I’m just finishing up a book I’ve been reading that won the Pulitzer Prize last year called All the Light We Cannot See. It’s a historical fiction novel about World War II. That may not sound very original from the outset, but the most unique part about it is that it’s told from the perspective of two young children, one blind French girl, Marie-Laure, living in Paris who is forced to flee, and a German orphan boy, Werner, about to “heil Hitler” after being chosen to attend a brutal military academy under Hitler’s power. As the story has progressed, I’ve realized that what is most chilling about it are the parallels I can draw to modern day politics in the U.S. right now.

For better or for worse, our country is becoming more and more divided. It doesn’t help that everyone has their own set of “facts” presented to them by their desired and read/watched media sources, or that Facebook seems to be the main source of news for most people today (which obviously skews everything you read toward whatever your political bias is). The saddest thing is that people cannot get their “facts” straight, and when presented with true “facts,” they deny they are true because they go against what they originally believed to be true (hello, the “fact” that Barack Obama was born in Kenya, or that Michelle Obama is actually a man, or that Hillary Clinton never actually gave birth to Chelsea). Maybe Barack Obama becoming president and running the country for almost eight years freaked out all the Republicans and the white conservatives, terrified that blacks and people of color would overtake this country and take what they wrongfully thought was only theirs. The way Marie-Laure’s great-uncle’s housekeeper describes Hitler’s rise to power could easily be likened to how the tea-party movement and the extreme division of parties in the U.S. have evolved. Hitler’s rise to power wasn’t sudden or dramatic; it was marked by slow, subtle shifts. As Madame Manec says in the book, it’s like the slow onset of oppression to a frog being boiled to death, the frog not realizing the change in heat because it happened that slowly. This scary comparison — it could easily be today’s “rise” of Trump. And even if Hillary does win the election, it will incense the right (and even many parts of the left), and cause even greater division and grid lock, especially if the House continues to be controlled by the Republicans.

It leaves everyday people like me feeling powerless against the system and all the hate, kind of like these children feel in a world that’s being taken away from them. Except for them, it actually is about life vs. death every single day.

The last few nights have brought me bad dreams. I’m not sure what has brought them on, but I have been waking up feeling disturbed, sleep-deprived (even when I have actually gotten adequate sleep), and this morning, I woke up with a terrible headache. The dreams have touched on everything from being abandoned, getting pregnant (yeah, that’s bad dream for me right now. I do NOT want to be pregnant right now), to giving birth, but never seeing my baby again. Maybe it’s the change in seasons, or the fact that Chris isn’t here, or that my friend just left New York that I’ve been having all these strange subconscious thoughts. I would love to have a real dream interpreter, one who knew exactly what every single one of my dreams meant.

We watched the first presidential debate via live stream tonight, and it certainly proved to be the show that I’m sure Trump wanted it to be. Donald Trump made sure to interrupt and cut off Hillary at least 10 times (I mean, isn’t that what men do to women all the time, and it’s acceptable?), predictably refused to release his tax returns as all presidential candidates are expected to do unless Hillary released all the e-mails off her private email server (completely  irrelevant, but not like he cares), and dug himself a hole when rambling on and on about blacks and racism, which only made him appear to say everything but “I’m a racist and hate blacks.” He lied through his teeth, acted like an impetuous child, and used the single word “Wrong!” every time Hillary stated a fact about his shady business dealings and character. Not everything Hillary said was true according to fact checks done, but at least she appeared poised, calm and collected — presidential. She didn’t stoop to his level of defensiveness.

Tonight, Chris and I went to see the Love, Love, Love off-broadway show at the Laura Pels Theatre. The show depicts what they call the Beatlemania era, a time of the “Me” generation. It shows two people who fall in love, get married, and raise children in what is to me, a house full of dysfunction. This quote I read from Mitch Albom’s Five People You Meet in Heaven rang in my head:

“All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair.”

The parents of the two children in the show are clearly very into themselves. They both work hard and seem ambitious in their careers, but they never truly hear or listen to anything that their children say. They are superficially involved in their lives with things like birthday cakes and candles, but really have no idea what their children do. Fast forward about twenty years later, their son is still living with their dad (as the parents have divorced) and is clearly suffering from a mental illness that the parents don’t want to address, and the daughter is barely making her rent payments in her sagging career as a professional violinist. She blames her parents for her lack of mobility, and as “payment” for their wrongdoing, she demands that they buy her a house in an economy where she cannot afford that luxury.

I’m not sure I agree that her parents should buy her the house. In the end, they refuse and do what they always do — ignore her and her brother in favor of what they want. It almost makes me remember how Ed used to say he always felt ignored by our father, that our father preferred being in the garage and tinkering with things down there and talking to himself over talking to and bonding with Ed, so Ed actively and consciously made the decision one day as a pre-teen to altogether stop talking to our father. I didn’t always get it then when I was young, but as an adult, I understood completely. How much can we blame our parents for what our lives turn out to be, and how much can we blame ourselves for potentially not trying hard enough and finding our own way? I think that’s what I’m always wondering.

We spent a lot of time the last few days looking at views of the Golden Gate Bridge and on Saturday, even drove across it twice. The drive didn’t make me cry this time, but it still felt pretty miserable crossing it. As we drove across the bridge, I wondered if anyone walking across it was suicidal and thinking about jumping that day.

I googled the latest statistics on jumpers at the Golden Gate Bridge last night. In 2013, the number was around 1600. In the last three years, over 100 people have since jumped off, contributing to over 1700 deaths from this tragic “international orange” beauty. We will never know the actual number because of all the bodies that get swept out of the bay.

During my Google search, I found this New Yorker article published in 2003 — ten years before my brother jumped off. The article is aptly titled, “Jumpers: The fatal grandeur of the Golden Gate Bridge.” This is the paragraph and quote that infuriated me the most:

“In 1976, an engineer named Roger Grimes began agitating for a barrier on the Golden Gate. He walked up and down the bridge wearing a sandwich board that said “Please Care. Support a Suicide Barrier.” He gave up a few years ago, stunned that in an area as famously liberal as San Francisco, where you can always find a constituency for the view that pets should be citizens or that poison oak has a right to exist, there was so little empathy for the depressed. “People were very hostile,” Grimes told me. “They would throw soda cans at me, or yell, ‘Jump!’”

When I read this quote, that was about all I had left for this city. This city makes me more mad every single time I come back to it. If it’s not the stupid parking fees in South of Market (where you have to feed your parking meter until 10pm) or the lack of attention to the homeless problem here (I actually detect a stench on Muni now; I must have just been blissfully ignorant before), then it’s how outwardly liberal this city is and how they truly do not give a crap about anyone other than themselves. They just want the perception of doing the right thing all the time. The dog and poison oak comment could not have been more true.

A suicide barrier has been debated since the bridge was unveiled and argued supremely in the 70s to lead to zero action, and finally in the 2010s, we’re actually seeing potential action. There really is zero empathy for those truly suffering from depression or those who are suicidal. It’s saddening to me that it still has to be so stigmatized where people don’t want to acknowledge it openly as a real health problem. I hate it when people are so awkward about my brother’s death. Why can we not just treat it as the disease that it actually is?

So when I Googled jumpers, I actually found YouTube videos of footage of people jumping off the bridge. This is real. Some film maker left his camera running and would record people one by one, month after month, jumping off that damn bridge. So one by one, I watched them jump. Some people climb over the ledge and jump off as though they are sitting. Others stand on the railing (they must have really good balance) and jump off. One did a little prayer and jumped off back first. Another removed his shoes neatly first and dove off like he was doing a dive into a swimming pool. The film shows their descent all the way down, 250 feet into the Bay. And all I could think as I watched each of these people jump was, which part of their body exploded or imploded first? Was it their ribs that shattered and punctured their lungs and heart? Or was it their neck that snapped first and had bones that scrambled their brains? The coroners have said that oftentimes when examining bodies, they see blood coming out of the victims’ ears, as well as organs oozing out. The Columbarium did a really good job cleaning my brother up. I’d ever have guessed he jumped off a bridge looking at his corpse in his coffin. I guess we did pay them to do that.

I wonder if there is footage of my brother jumping. I probably shouldn’t see it even if it is available. But I always wonder what he did in the last moments of his life — what his face looked like, if he was calm, if he was crying, if he was at peace with himself and the last decision he would ever make — to leave this world. I wonder if he dove in head first or if he jumped backwards. I also wonder what the effect was on the person who saw him jump and dial 911, and if s/he still thinks about my brother to this day.

This city will always be a reminder that my brother is gone. And thus a visit to San Francisco will never be absent of pain.

I’m sitting at home watching the Democratic National Convention tonight, listening to Hillary’s acceptance speech while trying to anticipate all the things she’s going to get criticized for. The very first thing that comes to mind: that she’s not smiling enough.

It’s a woman’s traditional role, right, to be pleasant and agreeable, and therefore we’re expected to smile and to serve. She certainly has served the American people quite well in her lifetime, but I know for a fact that tomorrow, when I start reading articles or scroll my Twitter feed to see comments on her speech, her lack of smiling (except at the end) will be commented on negatively by a bunch of idiot men out there. While it’s exciting to have the glass ceiling broken in having the first woman being nominated for a major political party in this country, it makes me want to grind my teeth thinking about how even more intensely scrutinized she will be for being the first.