Last night, I dreamt that I was walking through a huge green park, and everywhere I walked, I could see dead white ducks with bright yellow beaks lying around me. I peered closely at a few of them, and as I examined the ground, I realized that they were all attempting and failing to eat the pins that you poke into Pilates balls to get them to seal the air in. The white pins were lying all over the grass, and some ducks had tried to cough them up before they had died. I felt distraught as I continued walking, trying not to step on any of the dead duck corpses.

Chris came out of nowhere, and I grabbed his arm and told him that all these ducks were lying around and had died because of eating all the white pins that some evil person had left lying around for them. Chris shrugged, acted as though this was all normal, and insisted it wasn’t a big deal. I wasn’t sure what to think.

I had a dream that it was my friend’s daughter’s third birthday. They are hosting a birthday party for her at some rented space on the top of a 50-story building. I’m chatting with one of the party goers, who is a friend of my friend. And we were talking about how people are dying younger and younger for some reason. Maybe it’s the chemicals in our food, the stress in our lives, but every single one of us is doomed to have a shorter life.

And there comes the birthday girl out of nowhere, who starts balancing herself on the sofa. Behind the sofa is a window that is half open… big enough for a baby to fall out of. The girl tries to use the window to lean against to balance herself on the top of the sofa, but because it is open and she cannot see that, she falls right out in front of our eyes. The friend’s friend and I both witness this at the very same time, and we both yell out. The girl just fell out of the window of a 50-story building, and she’s going to die.

Last night, I met with a friend who has been troubled recently. In some ways, the way he talks, his tone, and his attitude toward life remind me of my brother in his last weeks of life. I spent about an hour with him and he left, but as I made my way home, all I could do was think about how this was like deja vu all over again, and all I could feel was powerless, powerless in the same way I felt with my Ed.

And to remind me of how powerless and hopeless I felt, I saw Ed in glimpses in my dreams last night. It was just flashes, but I could see his despair, his eyes as though they were just dark holes staring into a world of nothing. I woke up this morning feeling awful. You never really get over knowing that you failed at saving your brother’s life. There are times when people lighten the mood in dire situations and say, “Well, it’s not like it’s a matter of life versus death.” Well, that can’t be applied to this situation.

Family is overrated. People always say that blood is thicker than water, but most of the time the people making statements like that have no idea what a dysfunctional family can be like. It’s easy to make sweeping ignorant statements like that when you are blissfully unaware of how bad it can be.

Most of our wedding guests RSVPed in a timely manner, most far ahead of our RSVP deadline. I have one cousin who makes it seem like it is painful to say yes and that he doesn’t really want to come, so he decided to RSVP on the very last day for both deadlines I set and then complain that the sites were malfunctioning on the last day. That is probably our wedding website and Evite quietly telling him that his presence is unwanted. We really don’t want to host guests who are ungrateful and make it seem like it’s a chore and a hassle to come to our wedding. Just don’t come with an attitude like that.

And then I have an aunt who has been passive aggressive with me since I told her that her on again, off again boyfriend would no longer be welcome at the wedding. I refuse to host drama at my wedding events. I sent a reminder to RSVP for the optional wedding events. She forwarded my e-mail to her best friend… well, she thought she did, and asked her advice about whether she should continue ignoring me or just respond finally. She actually made the mistake of sending it…. straight to me. So I called her out on it and emailed her back, telling her that I don’t believe I was meant to be the recipient of this message. She dumbly responds, saying she has no idea how that got sent to me and that it had nothing to do with my message, and yes, she will be attending both optional events. What a pity.

I realized today that a short attention span is not only affecting my generation, but also the generation before me. I sent out an e-mail reminder regarding the welcome dinner and farewell brunch that Chris and I are hosting around our wedding to my side guests, and my cousin’s wife responded to me, letting me know that she already let us know that she is coming to our wedding. Well, if she had read the message I wrote, I explicitly asked for an RSVP for Thursday night and Saturday morning, not Friday’s wedding. Her message came off as passive aggressive and just annoying. She also probably didn’t notice that I blind copied everyone, so it wasn’t just like I was singling her out.

It’s sad when people can’t even read one- to two-line e-mails anymore and immediately read two out of ten words, choose to get mad about it, and then have to have someone else point out to them that they misread, misunderstood, and are just flat out wrong.

I don’t know if it’s bad karma, if it’s some higher power telling me that these work trips aren’t good for me, or if it’s just really horrible luck, but this is the second time in two weeks that I’ve encountered a flight cancellation. I don’t even receive a reason for it this time. I originally had scheduled a direct flight from Atlanta back to New York this evening, and between back-to-back meetings this morning, I listened to a voice message from AA telling me that my flight got cancelled – no explanation, no nothing. Instead, I got re-booked onto a flight connecting in Charlotte, and instead of getting back home around 9:30, I wouldn’t be landing at LaGuardia until nearly midnight. Nothing seems to be working out quite well for me in the last two weeks.

I sat on my connecting flight from Charlotte to LaGuardia in the first row of economy in a middle seat, which I never get, but I succumbed to choosing it since by default, they were mean enough to put me in an aisle seat near the back of the plane. These are the moments when I actually remember why flying can be so terrible and why people hate it. It’s also the moment when I realize that I never would have been happy as a consultant. I mean in this situation, it’s only been two back-to-back weeks of work travel, and I’m already miserable and want it to end. If I had to spend 90 percent of my time traveling and living out of a suitcase for work, I’d probably quit after a month.

I woke up this morning to a Facebook message from a cousin who usually makes zero effort to keep in touch with me. He simply said that he saw a photo on his Facebook Newfeed and linked it to me. I clicked it, and it’s a San Francisco George Washington High School yearbook staff photo from 1996-1997. I caught my breath when I read the text before looking at the photo and immediately realized that was Ed’s last year of high school and also the year that he was on the yearbook staff. He joined the staff to participate in some extracurricular activity and also in hopes that he might make a friend or two. Unfortunately, he didn’t, and he didn’t enjoy his time on the staff at all. In the group staff photo, it’s exactly as I would have imagined it: it’s a large group of students, smiling and looking at the camera, and on the left side of the photo is my brother, slightly off to the side and away from the others, looking seriously at the camera. All the names of everyone pictured is also noted in the photo description.

You think it might make me happy to see an unexpected photo of my brother, but the truth is that in this context, it does not. If anything, it made me want to cry when I saw it because it just made me remember how much he hated high school, school in general, and how alienated and alone he always felt. He always felt ignored or misunderstood or unimportant. I was too young then to realize that my brother felt that way in school, and I had no concept of loneliness or depression at that time. I only learned about it shortly after he graduated when he started revealing to me how he felt. I always look back and wish I could have understood more and helped him, but I suppose that at age 11, most things of that complexity should be out of my reach.

I missed him all day today, and not just because I saw this photo of him and was reminded of the deepness of his pain and suffering and sadness. It’s also because overall, this has been a really grueling, frustrating, and tiring week, and I just want to be done with everything and everyone from this week.

On my return home from Tampa today, I had a connecting flight through Philadelphia. I knew the winds and rain were a bit crazy since I felt a lot of turbulence on the flight to Philly, but I didn’t realize that it would cause several delays and ultimately a flight cancellation for my return to New York. I waited for hours and hours for an update, and of course all the airline agents were agitated and didn’t know what to tell us. The airport was packed with thousands of passengers who had been displaced, so tension was thick in the air, and I heard a lot of yelling and swearing as I walked through the AA terminal.

I’m only two hours away from New York City, I thought as I charged my phone at an available outlet and tried to figure out my next steps. I could try a car service, maybe even Uber it, wait for a flight tomorrow… what’s it going to be? Oh, well, the car services were all unavailable until 2pm tomorrow, no flights were going to land at LaGuardia airport tonight, and all flights for tomorrow are booked up also until 2pm tomorrow (magic time it appears to be), Uber refused to let me input any address not in Pennsylvania, and when I tried calling the first three airport hotels, they had zero rooms available.

I ended up finally booking a hotel in downtown Philadelphia and booked a seat on Amtrak to get back to the city by midday tomorrow. I never thought I wouldn’t be returning back to New York on this trip via plane and that I’d have to take a disgusting Keystone train back to the city. This trip has become the most exhausting trip ever, and it was all for work. All I want to do is go home, and I can’t do that. My level of frustration is at an all-time high.