Sometimes, when I have those really brief moments when I miss home and contemplate moving to be closer to my parents, I am brought back to reality quite abruptly when my mother decides to pick a fight with me over something completely inane and caused by herself.

My dad informs me over the phone today that my mom has planned a dinner for us with her loser Jehovah’s Witness friend and her best friend and husband next Wednesday. I told my dad that I was never informed of this plan and had already made dinner plans with my friend and her husband. My mom snatches the phone from my dad and says that I cannot prioritize “outside people” before her and that I do not care about her and do not realize how depressed she is. Just because she seems okay does not mean she is. I simply said, I already made plans. I am not cancelling them. This is far from the first time this has happened.

I don’t know if she will ever realize that I am not going to cancel on everyone else in my life just to accommodate her no-reason schedule that she just assumes she gets to create and the rest of the world must revolve around. Ed didn’t want to deal with it anymore, so he left us. I don’t want to deal with it anymore, either.

I really think it’s a sign of age when you realize that you can’t eat anywhere as much as you used to before. Tonight, my best friend and I had cheap, delicious hand-pulled noodles Henan-style at Spicy Village, then proceeded to Kung Fu Tea for hot taro bubble tea and shared half-off egg custard tarts from Manna House Bakery. And I felt so stuffed that I couldn’t really sleep very well. Actually, it took me three hours to fall asleep. And then I woke up feeling sluggish and disgusting.

Once upon a time, that would not have been that much food. But when lying in bed, I could just feel the food sitting there, sticking to my stomach, making me regret getting that bubble tea (but not the noodles or egg tart). Oh, age.

Last night before bed, I started reading Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie. It’s a memory play I’ve always wanted to read, especially after I really enjoyed Streetcar Named Desire. I was only ten pages into it but already felt like Laura, one of the four characters in the play, reminded me of Ed. Laura is the main character’s older sister, and she experiences some illness at a young age that results in her being disabled for the rest of her life. Because of this, she also is extremely fragile mentally. The way she responds to things is like the more feminine version of my brother.

I went to sleep and dreamt that I was home again, and to my surprise Ed was there. I kept thinking in my mind, he is still alive? And suddenly we start having a conversation during which he tells me that he has just ten more days to live before he will take his life. He continues about his business in the house, reading his Bible, cutting and eating fruit, going to the bathroom to floss. I sit there and don’t do anything. I just think. I think of all the ways that I can prevent him from taking his life in the next ten days. Maybe we can do some activity together that I know he will love, and in his moment when he is about to jump, he remembers how much fun we had just a few days before and decides he wants to do that again! Or maybe I can have him listen to Shania Twain and ask him, is this really the last time you want to hear that amazing voice? Or maybe on the tenth day, I could just prevent him from escaping my presence, tackle him, and then just sit on top of him and not get up. Well, it may have worked. Who knows.

I woke up and felt distraught and unmotivated, so I skipped the gym. Again. In reality, he really did succeed in leaving me. I wonder what it would have been like if ten days before July 22, I really did know for sure that he would leave me forever.

We’re all bad listeners. Even if we say we are good listeners, we’re all really just crap at it. Even quiet people who claim to be great listeners still want to be heard; their struggle to speak is just more silent. We’re human beings; that’s the way we are programmed.

One of the worst feelings, though, when having a conversation, is when you are cut off, and not just cut off once, but repeatedly – over and over and over again. This happened a number of times during a three-way conversation today among me and two other men today. Initially, I thought, these jerks. They’re doing this because I’m the only woman in the conversation! I can do this, too! So I started cutting them off. But as I stood there and observed, I realized that they were doing the same exact thing to each other. It led to a number of misunderstandings, which I was able to clear up at the very end of this conversation that really should have lasted about 1/4 of how long it did last.

Everyone really just needs to shut up and listen. It’s not going to kill you to wait a few extra seconds and listen to what the other person has to say. I feel exhausted.