Monthly Archives: September 2015

Entitlement

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My aunt, who hasn’t showed up to any out of town (as in, outside of San Francisco) wedding in our family, has told me that she is likely bringing her boyfriend of the last few years to my wedding next March. One of my bridesmaids, who is casually dating someone now but doesn’t seem to care much about him, says that if she’s not in a relationship by the time March rolls around, she wants to bring her mom to the wedding as her plus one (mostly because she doesn’t drive, so her mom can act as her LA/Orange County area chauffeur). While I can kind of understand the bridesmaid assuming she has the right to a plus-one since she is in the wedding party, I’m not a huge fan of the idea of her mother coming to my wedding. What is she supposed to do there? Who would I sit her with? I don’t really have friends or family that she’d readily be seated with or even get along with. And with my aunt, I’ve never even met her boyfriend. Not only that, but she hasn’t seen or been in contact with her son, my cousin, since her late husband’s funeral because of a falling out, and to make matters worse, she doesn’t even realize her son has a baby — yes, her own grandchild.

I don’t really get the sense of entitlement here. But I also don’t really know how to say “no” because a negative response will only get a negative reaction. These are the sticky wedding and “big event” problems that I have to deal with now.

Sex and the City over a decade later

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After over ten years of first seeing Sex and the City on DVD, I’ve been watching (and/or just listening to) Sex and the City on HBO in the background as I’ve been working on my crafts projects, researching travel, and reading. I was addicted to this show after I watched just two episodes. I’ve never been a big TV person, but I have never been addicted to any TV show like this one and watched it and known the episodes by heart since Saved by the Bell (the original class). But now that I’m watching it in the year 2015 instead of 2004 when I first watched it, I feel like the characters are annoying me even more than they annoyed me then. Then, I at least found them tolerable and humorous. Now, they just piss me off.

Charlotte was always my least favorite, and I guess from her general description, it would surprise no one: she’s a “rich bitch” who grew up with a lot of privilege, believes strongly in gender roles and is an old-fashioned traditionalist. She, along with Carrie, probably piss me off the most now. I think their selfishness is shining through even more glaringly now than they had when I first watched these episodes over ten years ago. In Charlotte’s worst moments that made me want to grind my teeth, she was having fertility issues and got angry when she found out Miranda accidentally got pregnant. “How could you do this to me?” she yelled at Miranda in the coffee shop. Um, no. No one did anything to you. The world doesn’t revolve around you. In another scene, she and her husband are having sexual intimacy issues because her first husband can’t “get it up,” so she snaps at Samantha for having sex with strangers and asks her when she is going to recognize that sex is more than just sex; it’s supposed to be “sacred.” Carrie annoys me with her own selfishness. She knows Aidan is moving in with her, but refuses to make space in her closet for his belongings. He buys her a brand new Mac when hers has a melt down, and she is totally ungrateful for it and says she doesn’t need it and has her own backing up method (she doesn’t).

I guess the more I think about it, the more I realize why women relate to these women — it’s because we see our own selfish selves reflected in the Sex and the City women, and thus we relate. We’re all selfish witches ourselves.

Hopeless hope

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I met with my therapist yesterday after not seeing her for about four months. She was busy sunbathing in the Hamptons while I was occupied with busy Mondays filled with revenue reports. We spent some time discussing my series of bad dreams of betrayal, my time in San Francisco, fights with my mom, and my friend who failed to be a part of my bachelorette weekend.

We spent the most time discussing why I always feel the need to defend the people my mother puts down. “If you know based on history that she will never see your point of view and will always use this as the beginning point of a fight, then why do you keep defending them?” she asked me.

Well, there are several answers to this. First is that I hate it when things are unjust, and I cannot stand people being attacked without any valid reason. Second, I am kind of deluded myself because I hopelessly hope that one day, she may actually listen to what I am saying and realize there are other perspectives other than her own. Third, it’s a lose-lose situation for me regardless of what I respond with because no response satisfies her, and she will find some way to turn the attack on me. If it’s not this conversation, it will be in the next conversation.

So at the end of the day, I just become more self-ingratiating by believing that I am standing up for what’s right when it actually causes even more agony for me. Maybe I can be just as deluded as my mother.

Emotionless

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Today was fairly uneventful, and the usual people I chat with at work were not available, so I decided to message one of my long-time friends from middle school. We have been friends since I was in eighth grade and she was in seventh. She’s one of the small handful of people I actually still keep in touch with from San Francisco. The more I think about it, though, the more I think we don’t have that much in common other than the fact that we are both Asian American women who grew up in San Francisco with overbearing mothers and moved to the Northeast for college. I’m very expressive; she is one of the hardest to read people I know. I’m more or less an open book, which is why this blog is public; it’s like pulling teeth to get information from her about her life. I am very affectionate; she is like a brick. I like to socialize; she hates it unless she already knows and likes the people there. We’ve remained friends, though. I thought about it the other day, and I really think it’s because I value her honesty… when she is willing to share it.

But sometimes, it’s exhausting, especially when things are always answered in the negative.

Me: Did you enjoy the trip?

Friend: It was better than I expected.

Me: How’s the first day of work going?

Friend: I don’t hate it.

Me: How’s your project going?

Friend: Not awful

Me: Are you going to say after my wedding when people ask you how it was, “Well, it wasn’t awful.”

Friend: Not to your face.

What I really wonder in these exchanges that I know will never be answered is — what really makes this friend happy, or excited, or actually like she has feelings and real emotions? Where did all those feelings and emotions go, or did she really ever have them? Do I need to buy this friend the same book I bought my other friend’s daughter, The Book of Feelings, to get her to engage with me like a real human being with actual emotions? What does she get out of human interactions with people who she doesn’t “hate” or doesn’t find “awful” or finds tolerable? If I died tomorrow, would she actually feel anything or even cry?

I told my colleague this the other day, but I will write it here anyway: I really do not understand people.

 

Whiskey

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My sleep schedule is screwed. I can’t seem to sleep at a regular hour for myself unless I’ve sedated myself with whiskey before bed. Last night, I slept well, but I kept waking up every hour or two to see what time it was. The only other time in my life I’ve had sleep like this was in the days after Ed passed away. For an entire week, I couldn’t sleep through the night and would wake up several times, dead alert. The night before last, I slept through most of the night, but still felt too sluggish at 6am to go to the gym.

I was at lunch with one of my colleagues and told her I was taking a whiskey shot before bed to sleep, and she suggested I take a melatonin supplement. What scares me about taking a supplement even if it is supposedly all natural is that I will get addicted to it. I can’t really get addicted to whiskey before bed, right?

On a hike

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My parents are spending this week in Monterey. They’ve been there a million times, but I guess that’s what they like to do — go back to places with which they are familiar. Surprisingly, though, after I showed them photos from Point Lobos State Reserve, they actually decided to go there to hike it and see it themselves. I was really surprised because in most cases when I have given them recommendations on things to see and do, they rarely take me up on it because it’s new to them, and therefore foreign. My mom raved about how mild the weather was and the pretty scenery.

It makes me happy when my parents discover new things that they like and enjoy doing because it doesn’t seem to happen enough. They get too caught into their usual boring and everyday routines, and the curiosity to discover a world outside of what they know is rarely there. Maybe I shouldn’t doubt them as much as I do and keep suggesting new things to them.

Single friends

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I invited a friend over for dinner tonight to help eat all the food that Chris made me this week, and we discussed online dating, weddings, and being single. He is eight years older than me, and everything in his life is going well from work to friends to charity work — except for his romantic prospects. He’s always jokingly asking me if I have any cute and smart single girlfriends, but the truth is that I don’t — at least, not ones that are in New York City, or ones that he’d be into given their personalities. He makes it obvious that this is really dragging him down, and he’s been in a bad mindset in the last few days. I want to help him, but I can’t.

It reminded me of my college-time obsession with the show Sex and the City and how the show discussed being single in your mid- to late-thirties, when most people are seemingly getting engaged, married, and having children. My friend is going through the male version of this, except he’s not getting one night stands as easily as those female characters were. The more I think about it, the more I think it’s not great to be single in New York City. Yes, you think you have a lot of options, but those options end up screwing you over because then you feel like you don’t need to commit to just one person. That doesn’t even just apply to romantic relationships — that applies just to agreeing to meet someone for a meal. I feel that frustration myself from the friend perspective. So if I think it’s hard to make real friends here, I don’t even know what it would be like if I were single today at my age in this city, trying to find “the one.”

Shorter stays

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I’ve been discussing my mother’s situation with a few different people, and it looks like we all agree that perhaps I should shorten my stays when I visit home and potentially increase the frequency to make up for the fewer days. The last time I came in June, I was there for about five days, and luckily, no real fight happened; everything was as calm as it could have been. This time around, the stay was about 11 days, and we had four arguments varying in intensity and length. It really takes an emotional and psychological toll on me when these things happen; I feel stressed to the point where I can feel a physical change in my body, and then all I think about are all the dumb things she had said to me that made zero logical sense. It would be different if I didn’t care about them at all, but I really do; ultimately, I just want my parents to be happy, but it doesn’t seem that I can really make that happen on my own. What is really preventing them from being happy and leading full, rich lives is their own mindset and all the negativity that surrounds it. It’s their distrust of the world, their disgust of other people like my aunt who actually do lead happy lives despite having many elements of dysfunction and imperfection. They will always be like this, and it’s my life-long struggle to just accept them the way they are and the way they will continue to think.

Series of nightmares

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For my first three nights in San Francisco, I had one nightmare after another. In the first dream, an old friend from college is confessing to me that she committed a murder of someone she hated, but because she thought I was such a pure person, too pure, that she had to frame me for the crime, and that soon, the authorities would find out, and I’d be put in jail. I asked her why she would do something like this, and she responded that she felt that people that were too good needed to be punished for trying to outdo everyone else in the world who tried hard to be good, but couldn’t be.

In the two subsequent nights, I had bad dreams, but I couldn’t remember what happened. I just remembered that the theme that kept appearing was of betrayal, of people who I thought were supposed to be good who were turning against me or blaming me for things I never did.

I have a feeling I know why I had all these bad dreams in my trip back. It’s because I’m always questioning how loyal people really are to me, and what they’d really do for me when life got tough or if they were put in a real position to defend me or do something in honor of me to prove their dedication. It’s hugely an influence my mother has over me — to never fully trust anyone and to constantly be questioning their devotion. I think as the years have gone by, I’ve gotten better at putting a halt to the process of obsessing over it, but it always has its way of creeping into the back of my mind, especially in light of the fact that the bridal shower/bachelorette weekend is one of those main moments in life when your friends or whoever is organizing on your behalf is somewhat intentionally put on the spot to show their love and dedication to you.

We can never escape the influence of our parents, even when we try our best to. It’s like that quite from the book The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom. Ever since I read that book shortly after Ed passed away, this quote has stayed with me and popped itself into my thoughts more times than I can count: “All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair.” Ed was shattered beyond repair. I am damaged but trying to repair myself every day. This is my painful reality.

The photo frame with a hidden message

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Today, I met briefly with a friend and her daughter at Spreckles Lake at Golden Gate Park. I cannot remember the last time I walked through that area, but Ed and I used to go all the time on the weekends as kids and feed the ducks by the water there. It made me feel nostalgic to walk along the lake today with them and see the ducks and the remote-controlled boats gliding across the water at rapid pace.

My friend and her daughter came to my bridal shower and gave me a silver photo frame from Gump’s. At the shower when I was opening gifts, she told me that there was a story behind the frame, and today, she shared it with me.

She told me that her husband was at work the week before the shower, and somehow dozed off, and when he did, he dreamt that he saw Ed. Yes, that’s Ed as in my Ed, my brother. He couldn’t quite make out his face clearly and could only see black, but he knew it was him. “Isn’t your wife attending a bridal shower this weekend?” Ed asked her husband.

“Yes, she’s attending a bridal shower,” the husband responds.

Ed reveals that it’s his sister’s bridal shower. “What is your wife getting as a gift for the shower?”

Her husband finds this amusing and said he actually had no idea, as they hadn’t discussed it.

“I think you should get her a photo frame from Gump’s,” Ed suggested. “I think she’d like it.”

The dream ended. Her husband woke up from his nap and asked his assistant to go to Gump’s and pick out a photo frame. He then took the photo frame back home to my friend, and said that she had to give this gift to me. “You can’t ignore a message like this,” her husband told her.

Ed’s still out there watching over me. My friend says this was his way of being part of the shower, of speaking to her husband and knowing that the message would get back to me. I’m not sure what I felt more when I heard this — happiness that his presence is still here, or sadness that he physically is no longer here.

I miss my Ed. I love you wherever you are.