Monthly Archives: May 2015

Breakfast smoothie gone awry

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My mom wants me to be a good wife and daughter-in-law. She knows that Chris’s parents are in town this week, so yesterday when I talked to her, she asked what I was making them for breakfast every morning. That’s a code for, she expects me to be preparing something for them to eat each morning to fulfill my good daughter-in-law duties.

The last two mornings they have been here, I’ve been making breakfast smoothies. On Wednesday morning, I made a pineapple, banana, spinach, Greek yogurt, almond milk, and chia seed smoothie. On Thursday, I made a wild blueberry, cherry, spinach, avocado, Greek yogurt, almond milk, and chia and flax seed smoothie. These smoothies take less than 5 minutes of prep work and even less than 2 minutes of blending via a blender. No one here is doing any hand blending here. The blender does all the work. My mom doesn’t seem to get this, and she asks why I’m doing “so much work” and “aren’t Chris and his mom helping you out at all?” She sounds annoyed and makes it seem like I am doing slave labor. I just explained to her that this takes less than ten minutes both mornings. Why is there such a problem here?
My mom would never admit this, but she doesn’t like it when she knows people are staying at my apartment, unless they are her and my dad, of course. She doesn’t like the idea of people “freeloading” off someone’s apartment for free accommodation. She also doesn’t like me spending time with other people in general. She’s basically just jealous that I am spending the next week with Chris’s parents and not her. She will never stop being like this. And it comes out in conversations like this very clearly.

Awareness

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A colleague told me today that her brother-in-law is doing some charity work for a nonprofit called Bring Change 2 Mind, which has the goal of raising awareness about mental illness among American males. She said that she’s noticed a few of my posts on mental illness and suicide and thought I’d be interested in learning about this non profit and the work her brother-in-law does.

It made me smile when she brought this up during conversation. It’s like an acknowledgment that yes, there are people I don’t really think pay attention who do notice things I post publicly, and they actually care that I care to a degree. She said she was interested in getting involved in a nonprofit that was specifically helping the mental health awareness issues because she has a family history of mental illness. I told her I did, too, and when our eyes met, it was pretty clear she knew what I was talking about.

I guess I can’t be that hard on the world. The world is hard on all of us, even those I don’t think have it hard at all. There’s only so much we know about those who surround us every day. It’s hard to know what you can reveal about yourself when, but it’s comforting when people do reveal parts of themselves that they don’t normally do because then they become more real and human to us.

Worth it “for you”

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I’m starting to do research for our upcoming long Memorial Day weekend in Ohio and Kentucky. Chris, his parents, and I will be based in Cincinnati and are planning to explore the surrounds, and drive down to Lexington and explore the Kentucky Derby land. Because Memorial Day is quickly approaching, everyone at work is asking what everyone else is doing for the long weekend. It’s funny to share that I’m going to Ohio and Kentucky for the long weekend with people who are living and working in New York because the majority of people here seem to think those states are not worth visiting. And when they hear we are flying there and not driving, they think we are even crazier to pay for airfare to get to these places.

I’m almost like a Middle America person when I say this, but I just find these comments really frustrating. I grew up in California, went to school in Massachusetts, and now work and live in New York, all three of which are considered good places to visit, study, work, and live, but I’ve always wanted to explore states of the country that are far less traveled to. It’s the optimist in me, but I think there is something great about pretty much every place in the world and in this country. I don’t want to be the snob or ignoramus who thinks that there’s nothing to see in Ohio or Kentucky or Idaho, especially if I have never even visited these areas. Who am I to even make that judgment? The overwhelming assumption there when a person makes a comment like that is that she thinks she’s superior to these places, which is pretty pig-headed to me. People willingly choose to live and work in all of these places, so there has to be something that they get pleasure from in these cities and states.

A friend of mine had the argument that time is limited in life, so why would you want to visit places that don’t have known things to see to the average person? I think that argument should be reframed as, you should want to see and visit the places that interest you as a person, not you as one of a massive group of generic people. Few people would say that there is nothing to see in Paris, but many would argue that is true for a city like Cleveland. As someone who really enjoyed the time she spent in Cleveland, I would argue it’s a place worth seeing for me.

What it’s like

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This morning, I read this Vice article written by a woman whose best friend is suicidal. It was interesting to see another person’s perspective of interacting with someone with a severe mental illness and how she was coping with it. If I had to write an article like this about Ed, I’m not even sure where I’d begin. Would I begin it with his first suicide attempt when I was 11? Would I isolate it to his downward spiral from 2012 to 2013 when he started exhibiting schizoaffective disorder, and how I knew he was nearing his end, so I kept telling him I loved him and cared about him and that I needed him to be strong and believe in himself because I believed in him in every single phone conversation and e-mail up until that dreaded day he went missing? I don’t know.

What’s it like to be friends with someone who is suicidal, or to have a sibling who is suicidal and then commits suicide? I know what that’s like. No one really cares about your experience as the friend or the sibling. They just tell you that everyone has to carry their own load, that he has to figure things out for himself and stop leaning on you. No one wants to help you. They think you are pathetic for wanting to help. And they certainly don’t want to help him. So you are powerless, and you feel even more powerless as the days go on because you can tell the end is near. They think he’s crazy or not worth the time or effort, or they criticize him and make him seem that all his failures are his own fault… That is, until they receive the news that he is no longer living, that he is dead, and that he is dead by his own choice, or hand, or jump. Then they come back to you and say senseless, moronic things like, “If only I had known it was this serious, then…” Then what? Then you wouldn’t have done shit. You wouldn’t have done a single thing differently. Go ahead and cry your stupid tears. I don’t care that you are crying. You will cry at the funeral, feel bad for the next few days, at most a few weeks, and then move on with your life. The past has then passed, and you have forgotten. It’s easy for an outsider.

It’s really hard to have faith in human beings when you know how stupid they can be in times like this. How do you teach empathy to people who are just not open to it?

Fish

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This weekend, we went to Whole Foods so that I could pick out some wild fish to prepare for dinner tonight. We ended up picking out some bluefish fillets that were priced at $9.99/lb. At Whole Foods, this sounds fairly affordable, but after paying almost $19 for four fillets, it seemed like quite a lot of money to spend on just a handful of meals. And considering that bluefish was once considered the fish that fisherman tossed back into the sea and fed to other fish, it’s quite a markup. Once upon a time at a local grocery store in Cambridge, MA, you could get great and fresh bluefish fillets for less than $4/lb.

It’s a decent amount of money to spend, but I rather spend money on a fish that’s rich and fatty like this than a boring, bland white fish. I don’t understand people who want to eat fish but don’t like the actual taste or smell of a real fish. Fish like halibut and tilapia have no real, distinct flavor. There’s little way to tell one white fish from another in terms of flavor because they have none. Like articles I’ve read about bluefish have said, bluefish is for people who want to know they are eating fish, not people who want to eat fish but don’t want to taste fish.

Graduation

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This weekend, people across the country will be graduating. I have a few friends who are graduating this weekend. One is finishing business school. Another is getting her long-awaited medical degree, which was delayed by a year because of her cancer diagnosis in 2013. I personally thought undergraduate was long enough. I had little doubt in my mind when I finished my undergraduate work that I would probably never set foot on a campus for additional study ever again.

I think learning is a lot fun when you do it at your own pace, when you don’t have to get graded on some dumb bell curve based on a test you spent weeks of sleepless nights studying for. Some of the best learning I’ve had is during my travels, re-learning all the U.S. history I glossed over through formal schooling, and through books I’ve voluntarily read myself since college. I’ve also learned a lot meeting different people and speaking to different people. I knew unless I was crazy passionate about a certain topic, I’d never do graduate school. So I didn’t.

If I had to turn the clock back, and if I really thought I could do anything this past week, I wondered what my life would have been like if I decided to pursue a social science like sociology or even political science. I’ve always been interested in how people interact in groups, how the dynamics change, and how our societies have been formed based on historical and personal life events. Being an academic isn’t all boring and theoretical as people think it is; many politicians such as Elizabeth Warren, whose book I am reading now, started in academia and are now influencing the entire country, if not the world. I would like to have a bigger influence on something, but what that something is — it’s still unknown. I still haven’t figured out what I’m going to be when I grow up.

Phone chat

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A friend and I were catching up over the phone the other day, and we ended up spending over three hours on the phone. I really didn’t think the call would last that long, maybe half as long at most. She’s my friend who wants to be friends with everyone, who wants to give everyone a chance to “hang out” because of her mindset that the more, the merrier. There were brief times in my life when I have agreed with this sentiment, but for the most part, I disagree.

She told me that as she has gotten older, she’s realized that sometimes she really doesn’t want to do any small talk to get to know a new person as bad as that sounded, that sometimes, she just wants to eat and drink with people she knows and ignore the people she doesn’t. Does that sound bad? She asked me.

Not really, I said. It just means you are getting older and have realize that you can’t be friends with everyone, nor do you want to be. It won’t bring more happiness. If anything, it just provides a false sense of security. How many of these people are going to really care or cry if we died tomorrow?

I really am a disappointed optimist.

Upwardly Global gala

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Tonight, Chris and I were invited by a good friend of mine to the annual Upwardly Global gala. My friend actively volunteers and was previously a board member of this organization, which is a nonprofit that helps work-authorized immigrants find jobs here in the U.S. My friend has been actively volunteering with Upwardly Global since 2008, so it’s a cause he’s very passionate about. Unfortunately, the goals of the organization do not jive very well with Chris, who is an immigrant in this country and thinks that the organization glosses over the hardest part about being an immigrant in this country — actually getting into this country and achieving legal work authorization, either via a work visa or the much coveted green card. I agree that the organization does gloss that over, but it’s not what its goal is. I can’t even imagine a nonprofit that actually helped with that process and the types of legal fees and overhead they would need to spend. It’s a separate struggle to get work in this country even with work authorization, and that’s what Upwardly Global strives to do.

What I am not a fan of in terms of nonprofits and donating to them is the perceived “black hole” that donations go into. If I am donating to an organization, I want to know that my dollars are actually going to something tangible that I can see having an effect. The saddest part about a lot of nonprofits is that so many of the donation dollars end up going towards hazy “administrative costs,” and not toward the actual work that the organization is striving to do. I asked my friend where the tickets costs ($500 each) were going, and he said he wasn’t sure and that it would be decided by the board. That’s not really a good sign. I was grateful to be invited and to attend, but I’m just not sure about this black hole. It also didn’t put a good taste in my mouth that all the servers at Guastavino’s barely spoke English and also couldn’t tell me what they were serving. They had no idea what type of fish they were giving me, and when they told me that dessert was pineapple upside down cake, it was actually a horrendous peach cobber with peaches that tasted canned. These are the people we should really be helping through this organization, right? Well, I guess we can’t because these people probably don’t have green cards.

At least I know that one nonprofit I fund raise for, AFSP, keeps its administrative costs below 25 percent.

Time famine

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I was reading this article yesterday on advice that a number of successful people would give the 22-year-old versions of themselves. Arianna Huffington was interviewed for this, and she said that the concept of “time famine,” or not having enough time to accomplish all the things we want in life, can have a very dire impact on our happiness and stress levels. I’m reading what she has said, and I thought, wow, that really applies to me.

I’m always thinking about ways to be more efficient and to accomplish things in a smaller amount of time, whether that means multitasking or finding shortcuts for things. It’s part of the reason I started listening to audio books. I figured that while I am walking or taking the subway from point A to point B, I could get some learning done, whether it’s from a book or a podcast I can listen to along the way. Sometimes when I am catching up with a non-local friend, I will put her on speaker phone and work on my scrapbook as we chat, or prepare my lunch for the next day. And even at work with something as simple as preparing tea, I will steep my tea first while I cut my morning fruit so that once I’m done cutting, I can then add the milk to the tea and toss the tea bag. It’s gotten a little bit ridiculous, but I don’t even think about that process anymore. I just do it.

I’m not sure if being more efficient and accomplishing more is always a good thing, though. My mindset is so programmed in that way that sometimes, when I look back at everything I’ve completed in a day, I am mind boggled at myself for all those things, but then I want to one-up myself and accomplish even more. And then I tire myself out.

“Mother’s Day” celebrating

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Since my mother is a Jehovah’s Witness, she doesn’t celebrate holidays since that’s against their religion. She officially converted when I was around 18, so since then, I haven’t been allowed to say things like “Happy Mother’s Day” or “Merry Christmas” or even “Happy birthday!” to her. However, we should note that just because she doesn’t celebrate these things on the day of, she still expects an acknowledgment of some sort, particularly in the form of a gift. My mother loves gifts. She just doesn’t want them on the day of Mother’s Day or the day of her birthday. Sometime around that date would suit her just fine. So this Mother’s Day, I did wish someone a Happy Mother’s Day, just not my mother. I also didn’t send a gift the week before Mother’s Day because I figured I would send one to her the week after. It just has to be around the day, right? Wrong. She was pissed. I called her yesterday after work, and she irritatingly asks me where I’ve been all weekend and why I never called. “Did you know that yesterday was Mother’s Day?” she said icily. “You never called!” Well, actually, I did call on Sunday, but no one answered the phone. They have caller ID, but she insists I never called and was lying. She’s always right, I guess.

You can’t be a part of a religion that refuses to celebrate holidays and then expect an acknowledgment of the holiday on another day and with a gift. That’s not really how religion works… or should work. Either be a part of your chosen religion and accept the things it forces you to do or live without, or be free and do what you want!