Author Archives: Yvonne

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.

 

 

Secret revealed

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I finally asked my mom today if she was going to tell her two friends from Hawaii coming to the wedding that Ed isn’t here anymore. I’ve been avoiding asking her in fear that she might lash out at me, but she actually seemed very thoughtful when she responded. She said that they will be visiting the Bay Area before the wedding and that she’d talk to them then about it. She even acknowledged how important it was that they know before the wedding. I am slightly in shock we agreed on this so quickly and easily.

A wedding without my brother is getting closer by the day and more real by the minute. I hope that he will be watching over us.

He’s alive

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I woke up this morning in shock after having a dream that felt so real that I thought there was absolutely no way that I dreamt it all up. I dreamt that Ed came back from the dead; no, he insisted in the dream that he never died, that he was always here. And he was really happy. I’d never seen him smile like that before… well, except the Seattle weekend we saw Shania Twain in concert.

So Ed was alive, and I was happy. But then the next thing that I learn is even more startling: he tells me that our mother is gone — she died. I’m not sure what to feel. Should I be ecstatic that Ed never died, or sobbing with grief that my mother is dead? And how does he even know she is really gone?

It’s like in real life: you can’t have everything you want, can you?

Health and life

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It’s been about two months since I’ve gone to the gym. It’s kind of a weird feeling to not be working out for so long. In December, it made sense since we were away in Australia and then in Hong Kong, but ever since then, I’ve been slowly but surely recovering from whooping cough. It’s not good to be doing breathing exercises and getting over bruised ribs when trying to go to the gym. So Chris banned me from going until my ribs fully healed. And this morning, I woke up for the first time in nearly two months and didn’t feel any pain in my ribs after inhaling deeply. It’s like a revival (and this means I’m going back to the gym!).

The last week or so when I have been able to speak properly has made me so happy. I can speak loudly and clearly without my voice breaking up or sounding like I am choking up, and I don’t sound like a sick person. My voice actually sounds like my voice now. And I have moments through the day when I am speaking to people, and I just start smiling a lot, thinking, “I’m so grateful to be healthy and able to speak and breathe normally again.” Health is the most important thing in the world. Healthy people rarely think about it because they just have it, so they don’t need to. In the last couple of weeks, I’ve woken up in the morning, and as soon as I start speaking to Chris or whoever it is that I first see in the morning, I’ve been really thankful for my health and my life.