I went out to Forest Hills today to attend a friend’s housewarming party/baby shower. Since Chris is traveling internationally, I went on my own. And I’d never really felt more unattached than when I showed up at this party, where literally everyone, with the exception of the host’s two single friends, his mother, and his grandmother, were all paired up. I’m generally a social and outgoing person, but at this party, pretty much no one wanted to talk to me because everyone seemed to be glued at the hip to their plus-one/boyfriend/girlfriend/husband/wife. The people who ended up talking to me were 1) the host obviously and 2) the two single male friends who came. One of the friends was familiar to me since I met him the last time I came to this friend’s house for a dinner, and so he ended up latching onto me, for better or for worse. We clearly had very little in common, so it was a nice break when the second male friend arrived and could change up the conversation topics. I got asked a few times where my husband was… not because anyone knew Chris, but because they saw the wedding band/engagement rings on my left hand. Go figure that everyone is going to want to size me up to some degree.

I don’t really think about being married that often in a social context because…. I suppose I’ve never really had to think about it. Chris and I are not the couple who attends an event and cannot be separated. In fact, we tend to break off pretty often, and sometimes it seems like he’s just more social when I am not there. But I could tell that the host’s friend who latched onto me was very cognizant of being single in a party where pretty much everyone was paired off. And I’m sure it made him feel self-conscious and perhaps even made him question his self-worth.

We don’t really live in a society that’s progressive enough to not judge people who are single by their early- to mid-30s sadly. I wish it didn’t have to be this way. But we live in a judgmental world. Just because someone is dating someone or married to someone doesn’t necessarily mean that he’s a better person or more “put together” than someone who is not paired off. I don’t think I will live to see the day when this is not a measure we have to hold ourselves against.

My dad is not the kind of person who shows his emotions. He’s the stereotypical Asian male, the one who is usually stoic, sticks with the facts and the tasks at hand and never tries to enter the realm of feelings and inner thoughts.

I sent him this article from the New York Times about a successful woman who experienced her own stroke quite young, the same article I wrote about last week. I said to him over email, hey, sometimes, even when you think you are healthy and are doing the right thing, things happen, and you need to treat them with urgency.

He replied back with something along the lines of, “Luke Perry’s situation was probably more complicated than that. He was likely on drugs!”

I responded, eh. Should we really be that quick to assume drugs were responsible for this? I’m not fully sure?

My dad’s last response to me on this via email: Even if you think you are healthy because you’re eating relatively healthily and exercising regularly, if you work in an office full of politics and have a stressful work life, then you aren’t healthy!

I stared at that short and sweet email for a while. He’s basically saying to me… that that is my life. That’s probably Chris’s life.

Then, I thought about all those times my dad has always said that working for someone else is always going to be terrible because you are at the beck and call of someone else. You are constantly serving someone else and not yourself, that the best way to live is to work for oneself because you can run your life the way you want it and don’t have to answer to anyone.

Before I left to go back to New York on this last trip home, he said, “Remember to take care of yourself,” with a stern voice. My dad worries about me. I know he does because my mom always tells me that he wonders if I am getting enough sleep or am stressed out from work… because they know I would never tell them if it was bad.

My dad is right, though. Working for someone else really does suck… especially when you have officially gotten recognized for being a top performer and are not rewarded proportionally for it.

It’s a small world we live in, but this small world certainly has a lot of people… a lot who are smart, and even more who are dumber than dumb. The worst people, to me, are the ones who feel entitled to whatever they get or want.

I had a pretty sour end to the last company I was employed at. To this day, I only actively keep in touch and spend time with one person from there. Everyone else… I truly could care less about. But when I left, only a very small handful of people reached out to me to be cordial. Outside of those people, I really could care less. So it was amusing to me when one of the people who totally ignored me when I left sent me a message that started with “Hi friend!”, then asking me how I like my current company because she’s considering applying (she’s still at said last shitty company), and would appreciate a referral.

Wow. Really?

I deleted it and will not respond, but if I did, this is what I would have said: “If you think you are going to get any favors from me when you never reached out to me and ignored me upon my departure, you can keep dreaming, you entitled loser.”

What goes around comes around. If you are kind to me, I will likely remember it forever and go out of my way for you. But if you aren’t…. you can expect absolutely nothing from me. Ever.

My friend, a former colleague and his friend, and I went to Flushing today for a food crawl in hopes of discovering new and interesting foods. The one thing that hasn’t changed in New York for me is the constant discovery of new, interesting dishes across the different regions of China represented in Flushing. It feels like every single time I go back to Flushing, as I am going into basement food stalls or the new and shiny food malls of New World Food Court or New York Food Court (as it’s generically called along Roosevelt Avenue), I’m discovering yet another region or city’s cuisine I’ve never heard of, but is just as delicious or more delicious than the dishes I have been acquainted with. Today, the three of us visited six different spots to grab food, and all were delicious. I got to have my beloved Happy Lemon salted cheese green tea with lychee jelly and introduced it to both of them.. and they loved it, even despite the initial skepticism of “salted cheese with tea — what?!” I realized the best way to sell this concept: “If you like salted caramel, then you will like salted cheese with tea.” This ended up working, and one of them was tempted to get a second drink. I even found a stall that served very similar fish and chive dumplings to Shandong Mama in Melbourne, so I will definitely be going back there. But the most surprising thing we ate today was Luo si fen, which is a pork bone and river snail soup with mixian (Yunnan) style slippery rice noodles, beef, pickled bamboo, and vegetables. The broth was sour, salty, hot and numbing like the Sichuanese peppercorns. It was kind of addictive. Even though we kept scooping through the soup to find snails, there were none. I read later that in this soup, the snails actually don’t get served; they’re merely there to “flavor” the broth. But if you think about it… do snails really have any real flavor on their own..? Regardless of that, it was definitely a highlight of the food crawl today.

Being in Flushing today and eating all the super cheap, delicious food reminded me yet again of how much I love this neighborhood and really should spend more time discovering new things there. There’s always a delicious, cheap find around the corner there. When you think of all the expensive and “just okay” meals in Manhattan, it’s really such a small price to pay to trek out to Flushing and have such a good experience there every single time.