The bad dreams still seem to keep happening. It’s not just one dream, but a series of dreams that all interweave into each other to the point where I’m unsure if they are all separate or part of the same twisted story. Last night, I dreamt that Chris asked to go on a “break,” which of course was pretty devastating to me. I felt so lonely.

Then, I was in a scene where this boy I went to elementary school with who lived only two blocks from my parents’ home was my friend in today’s world, but he was having a dilemma where his girlfriend was so distrustful of him that she would call him anywhere from 20-30 times a day when they were not physically together. He showed me her constant text messages and missed call log. I took his phone and threw it onto a couch, and he got really angry with me and said I had to treat his phone with respect. Eventually, he disappears, and I still have his phone. I’m watching the bubbles pop up every time she texts him. As the minutes go by, his entire screen is full of text messages from him. I finally unlock his phone, which had no pass code, and told her that he’s on his way to see her. I’m not sure why I did that, but I wanted to shut her up.

It’s not easy to understand, but I guess this is my subconscious.

I got into a tiny squabble with a colleague yesterday where we were trying to resolve a billing issue with a client. This problem has been pretty stupid to say the least, and the only reason it’s been prolonged over the course of three-plus months is because neither side, us or our client, wants to just pick up the phone and resolve the issue. Lots of misunderstandings happen over e-mail, and just because the words stare at you in your face doesn’t mean you will completely get what the person who wrote this email is actually trying to convey. Picking up a phone in about ten out of ten cases in my experience always resolves the issue — that goes for personal or professional issues.

It’s not a unique issue to this colleague; it’s an issue with pretty much every single person at my company, and very likely at yours, too. Technology has made us lazy and given us an excuse to not have real phone conversations or face-to-face interactions with people. Why call someone when you could just email them and wait for a response? So I expressed this to my colleague and was insistent that he just call the client; get it done NOW. My colleague shakes his head at me and half jokingly says I’m being angry and pessimistic.

This isn’t about being pessimistic or optimistic; it’s ultimately about looking for the quickest way to solve this problem. It’s being realistic, moron. Do you want to solve your problem or not? If anything, it sounds like you rather just sit there and complain about it then take any actionable step. Since my brother’s death, and as I’ve gotten older, people who just complain and don’t do anything actionable to resolve their problems get zero sympathy from me.

When I think about the question of whether I am an optimistic person versus a pessimistic person, my knee-jerk response I want to give is that it depends on the situation, and actually, I’d prefer to say I’m just a realist. It could be perceived as a cop out, but I try to take the attitude that is most realistic in any given situation. As an example: will my mother ever accept the fact that I’m not moving home? What’s the optimistic vs. pessimistic response to that? I could sit here and be lame about it and think that she’ll just “suck it up” and grow to accept it, but anyone who knows her even the slightest bit knows this is crap. So, the realistic response is that she will never accept it and will always be angry about it.

I decided to text my therapist the question of how she’d characterize me, optimistic or pessimistic. After a bit of back and forth so she could see how I’d characterize myself, she responded and said that if she had to answer the question in black and white, she’d say that I’m a “disappointed optimist.” I guess if what she says is true, then the world really has failed me, but despite that, I keep believing in it.

I went to see my therapist this afternoon. We spent most of the time discussing my anger since I’ve come back from San Francisco, and we also touched upon the upcoming Vancouver trip that Chris and I are planning to take my parents on. It will be the second trip that we’ll be taking my parents on, the second trip we’ve taken altogether when Ed has not been around. It will be the second trip that we’ll be paying for.

My therapist said she thought it was extremely generous and thoughtful to want to take my parents on these trips, and she asked why I wanted to do it not just once, but a second time, particularly given we know how difficult these things can be and my differences with my parents in general in life. I thought about it for a second, and I responded that my mom always wanted to travel to see other places, but my dad, being a hermetic and antisocial and anti-change homebody, didn’t see a reason to. My mom’s lived a really hard life and has had to experience and witness things that no one should have had to go through, I said. She deserves to see at least a little bit of the world, and if I want that to happen, I need to do it myself. No one else will take her — not even my dad. “And frankly, I’m scared that my parents will die one day never having seen anything of the world,” I said.

What this is ultimately about is that I just want my parents to enjoy life and be happy. That’s all I really want. I want them to do things they’d like to do that they may think are frivolous, but things that they’d gain happy moments from. I don’t think this is a lofty or esoteric type of wish; it’s actually quite simple. But with my family, the simplest things always have the potential to get extremely complicated.

Wedding invitations are far more complicated than I thought they’d be. When I first started doing this research, I figured I would choose a template we liked from one of the major sites like Wedding Paper Divas or Minted, customize the wording choice, decide what type of printing we wanted (letterpress vs. thermography vs. engraving vs. digital), and then call it a day. Little did I know I had more choices to make: those printing options are not the only ones. There’s also laser cut, foil stamped and different edge cuts to consider, about five million fonts that can be customized for names of bride and groom vs. the rest of the text, colored and textured envelopes, and did I even consider a pocket folder? What about letterpress invitations but digitally printed enclosures? What types of customized images would I like, if any? Do I want the invitation company to print all the guests’ names and addresses? How heavy should this paper be? Is there such a thing as having too heavy of a piece of paper for an invitation? Have I considered a return address stamp, press, or even sticker with our names on it? And to add to this, every budgeting wedding site keeps reminding me that the only people who will likely save my wedding invitations will be me, my bridesmaids, my mother, and my mother-in-law. Everyone else will throw them away. So if this is the case, is an expensive print method like letterpress even going to be worth it? What about selectively doing letterpress for a handful of invites and doing the rest digital? This is really overwhelming.