trainer: okie time to dig out my torture devices, lol
Me: hey, if I wanted to be lazy and have an ineffectual workout, why would I even contact you? I’d just sit around at home and eat lard.
Trainer: lmao, cause you would never do that unless someone put you in a severe depressive state

I love how well my friends know me.
So training this afternoon at 2:30 at a (fairly) local park. I hope I can do a pull-up and not embarass myself.

While pedaling on the stationary bike at lunchtime, I had a great chat with a public defender in our building about our childhood OCD quirks. It’s nice to know that I wasn’t the only one who had to read every single word in a book and absorb everything before I’d allow myself to go on to the next line, or who had to do something a certain number of times before feeling comfortable that the task is done. Altho I may still carry a touch of OCD on things (such as math-related things which is why I avoid math so much), it seems both he and I overcame our general OCD stuff by sheer will in early adolescence. We told ourselves that this was getting ridiculous, we were gonna break ourselves of the habit, and just sit thru the anxiety attack resulting from NOT giving in to the compulsion until we see that there is no negative effect to not eating M&Ms in even numbers, for example. (That one’s not mine.) It was a great conversation as we laughed at ourselves, and I even stayed on the bike 15 minutes longer than I’d originally planned to just because the conversation was so entertaining. I bid him adieu with, “See ya later, you freak.”

There are an unusually high number of emotionally miserable people out there right now. Not just my friends and coworkers, but it seems friends of friends, or random strangers whose blogs I stumble across, are going thru relationship crap. I just came back from running a favor for the judge I’m working with today. A woman where I was at detained me to utilize some of my counseling skills and vented about a guy she just ended things with. Familiar stories all around. I gave her some suggestions on how to move forward from her situation, and am gonna help her w/some mild hand-holding, such as going to a spa and pampering ourselves sometime in the near future. Maybe I went thru all this crap so people around me could benefit from my experience. I dunno.

My supervisor suggested the other day that Spring yields some discontent because it’s the season people expect great things, and instead it’s been gloomy and it’s hard to watch your friends get married while you feel you’re nowhere on the relationship track (I guess a lot of weddings take place in Spring). I’m struggling every day for my emotional stability, and some days it’s easier than others. But we are all works in progress.