Last night, I met up with one of my best friends from elementary school for dessert in the evening when I got into San Francisco. She had seen me post years ago about losing my brother to suicide, and given we both spent a lot of time at each others’ homes growing up, we also inadvertently knew each others’ brothers pretty well. At the time, she had sent me a heartfelt message about his passing, and since then, has loyally donated money to my AFSP fundraising drive year after year. I never expect anyone to donate to my drive, especially people who are that distant from me, so it’s always been a very heartwarming and touching surprise for me each year. Facebook has certainly allowed for a type of connection that everyday people would not have normally had in my parents’ generation, and I was happy to meet her this evening. Without Facebook, this definitely would not have otherwise happened.

I wasn’t sure how much time we would spend together, nor was I sure if we’d even still feel a connection to each other, but as soon as I saw her, I immediately felt comfortable and like we genuinely were old-time friends. We ended up chatting nonstop for over three hours about everything: school, work, moving (me), our families, now-husbands, our living situations, San Francisco, travel. But as much fun as it was to catch up, I realize that in leaving her tonight, I actually felt a bit sad.

Her family life seems pretty bleak: she lives in a cramped, rent-controlled apartment with her husband, and it was passed on to them from his family, who originally lived in the place when they immigrated from the Philippines. The house is dilapidated, filed with junk to the point where no one wants to do anything to change it. There’s barely even 12 square inches of counter space in her kitchen, so she feels like she can’t even cook or live properly in her own apartment. She has a brother of the same age as Ed, but they are pretty strained in their relationship, as there’s been a lot of verbal abuse in the past that she hasn’t been able to navigate. They’re constrained by money and dysfunctional relationships.

I can definitely understand the dysfunctional family relationships part, but I guess what made me sad the most is that even though we’re older, some of the things that bugged me about her are exactly the same now as they were then. I started remembering what really caused us to drift as friends, and she openly admitted she still did the same thing: since then, she pretty much has made zero friends because she’s spent all her time with her boyfriends, one guy after the next, and so whatever friends he had, she’d gravitate towards, and no one else. I remember the time when we were in high school and I tried to have her come to some events with me, but she refused because she said she’d rather spend time with her then-boyfriend; this was for my birthday that year, too. I was so angry then; we hadn’t seen each other in months, yet then, even though she saw her boyfriend every day, she’d rather blow me off to spend even more time with him. I gradually stopped making an effort to spend time with her, and because I was the only one making the effort, we drifted in our own directions and away from each other. We occasionally reached out to call, email, and then Facebook message, but that was it.

I guess the other thing that made me sad was that it was clear from the lives we lead exactly how different we are. She seems like she has been paralyzed into indecision and thinks she is fully unable to change all the things that have made her unhappy. I feel like I’ve made massive strides in improving a lot of things to ensure that I’m making progress in my life, emotionally and mentally. Here I am, back in San Francisco on work travel, clearly privileged in so many ways, and she’s never left even San Francisco (and has zero desire to and said she wouldn’t know what to do with herself) and is struggling to make ends meet with her rent-controlled apartment payments.

While it was fun to catch up, I don’t think seeing her again regularly would be the best idea for me. I really need to make an effort to spend time around people who exude positive energy, who are confident enough to take control over their lives, and sadly, she is not one of those people.

Today, we spent the morning at the World of Coca Cola. Despite having come to Atlanta once for fun and countless times for work, somehow I’ve never made the time to come here and finally did today. I guess the main reason I wasn’t super enticed to come is that in general, I’m not a soda person, and I don’t particularly like Coke at all. I understand why people are obsessed with the flavor and kind of see why people prefer Coke over Pepsi, but overall, I’m not enthralled with the brand at all.

But then, they got brownie points with me when I saw that they not only donated land for what is now the National Institute of Civil Rights just across the park from them, but they also supposed anti-segregation back in the day. And, I guess I do quite like their old-school, original bottle design. I also prefer the taste of “real” coke with sugar, as opposed to the disgusting high fructose corn syrup that sweetens it here.

In the museum, the actual recipe/concoction/formula for Coca Cola is locked and sealed in The Vault. It’s very dramatic, and apparently only two people in the world know the formula, and only half of it, and therefore, they can never travel together at the same time if God forbid anything happens to them. The funny thing to me is that I am pretty convinced that given it was concocted in a lab way back in 1892, I am 100% convinced that it is fully made of artificial “natural flavors” and therefore probably has gut-busting, body-ruining, cancer-causing hideous ingredients in it, and that’s partly why they are being so secretive about their formula. If you actually spend time to think about it, what in real life that you eat actually tastes anything remotely like a can of Coke?! It just screams to me of artificial flavorings and therefore, yuck.

We caught up again with our friends in Atlanta today, first at the Martin Luther King, Jr., Birth Home and National Historic Site, then over dinner in Duluth, where the third largest Korean population in the U.S. resides (and evidently, has delicious and authentic restaurants). I feel like the more I listened to our friends talk about living in the South, being in the sciences as a person of color, the more disgusted I was becoming in these conversations. I never would have learned these things other than in random articles unless I spoke with them about these incidents they’d gone through.

She talked about being an intern and working with a white racist attending doctor, who basically determines whether you get to move on to fellowship and becoming a full fledged practicing doctor; they do all your write-ups and evaluations, they decide whether you can take the next step. If you don’t get along with your attending, you’re basically screwed, and the system is set up in such a way where it doesn’t matter if you have been discriminated against; no one wants to care or cares. A patient came in, black and poor without medical insurance, and the doctor says to her in the room that the patient is a “fat n*****.” Our friend raised her eyes at him because she felt powerless and could say or do nothing, and he retorts back to her, “Why are you annoyed? I didn’t say anything about your race.” In her very wealthy and white undergrad experience at LSU, she was surrounded in sciences by 5th, 6th, 7th generation white southern women, some of whom were wealthy because of their slave-owning ancestors pre-Civil War. And these are people who you could probably never have a conversation about civil rights with, as they lamented what a difficult time their relatives had back in the day when slavery ended, “how hard” it was for their families to get by and make themselves into what they now have today. To them, black people and other people of color don’t have it hard; they have it hard because we’re probably taking all their land, their jobs, their rights from them. When she worked in Birmingham for a temporary internship, she told her team openly that she wanted to visit the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute and the 16th Street Baptist Church where the bombing happened, and it was just crickets in response; no one else had any interest in going or cared. It was chilling for her to witness this… today, in the 21st century, in a time post our first African-American U.S. president.

I couldn’t really say anything because I was just so disgusted. But then I am reminded of the horror stories I’ve heard in California, in Long Island, of people who think just like this. And I realize that the stories our friend shared during this trip — they are not isolated. They are a lively and growing group of hatred-filled people being further fueled by President Dipshit.