Today, Chris and I met up with my friend, her husband, and a friend of hers visiting from out of town. My friend and her husband live in San Francisco, but because her friend visiting from Singapore was in the States but had never visited New York before, she decided to take her to New York for some sight-seeing. She recently got married, and she and her British husband are settled and living in Singapore, which is where she was born and raised. She talked about always wanting to live in a place like San Francisco or New York, but she felt like she was too old for that.

“That’s the kind of thing you do when you’re young,” she insisted. “My friends all did that before they got married and had kids. Now, I’m too old to move around and have that kind of fun life.”

So, what is she saying.. that because she’s in her mid-30s, any exciting life prospects in terms of living and exploring are all just dead? I told her that anyone is really capable of doing what they want to do, and that the real limit is the mind and not the age. It’s actually really fitting to discuss this since the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times have recently published articles with themes of “It’s never too late to start a brilliant career.” Oftentimes, when we think of really accomplished celebrities and minds, we forget that most of them didn’t start that path until they were in their mid 30s to 40s. Success and adventure aren’t always something just reserved for the young and eager. My former colleague and friend, who is married with a one-year-old daughter, just relocated from Amsterdam to Hong Kong. She said she doesn’t want to move back home to New York and that she’s not done exploring and living in other places. She’s 36, probably a similar age to my friend’s friend today.

You kind of get what you want out of life. When you arbitrarily set limits, you limit yourself. If you want to make something happen, you can make it happen — assuming you are relatively self sufficient and leading a comfortable life. It would be a different story if you were living paycheck to paycheck, inundated in student loan payments or needing to support and take care of aging parents who had no other form of help. I always get annoyed hearing people creating these artificial limits for themselves and not even realizing that they themselves are doing this. Society can say whatever it wants, but what you choose for yourself is just that – choosing for yourself. I suppose you need to differentiate that for yourself first, if you ever get there.

My mom has been getting pretty impatient with me, but she tries to hide it. Given she’s my mom and I’ve been in this mother-daughter relationship with her for 33.5 years now, I can always see through her, her facial expressions, her body language, her tone, her words, even over the phone. I always know what she’s thinking about, even if she never fully spits it out.

She’s not very pleased with me because when she asks me, “So, any news?” or “Is anything new?” or “Have anything exciting to share with me?”, I pretty much always respond no. What she really wants to hear is a) that I am pregnant, b) one of my good friends is pregnant, or c) one of my unmarried friends is finally either getting engaged or getting married.

She insists that she wants what is best for me and my friends, and that what is best for us is that we all get married and have children. She was in shock when I told her that one of my friends explicitly said she did not want children at all. “She’s making a mistake,” my mom said. “She will change her mind. Just give her some time. She will realize she wants children and then have them then.” That’s not really how it works, Mom, but I’m not saying anything to that because I don’t want to have this discussion with you.

If my mom had it her way, I would have gotten married by 25, had my first child by age 26, then had my second and third child by age 30 and been done with child bearing by then. That was 3.5 years ago, and since I don’t even have one child yet, I’m extremely, extremely behind the schedule my mom wants.

The greatest thing is that she doesn’t get to control my body or my reproductive organs, though. I will give her the “good news” when I’ve decided it’s okay for that. In the meantime, she can continue to wait and perhaps do something else more productive for herself.

A colleague and I took a walk in today’s blistering heat to get some iced matcha tea. He’s been pretty unhappy for the last 7-8 months and has been actively looking for a new role. He was telling me about his latest offer on the table, the trade offs he’d have to make if he accepted this job. He said he realized that although he complains about his current job and our company now, he really doesn’t have it so bad after all because there are so many horrible jobs and companies out there that are 100 times worse than where we are today.

What I also thought about while on our walk is that when colleagues leave, it’s always kind of the same pattern: you chat a lot when you work together. You take walks and go out for coffee and tea breaks, you text and Slack actively and enthusiastically while you are working together. And then, when that person leaves, he will invariably say he will keep in touch, we’ll be friends, we’ll still meet for coffee or lunch. It might happen once or twice after he leaves, but then it will trickle off, and you’ll be nothing more than Instagram or Facebook “friends” — loosely connected, faintly aware of each others’ lives based on what you share on social media, but really, nothing else. Of course, there are exceptions to this rule, but this is generally how it goes.

It’s kind of sad. In that sense, we’re all replaceable as colleagues, friends, confidantes. No one really matters that much personally, even when you might think for a second they do. That “bond” you shared will be replaced by another bond he will share with someone else in just a few months.

A friend and I caught up over dinner tonight near his new apartment, which he wanted me to see since he just moved in last month. It’s actually owned by the same management company that my building is a part of, so I was interested to see how it compared. I’d previously visited a few units here two years ago, but given I generally hate anywhere in the 30s on the west side, it never would have been a fit for me.

The first thing I noticed about the apartment is that for a “luxury” building, the layout was definitely non-standard: you don’t just walk in, have an open kitchen to your right or left, the living/lounge area, and then turn left or right to see the bathroom and bedroom. Here, there was actually a pretty long living space that would easily accommodate a separate dining area. The kitchen was half open, and the closet space was quite overwhelming. Several of his closets weren’t even filled with anything as of yet!

But the biggest annoyance about the place was the total lack of natural light. Anywhere in midtown in the 30s, whether it’s on the west or east side, would be starved for natural light, but especially his area between 8th and 9th Avenue. You’re surrounded by skyscrapers and other tall office and apartment buildings; it wouldn’t matter if you were on the 10th or 30th floor because there’d still be no light. In that case, there’d be zero reason to pay more for a higher floor because there’d be no extra natural light to justify it. Bigger windows wouldn’t help in any case.

Even if you live in a “luxury” building in Manhattan and are paying luxury prices, there’s still no guarantee you will get everything you want.

I came late to our team happy hour this evening given that I’ve had a lot of things on my plate this week, but I realized when I arrived that I wasn’t really feeling it. We do have a lot of new people who have joined our team here in New York in the last couple of months, so I should have been more social, but I wasn’t really feeling it. I just felt exhausted and disengaged. I stayed for about an hour and then ended up leaving… and picked the absolute worst time to leave, as there was torrential downpour at that time. And it was not just endless buckets of rain coming down, but the wind was out of control. The weather report said the rain wouldn’t end until around 9:30 and kept sending me multiple alerts for flash flooding, and there was no way I was going to stand around for another hour and a half just to get home. So instead, I ran about 5 blocks to get to the subway station, taking breaks under cover occasionally to clear my vision and wring my dress. I thoroughly drenched my flats, dress, and hair; I can’t remember ever getting this soaked in rain ever before. And very empathetic women and men on the subway told me that my eye makeup had completely run down my face as I was using a napkin to dab it all away.

Luckily for me, when I got out of the train at the stop closest to my apartment, the rain had lightened to just above a drizzle, so I was able to get home okay, wring out my clothes, and then have a quick shower to get comfortable. I am never not packing an umbrella when there’s even a hint of rain in the weather report ever again. I rationalized it in the end, thinking that even with an umbrella, I still would have gotten drenched, but it’s better to come prepared anyway.

As a joke among a handful of Asian females on my team, at our team week in June, one of my colleagues got all of the Asian females on our team a “wrong Asian” pin. Unfortunately at our company, we’ve had more than a handful of instances of people confusing us for each other, and so we thought we’d keep the inside joke running along regarding how dumb people can be to actually think we’re all interchangeable.

So, you can imagine how I felt when my Australian colleague, who is based out of our London office, said “Hey, Mei!” to me today. He and I get along really well and have endless fun banter when it’s just the two of us, but given that I was between too many meetings today, stretched thin for time, and he said this to me, I looked at him in shock and said, “What the heck — did you just call me Mei?!”

“Whoa, whoa!” he said, defensively. “Calm down! I said ‘hey, mate!'”

We both cracked up. My sensitivity was clearly on high given my work to-do list has felt never-ending, but at least we both had a good chuckle about this. He knows the story behind this. However, I did tell him he’d be in a lot of trouble if he ever did confuse us in the future.

Since I’ve come back from our China trip, it’s been pretty much nonstop at work, fighting fires that were created in my absence that I had to resolve, traveling for customer and prospect onsite, more and more meetings to accomplish the endless to-do list at work. Sometimes, even though I think overall, the work is meaningful in my day-to-day role, I cannot help but think that a lot of what I am doing is so robotic, and the way we are being measured is feeling more like quantity over quality: quantity of customer meetings, quantity of tasks completed over quality of tasks. It’s exhausting to think about it.

I was looking at my calendar for the rest of this week, and I couldn’t believe the number of meetings I scheduled, one literally after the other, so that I could barely have any time to breathe and think between meetings. I don’t really know why I did this, but now, I’ve pretty much forced myself into this situation and can’t really get out of it. There is light at the end of the tunnel… at the end of this week.

Chris and I were at dinner early this evening when suddenly, all the lights and music suddenly went out in the restaurant. The service staff got into motion, checking everything, ensuring that the patrons were all fine. Our server/bartender served each of us two shots of tequila on the house. They took care of credit card payments the old fashioned way. And as we finished eating and exited the restaurant, we realized that this was affecting the entire area. We were literally standing in the heart of the theater district, where shows had to stop mid-way through or had to be cancelled. Crowds and crowds of people were exiting theaters, unsure what to do next or where to go. Traffic lights were not working, and cars and pedestrians alike were hesitant to move forward.

It was a strange sight and lasted for a good handful of hours. We were lucky and regained power just past 10:30 on Saturday night. It really would not have been so bad if it were not for the sweltering heat. But it really became jarring to know that this power outage happened when someone posted a photo on Twitter showing how Manhattan looked to someone viewing the island from New Jersey…. lots of glittering lights as usual… except for an entire 20-block stretch of Manhattan that was just all black, lights fully out.

Tonight, Chris and I treated my friend and her boyfriend to a belated birthday dinner at an omakase restaurant I’d been wanting to try in the Flatiron. We caught up over sashimi and sake, and then ended up making a detour back to our place because Chris accidentally left a gift we got her at the apartment. It ended up all working out since it just meant extended time together in the comfort of our own home, with far less expenses under our belts since drinking and eating cake at home is always cheaper than doing the exact same activity outside.

During our catch up, my friend’s boyfriend said, “Yeah, I worry about a lot of things… like money, having enough money to do what I want to do, for the future, and all that. But us? I don’t really worry about our relationship. Not saying that I take her for granted because I don’t think I do… but well, I just don’t worry about us. I think we’re good.”

I didn’t say anything to that. I guess that’s how he feels. But I did think about it for a bit in the context of myself. What do I worry about? What makes me fearful of the future? In response to him in my head, I’m very lucky and privileged because I don’t worry about money. In fact, my entire life, I’ve never really had to worry about it, and that is a massive privilege in itself. While I never thought my parents were rich, I always knew we were comfortable in that we never had to worry about rent money, having a roof over our heads, or how we would get food on the table. We always had more than enough to eat, and a variety at that. But the saddest part about that is so many families do have to worry about that, as well as their children. And to me, I don’t think the worries of parents should ever, in a perfect world, have to be the worries of their children. And in the event that I ever had money issues, I know that Chris and I would have the support of our families. Not everyone is fortunate enough to be in that position.

I don’t really worry about work, even though I have a lot of frustrations with it, as any average person would. Circumstances and expectations frustrate me, internal politics and favoritism anger me to no end, but as far as the day to day goes, I’m not very concerned about the stability of my job; I do not fear that my next paycheck will get lost. I earn a comfortable living and have relatively good work-life balance.

Health, knock on wood, is not a concern right now. Other than the annoying colds I’ve gotten which have reignited bad coughing fits that have been reminiscent of my whooping cough days, I’d say I’m relatively healthy and fit for my age.

And similar to my friend’s boyfriend, I guess overall, I don’t really worry about my relationship with Chris. I think we are pretty stable and happy together. We have a lot of differences. He drives me crazy pretty much every single day and is one of the most annoying people I know, but he likely feels the same way about me, and to my friend’s point, that’s probably what keeps us together in the end, whether we are fully conscious of it or not. We both get bored easily; if you get annoyed by someone, it probably means you’re not getting bored.

So what does worry me? I don’t think about it very often, but I guess it’s all the things that are fully out of my control: stupid political situations like the U.S. becoming more anti people of color, anti-women, anti-immigrants; a potential World War III created by President Dipshit, climate change wiping out entire islands, cities, and states. I also worry about the things that are fully not real, but could easily become real in a second: a sudden death of someone close to me, who is going to take care of my parents one day when they are not able to take care of themselves, one of us getting a heart attack and dying while in flight on an airplane and having no help until it’s too late, contracting stage 4 of X cancer and not having any awareness of it until it’s too late. It all sounds a little ridiculous, some more than others, but when I do worry, those are the things I think about.

All in all, I’d say it’s a pretty decent set of things to worry about because I suppose this means I am fairly stable and relatively positive? I don’t always think the worst, even if it sometimes seems to be that way.