Today, I spent the majority of my day at the Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park for an all-day client meeting. Between endless meetings and presentations, I got to enjoy the perks that Facebook employees and guests get to relish during their visits to the Facebook campus: endless varied food options, from cold pressed, fresh squeezed juices to on-campus smoked BBQ, even crispy bacon vs. soft bacon as options (it’s *that* specific and catered to individual tastes here); a free for all ice cream and desserts shop; fully covered washed and folded laundry; even a poster printing workshop where you can create posters with images and messages to your heart’s content. The conference rooms have fun names like “Chips and Salsa,” and around every corner, there is a snack bar full of Mighty Leaf tea bags, an espresso maker, and at least 15 different types of energy and granola bars. The Facebook Fifteen is a true reality for most new employees.

If Ed were a ghost, he’d be a friendly one. I know this because whenever I come back to our house in San Francisco, although the air is cold and slightly damp, it never feels hostile the way you think it would if someone who once lived here committed suicide. The room we once shared growing up seems bright and warm. I know his energy still lingers all over this house, but especially in areas where he spent a lot of time, such as on the long couch in the living room, his desk in the dining room, and his bed in our bedroom, which we kept because my mom couldn’t bear to give it up. After all this time, it’s not like the energy of a dead person that lingers, but rather the energy of someone who is still alive and out there, somewhere.

Since he passed away, every time I’ve come home, one of the first things I do is dust and sponge clean his old dresser in our room. I clean his framed photo and dust the vases. I sponge off the top surface of the dresser as though it’s never been wiped before. It’s where my mom displays the large framed photograph of him that we had up during his funeral. It’s surrounded by two vases, two orchid plants that were given to us when he passed, and a koala stuffed animal I bought in Melbourne. I also leave his service program up there. I noticed that one of the orchids is actually budding right now and about to bloom. Maybe it senses that Ed’s two-year anniversary mark is coming, so it’s time to start flowering.

I’m not fully sure how I developed this routine. I think I became a little obsessive about doing it because in some way, it felt like a way that I was acknowledging him, like, “Hey, Ed! I’m home! I’m here! Can you see me now? I’m touching you! I’m cleaning after you like I did when you were alive!” I always want to see and communicate with him, so maybe this is my weird way of attempting to be more in-your-face with him, even though his face clearly isn’t here.

Two damn years. I still can’t believe it.

I just finished reading the last two Freakonomics books, Think Like a Freak and When to Rob a Bank. I’ve also been listening to their once a week podcasts during my walks and workouts. I’ve re-thought a lot of things since listening to their podcasts and stories, ideas that most people would be against. Some examples include not thinking big (who would have thought? But actually, this makes a lot of sense to me since I’m into the micro and the details, so I suppose I am biased), failure is not always a bad thing (seems to be a relatively new thought given tech startups and the new ways that we raise our children today to test different things out to find their passions and strengths), and that drunk walking is actually far more dangerous than drunk driving. I enjoyed their first two books a lot, but the third one just seemed like a recycling of their podcasts and blogs, so it was a bit disappointing.

One thing that they brought up that I’ve been pretty cognizant of since I was young thanks to my frugal parents is food waste. As much as 30 to 40 percent of food is wasted in this country — you know, the food that you scrape off your plate at the end of a meal, food that you tried at a buffet that you realized you didn’t like (then why did you take so much of it to begin with?), the vegetables that you left in your vegetable crisper in the fridge for a week too long. As much as 40 percent, I thought — holy crap, that’s a lot of food! Preserving food and trying to make use of all of it has been a slight obsession of mine since I started living on my own. I chop up and freeze leftover vegetables and chicken bones for stock. I freeze buttermilk from desserts I make to use for future pancakes. I even store the little bit of cornmeal I have left in the fridge in the little hope that I will use it in the future for something. The fridge and freezer are like my food waste helpers. Thank goodness for modern technology.

We live in a country of plenty here, so no one really thinks anything of it when they eat just half their plate at dinner at a restaurant and don’t want to doggie bag it. The restaurant just throws it away. When fruit rots in their fridge, it’s no big deal — into the garbage it goes, and then they can go to the market to buy more fruit that they may eat half of and then throw out the rest once it starts molding! It’s a frustrating thing to think about since I’ve been so aware of it from a young age. It’s one of those things that has stayed with me, my parents’ constant reminder that they barely had enough food to eat when they were growing up, that in their mother countries, there are thousands if not millions of starving children, so I try as hard as I can not to waste as much as possible.

I recently read an article about Michelle Phan, the makeup guru and entrepreneur who became famous by creating and posting makeup lessons on YouTube. She has been labeled as a feminist given that she is a female entrepreneur, and her general response to it was that she doesn’t think she is, as she thinks it’s important not just to celebrate women, but to celebrate men. It’s really sad that there are so many people out there, particularly women, who don’t understand that “feminism” does NOT mean that you just want to celebrate women, burn bras, and bash men; it’s simply about equality for both women and men. It’s that simple, really, yet it isn’t that simple to so many people, sadly.

People who think that the feminist movement was overdone or still is overdone have no idea how much they benefit from all the changes that have been brought on because of it to this day, every single day. I once had this science teacher in middle school who was great at science, great at teaching, but probably great at little else. He said to us one day, “I always got why you need to learn science and math and English in school. But why do you need history? What benefit does it really bring to any of our lives?” At the time, I was only 13 and thought all my history classes were so boring and all about memorizing facts and dates, so I kind of agreed with him then. Now, as a grown adult, I think he’s moronic for making a statement like that, especially to teenagers. If you can’t understand history and know it, you will be doomed to ignorance and a total lack of understanding of how and why things are the way they are today.

Women vote today because of the feminist movement. They can own property, decide who they can marry, actually divorce and have it granted because of the feminist movement. Rape crisis centers were developed because of feminists; rape is actually considered a crime now because of feminism. Marital rape became illegal just in the 1990s because of it. We can work actual professional jobs and sit in board rooms now because of the feminist movement, and not just as secretaries or typists, but as actual real business people and key decision makers. It makes me sad that so many women take these rights for granted and have no context behind these laws today. These rights are actually privileges we have today because of sacrifices that other women and men on our behalf made for us, for future generations so we wouldn’t have to go through the same pain and tyranny that they once faced. We owe it to future generations of women to ensure that they, even more than today because we still have a long way to go, become true equals of men in this society.