Monthly Archives: February 2016

Annoyed FedEx delivery guy

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I had stems of 24 large cymbidium orchids sent to my mom for her birthday. When I placed the order, which I thought I got a pretty good deal on since cymbidiums are one of the most expensive orchids to buy, I envisioned my mother’s face ecstatically opening the box to uncover these fat, beautiful cymbidium faces, freckled with fuchsia and yellow and staring back at her. I anticipated that given the long life of orchids, the blooms would last her until the time she and my dad departed San Francisco to drive down to San Clemente for our wedding. Little did I know that the path to get to her would not be so smooth and bright.

On Friday morning, the FedEx delivery guy comes to my parents’ house and rings the bell. No one answers at around 9:39am, when he attempted the delivery. He rang again, and still no answer. So what does he decide to do instead of calling the recipient to ask when she would be home so he could re-attempt the delivery? Meh, no problem. He just takes the box, throws it over the gate, and drives off!

My parents come home about two hours later to discover what appears to be a very large florist box sitting in the middle of their staircase. My dad later told me the box was dented on one side, and when they took it in and opened it, six of these very beautiful (and expensive) blooms immediately fall off. Some of the petals had fallen off and had been smashed. Someone had mishandled these poor orchids, and this was just not right.

I online chatted The Bouqs and complained about this shortly after my mom called me, and immediately received a full credit back and numerous apologies. I just kept on imagining a FedEx delivery guy being so frustrated that the recipient was not home and then taking the liberty of throwing the freaking box over the gate. What the heck was he thinking?!

 

Someone’s turning 62

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My mom is turning 62 tomorrow. I’m not allowed to say “happy birthday” to her since she’s a JW, and her people don’t believe in birthdays, but since she is still herself, she loves receiving gifts, and she indirectly expects to get something around the date of her birthday every single year. Chris decided to send her a surprise dinner from some Asian restaurant tonight (I did not know this), and there was no card that said who the food was from.

So my mom called tonight to ask if I sent her food. My initial response was… No, I did not? Why? She said that someone ordered food with a label that said “happy birthday,” and that if I did not send it, she would give it to my aunt upstairs because maybe she ordered it.

“Auntie Linda’s birthday is not in February!” I exclaimed. “And when has she ever ordered food delivery before?!”

I looked over at Chris on the couch. “You sent something to her, didn’t you?” I said to him. He gives me this funny side-eyed look, and so I know he did it. “Chris sent it,” I said to my mom on the phone. “Don’t give it to my aunt!”

These are all the games that my family plays, and Chris just joins right in.

Team dinner

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Tonight, I organized a team dinner for all of the account and campaign managers who work on my clients, and I got a lot of push back from our finance team regarding the spend limit. I finally got a spend limit approved of over double the original amount I was given, and it was sad because the restaurant I chose is supposed to be a reasonably priced place.

For a party of at least eight, the family-style dining includes four appetizers, four mains, and a shared dessert plate. With two hours of unlimited house red and white wine, the price per person is $84 (before tax and tip). And that is supposed to be “cheap” by Manhattan standards. It just goes to show that the term “reasonably priced” is extremely, extremely relative.

Friend’s friends

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A good friend of Chris’s who lives in New York coincidentally got pregnant over the summer and found out her due date was one week after our wedding. This was especially sad news because we knew she and her husband would have happily come to California for our wedding.

While it’s sad that she can’t make it, we understand her predicament. She’s offered to take us out to celebrate early this Friday. What is not sad is when you realize that associated friends who were invited did not even have the decent manners to RSVP to the wedding period.

This is my cynical side speaking, clearly. As soon as I heard she wouldn’t be able to come due to giving birth, I made a silent bet in my head that the two associated friends who would have come if she had come would decline. They didn’t even decline; they didn’t even RSVP. If someone is so generous to invite you to their wedding, the least you could do is RSVP in a timely manner with a ‘yes’ or a ‘no.’ Chris reached out to one of them over Facebook, and he gave some rambling message about not being able to come with excuses that were clearly his way of saying, “Sorry, dude. I just don’t care enough if <mutual friend> doesn’t go, either.” It is sad when you are over 30 and you are still just a follower.

To make matters worse, he reached out separately to me to apologize. What is the point? I really didn’t care at that point and simply responded, “Don’t worry about it.” It just kept getting worse because he kept responding. “That’s the most upset I’ve ever heard you,” he responded back with… Again. “We should hang out some time soon. I miss you guys.”

I didn’t respond to that last bit. No, you don’t miss us. Stop faking that you want to see us and spend time with us, and just move on. We have.

I don’t want to spend time on or with people who don’t make any effort with me. It’s not worth it. The older I get, the more valuable I realize my time is, and the more I do not want to waste it on people who just want other people to be their conveniences in life.

White chicken chili

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Yesterday, I made a very time and energy intensive white bean chicken chili. Most people use powdered spices for their chili peppers, but I used three types of fresh chilies and one dried type, a couple of onions, and a handful of garlic gloves and broiled these in the oven until blackened. After making a paste with them, the smell was undeniably fresh and good. I knew this was going to be a finger-licking good chili. And it was. I’ll be sad on the day later this week when I am enjoying the very last bowl.

I realized that since we’ve come back from Australia and Asia, I haven’t really spent much time cooking at all. Wedding planning has taken over my January and February, and so it was very relaxing to stand at the counter and cut my vegetables and dice my chicken thighs and forget about all my to-do’s. This is like my own therapy.

Anti Valentine

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The hype every year is nauseating. Every time I walk past a bodega or corner store, all I can see are endless red roses, red carnations, red everything. I listen to colleagues of mine who are on their perpetual first date, and they are green enough to want to do a first date on Valentine’s Day. Others in committed relationships stress over where to eat on Valentine’s Day evening. Why are you people going out at all?

Valentine’s Day is one of those over-hyped, stressed out holidays that needs to be done away with. Why, instead of buying all this chocolate and flowers for your love on Valentine’s day, don’t you just appreciate him or her a little bit more every day?

One year, I remember I was dating a guy that I thought I was fond of, but I quickly realized what a miserable human being he was. He got me a small bouquet of tulips on Valentine’s Day. I hated them. I knew I hated them because as soon as I put them in a vase, they immediately slumped over. Ever since that Valentine’s Day, I had decided that Valentine’s Day kind of sucked. I still believe that.

 

Death, Take Two

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I had a dream that Ed died again. Chris and I rushed on a flight back home, and when we arrived at the Columbarium to prepare the funeral arrangements with my parents, my aunt, and my cousin, the funeral director says that their next open slot for a funeral and viewing would not be for another two months. I immediately was confused and angry, and I asked my dad how he couldn’t have known about this before I decided to fly home. He seemed nonchalant and made it seem like it wasn’t a big deal at all. “How could you not have known this or even asked?” I said to him. My dad stared back at me blankly. He obviously had no control of the situation, nor did he feel the need or desire to take any control.

I turned to Chris and said to him that we would need to come back in two months for the funeral. He whips out his work phone and says that in two months, he will be fully booked up with work travel, which will even include weekend conferences. There is absolutely no order or understanding here, and I lashed out at him for being so flippant about my own brother’s funeral, particularly given the circumstances of his death.

Then, I looked over at the funeral director and got angry with him for telling us this. “So what is it — do you just have a massive refrigerator that stores dead bodies for months at at time?” I said to him in disbelief. “How can you even plan funerals that far in advance? Are you just having people’s families scheduling when their loved ones will get unplugged or pushing people off bridges on certain dates?”

The funeral director also looks at me expressionless and says nothing to my questions. Everyone in the room thinks I am the crazy one there. But I think they are all crazy.

Gym renovation

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I returned to my usual gym after a very long two-month hiatus to discover that they not only renovated the group fitness studio floor, but also the women’s locker room. All the floors have been redone, the sinks and makeup stations have sparkling granite counter tops, and the showers have been modernized. And in an effort to make the locker rooms more modern and chic, somehow Crunch also decided to remove every single full length mirror, make the locker room benches about half the length they used to be, and replace the old lockers, which had plenty of hooks for hanging jackets and purse, with new lockers that have a very inefficient swivel hook right in the center. And the little changing stations we used to have outside the showers are now gone. Now, I am forced to dry off and be naked amongst all my fellow female morning gym go-ers.

Is this what it means to be modernized in today’s gym — to aesthetically appear pleasing but from a utility perspective be useless?

Engagement photos

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Our photographer finished editing the full set of our engagement photos, so I sent the gallery to my parents so they could see them. My mom said she loved the photos and said we both looked really good in them, but she critiqued my choice of wearing jeans for half of them. “Why are you wearing such weird clothes in the first half?” she asked. “Who wears jeans to things like this?”

My mom has had a life-long hatred of denim and anything jeans-related. She’s always looked at them as working men’s clothing, the type of clothing you wear if you are changing tires or working on a construction site. She has no idea why anyone would want to wear jeans every day or why anyone would find them attractive or comfortable.

“But that was meant to be the casual clothing photos,” I said to her. “I’m more dressed up in the second half.”

She doesn’t care. The jean hate continues.

Dream recap

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I was walking up to Grand Central tonight and talking to my mom on the phone when I decided to tell her that I dreamt that Ed never died. I guess I thought to tell her because she brought him up. Well, what I left out was that I also dreamt that although he was alive, she had died. But hey, she doesn’t have to know every detail, right?

“He said he never died,” I told her. “He said he is still here with us. He said he has always been here with us.”

“He never died?” My mom repeated pensively. “He never died… Yes, you know that when Armageddon comes, Ed will be resurrected, and he will live on paradise on earth with us forever.”

My mom loves her convenient truths. If paradise on earth really existed according to Jehovah’s Witnesses’ beliefs, then Ed and I wouldn’t “qualify” because we were never Jehovah’s Witnesses to begin with. We would go to hell. And neither would our dad qualify, and heck, my mom hasn’t converted a single person yet, so she probably wouldn’t have made the 144,000 person cut off, either! But at least our mom thinks Ed is a good enough person so that he could be resurrected, so that thought was kind of comforting.

She said to me that since Ed has passed, she has seen him in dreams only twice. I told her he comes to visit me at least a couple times a month since he passed. She expressed half surprise, half envy.

“He comes to visit you… in New York?” my mom said to me, confused. “But how doe he know the way to get there? He could get lost.”

Even in dream life, in the after life, in heaven — wherever my sweet, innocent brother continues to live another form of life, our mother continues to worry about him. After death, he still lives somewhere out there, and because she knows this, she continues not just to pray for him, but to worry if he is safe, happy, and at peace… and if he won’t get lost on the way to New York to visit me.

What our mother doesn’t realize is that now wherever her son is, Ed can’t get lost. He cannot be in danger. He can’t feel pain, and all he can do is feel peace and be happy. That’s why every time I see him now, he’s always the happy one, and I am the one crying and sobbing when I see him. I really should be happier when I see him in dreams, but I can’t because I am selfish. I miss him in this life where I am, where I live. In his new world, he has found peace and happiness. It is a daily struggle to accept and for me to be at peace with his peace.