Some people are flat out lying or plainly bullshitting when they say this, but I love my parents-in-law. They are so normal that they make you question whether normal is really “real,” and whether they are just some mirage that your subconscious made up because this is what you’ve always wanted for in-laws. They enjoy life for what it is and seem to only point out the most positive aspects of even the worst situations. It’s a world away from what I’ve grown up in. So you can imagine how annoyed I can get when my mother starts pre-judging their eventual meeting, which will be taking place in San Francisco when my in-laws will be traveling there next week. They will be arriving and staying with us here in New York beginning tomorrow night, and next Tuesday, they will fly to San Francisco. Chris will be going, too, with an overlapping work trip, so all five of them will have dinner together. My parents will be meeting my in-laws for the first time. And I will not be there. What an invigorating situation to be missing.

My mom is on the phone with me tonight, asking me if they are “really” nice, or if I am just making it up. Yes, because I lie all about my in-laws and how much I love them just because it sounds good. “I hope they are nice,” she says over the phone to me. “Of course they are going to be nice!” I exclaim, hearing the irritation coming out in the shrillness of my voice. “Well, we will see,” she says, doubtfully.

The problem with this type of negativity is that she’s already decided that there will be something wrong with Chris’s parents, anything wrong, somewhere. Even if this dinner goes smoothly and all is roses and blue skies, in her head, she wants something to be wrong. So she will search for things that she does not like either about them or the dinner or meeting itself. In just over a week, I will hear some criticism of hers of them. She may get annoyed that she payed the bill and they didn’t fight over it “enough.” She may get mad at the way Chris’s mom looked at her when they first make eye contact. I have no idea. But I know for a fact she will say something critical.

And if she doesn’t, then perhaps I have become a more version of my mother and only expect bad things to happen.

The dreams of Chris divorcing me seem to have no end. There’s always some drama involved — he’s leaving me because he’s bored. He’s cheated and is leaving me for another woman. He’s cheated and it’s made him realize he wants something different out of life. He laughs when I tell him these stories and says my subconscious is going nuts. He has no idea where these ideas are coming from.

I don’t know where they are coming from, either. It’s not really about the wedding from what I can see. Things are going pretty smoothly in terms of planning. No hiccups have come up yet. Our life together is full and happy. So what is the problem, then? Or maybe in the back of my mind, I am scared that my dreams will one day become a reality as they did with Ed self-destructing and dying. Sometimes, the future can be scary since we have no way of predicting every single thing that happens to us.

I always have a conflicted feeling every time I leave my parents. Yesterday, we saw them off as the cab driver took them to the Vancouver airport to go back home to San Francisco. My parents are good people at heart, even though they don’t always seem that way based on the way they perceive the world and their actions. I always feel especially sorry for my mother, who lived in very poor circumstances and many times feared for her life growing up in the countryside of central Vietnam. She came to the U.S. with all these hopes about what her future would be like, but instead, she came to experience a whole set of challenges she never thought she’d have to face: racism from the very family she married into, her husband taking his mother’s side over her’s many times, mental illness, and many other disappointments. My mom has always wanted to travel; she ended up with someone who didn’t want to travel and instead made travel much worse. My mom’s a nurturing, affectionate woman; she ended up with someone who doesn’t really know the definition of those two qualities. When I look at my mom now, she’s almost just a shadow of what she had the potential to be, broken by her own family and society in general.

The only person who can allow my mom to at least partly get what she wanted out of life is me; it’s a large responsibility and in a lot of ways is a huge weight on my shoulders. My dad’s never going to take her to see the world. He doesn’t have the patience, diligence, generosity, or desire to go anywhere or see anything, so why would he do this for her? Even if Ed were still here, he never would have taken her. He unfortunately got the “why travel?” trait from our dad. But I’m sure that was partly there because of his illness and the fact that no one ever really showed any genuine care for him.

I wear a blazer about once or twice a year. It is always at more serious client meetings because at every company I have ever worked at, suits or ties or formal wear are too stuffy, and the norm is to see people come to work wearing t-shirts or jeans or even sneakers. Yesterday, I wore one to my meeting, and because I went straight from my meeting to Publix and then to the airport, I wore it to the airport. The small thing I’ve noticed the times I wear my blazer versus times I do not is that somehow, people will always treat me a little bit better when I wear it. When on route to Florida, I was really dressed down, and most flight attendants would barely say “thank you” or “have a good day” as I exited the plane. With this freaking blazer on, everyone’s trying to greet me or say something to me.  I realize this is all anecdotal, but people really do judge and treat you by what you wear.

My dad used to complain about this when he would go to places like Macy’s or other department stores in his clothes from work (he was a glazier), and pretty much no one would give him service. But if he came in with a simple collared shirt and slacks (the rare times that happened, that is), people would rush up to him and ask him if he needed help. People treat me better when I am dressed up versus dressed down at stores, at airports – everywhere. If I just put on a little bit of makeup versus leaving the house with none on, people will smile at me more and say hi more at stores. I don’t like this, but nothing can be changed about this. This is the society in which we live, where people are just superficial without even trying to be.

I had a dream that I had to fly home for an emergency. My mother called to let me know that Ed was acting suicidal, and that he needed me to be there as soon as possible. I flew home, and on an Uber ride back to my parents’ house, I called my mom. She’s out buying food near the house, so she isn’t home with him. I went ballistic on her. “How can you leave him alone? If he’s suicidal, you cannot leave him alone by himself!” My mom gets defensive and said she had errands to run and can’t just sit with him all day. “If he gets very suicidal, then he can always call 911!” That’s probably the stupidest thing to say given the circumstances, but then again, it’s not like much of what she says in these situations tends to make sense. I got off the phone with her as the driver parks in front of the house.

My mom was walking up the hill at the same time, so we entered the house together. I immediately called out Ed’s name, but no response. I ran around to each room to look for him, and I finally reached his bedroom, where I noticed his arm sticking out from under his bed, and I screamed. I pushed the bed aside to reveal him lying with his arms and legs sprawled out, not breathing, his eyes closed. On the night table next to him is a glass of orange juice with a bottle of rat poisoning next to it. Based on the  looks of things, he had mixed the rat poisoning into his orange juice and downed it. I touched his chest to feel for a heart beat and touched his arms, and all I felt was cold as I tried to resuscitate him and yelled for our mom to call 911. But I knew it was too late.

As with the still missing Malaysia Airlines plane last year, the Germanwings plane crash was a devastation also is difficult to understand, especially given that we now know the pilot who crashed the plane suffered from depression, was suicidal, and purposely crashed the plane. Every time I see a headline about it or an article, my eyes have watered this week to think of all the innocent lives that had to die because of one man’s suffering. We can’t fully blame him because of his suffering and disease…. But can we?

I look back on my brother’s death quite often, and I think about all the ways he might have thought about killing himself that would have been “easy.” A self-inflicted gun shot wound if he could get a hold of a gun was one of them. Jumping off a bridge was another, and sadly the way he chose to go. Walking into oncoming traffic? Yes, that would be easy, but that would adversely affect the lives of the driver and whoever else was in the car. Ed was so painfully cognizant of his own pain and how it could affect other people. I’m assuming that this pilot was so blinded by his pain that he couldn’t see this the way Ed did. One of the things Ed said during a meltdown he had with my mom the year he died was, “One day, I will disappear. You won’t know where I’ve gone, so don’t come looking for me.”

I still get choked up remembering my mother telling me this after the fact.

At my friend’s birthday event last night, I met a guy who I would definitely label a creeper. I realize that sounds really judgmental, but I couldn’t help it. As soon as he introduced himself and made eye contact with me, I felt uncomfortable. He stood too close to me, got his face too close to my face, and tried to bond over the fact that we both have roots in Vietnam. To make sure he knew that I wasn’t available or interested, I started talking with another of my friend’s friends about my fiance and our upcoming trip to Japan, where this friend is originally from. This creeper suddenly became super belligerent and started interrupting our conversation to talk about completely irrelevant topics just for the sake of inserting himself rudely into our conversation. It eventually became so unbearable that I looked at my time and decided it was late enough to leave and not look like I was ditching my friend. So I left.

On my short walk home, I started thinking about how people get labeled “creepy” or “shady,” and I realize that I couldn’t really pinpoint an exact quality or trait. They tend to seem like ordinary guys at first glance, but there’s a certain unsettling vibe that these guys always tend to send to those around them. I kind of feel bad for them, but at the same time, I wonder if they even realize they are being creepy.

My friend and I went bridal gown shopping yesterday afternoon, and I found one dress I really liked that is now on my short list. The hesitation I have with this dress is that the sample I tried on is about six sizes too big for me, so obviously because of the size difference, it’s hard to tell exactly how the dress would fit my bust and arms if it were exactly in my size. By far, it’s the favorite dress I’ve tried on since beginning my bridal gown shopping, so I’ve thought about it a lot since then.

The assistant who was helping me gave me the brand, model number, and the price, and when she wrote the price down, she said that she’d give me 10% off the original price. This morning, I looked up the brand and model number, and I find out that the retail price for this dress is actually the price the assistant gave me after the discount.

You’ve got to love the fake mark-ups for the fake mark-downs. Everyone is out to screw you in the wedding industry. Everyone.

Tonight, I went to my third in-person mentoring session at my program’s high school in the west 50s. When I arrived, my mentee was sitting and eating pizza with her friend, who is part of the program, but her mentor was absent. I decided to include her in our discussions so that she’d feel like she had a reason to be there that night.

The more I interacted with her, the more I realized that her English was even poorer than my own mentee’s. She could barely understand me when I asked her what grade she was in, so in the end, my mentee ended up being our translator, even though my mentee’s English isn’t so good. I found out that this mentee has only met her mentor once, and that every other mentoring session that has happened, the mentor has never RSVPed or showed up. She’s never given her any advance notification that she couldn’t make it.

That made me so mad when I heard this. The face I made immediately made both the girls burst into laughter. While they found it comical that I was so annoyed, I just couldn’t believe that someone would sign up for this program and be so flaky. Why even participate in the program if you can’t show up at all, and if you don’t, at least give your mentee some notice? It’s as though this mentee shows up once a month, waiting to be disappointed each and every time, except that one lone time her mentor decided to actually show up. These kids join this program, hoping to have someone to look up to, and instead, this kid gets absolutely nothing and instead just keeps getting let down. She’s already complained and told the program coordinator, but unfortunately, he said that they had no more available mentors left to fill in the spot. She just keeps showing up, waiting to one day not be disappointed.

That almost sounds like me.

When I was my friend’s maid of honor back in 2012, planning her bridal shower and bachelorette weekend in Vegas wasn’t that difficult. In the end, I really just had to rely on myself (and I rarely fail myself when it comes to getting stuff done). I had a co-maid of honor who was just a maid of honor in name because the bride was too scared of hurting anyone’s feelings, and three other bridesmaids that in the end, proved to be pretty useless with offering any help. In the end, I made the plan, did all the bookings by myself, and just told each bridesmaid what share she had to cough up for the event. We had little interaction regarding event planning, and maybe in some ways, that was probably the best. I might have liked if someone actually offered to do something tangible, but I guess that’s just wistful thinking now.

I have three bridesmaids now, and there’s clearly some trouble brewing. One is freaking out over little harmless comments I am making about my mom (who has no expectations regarding anything), and another is getting flustered by this bridesmaid and not understanding why she is stressing out so much. And my third bridesmaid is trying to not get involved by not saying or doing anything to help the situation.

Planning events tends to be stressful for those of us who don’t do it on an everyday basis. There’s always going to be stress involved. But what would ultimately make the planning less stressful is if each of us just exercised a bit of level-headedness and tried to work with each other to make the process fun. That doesn’t seem to be happening here.