I just put a flight itinerary on hold to go home next Wednesday. Sudden visits home are never for a good, happy reason.

I just found out last night that my dad failed a stress test for his heart, and then through an angiogram, he discovered that his left artery has a severe blockage. As a result of this, he has to have heart bypass surgery this Thursday morning. He’s going to be in the hospital for five nights after that, and then after that will be mostly recovering at home for the following 3-4 months.

The main reason my dad had this stress test done was because my uncle, his younger brother, had the same test done after sensing some chest pains, and he found he also had an artery blockage, yet it wasn’t severe enough for a bypass surgery, luckily for him. I spoke with my dad’s doctor tonight, and she reassured me how common this surgery was and how they do over a thousand of these surgeries in this hospital alone every year. The success rate is over 99.5%, with less than half a percent of patients experiencing complications. She said my dad was the ideal candidate given his vitals and his relatively young age, as most of the patients they do this on are between 70-90.

I know I’m supposed to be rational about this and calmed by all these facts, yet I can’t help but feel scared. Imagining my dad’s chest being opened up and his heart stopped for 30-45 minutes is absolutely terrifying.

I thought about Ed a lot this evening as I was learning about all of this from my parents and my dad’s doctor. A part of me knows that if he were here, he’d probably be hysterical, too, the way our mother is now. He was always the worrying type. Part of me wishes that we could share this experience together. The other part of me is a bit happy that he doesn’t have to deal with this stress — the stress of living and coming to terms with the fact that not everyone around you will live healthily forever.

I’m going to hate every visit to the dentist for the rest of my life.

My dentist today walked me through an X-ray of my teeth. He explained why my teeth are shaped the way they are, and then showed me what my bone structure is supposed to look like versus what it actually looks like. That’s never a good thing. Then, he said that basically everything wrong with my mouth is not because of poor hygiene or diet because he can clearly see I take good care to brush and floss more thoroughly than about 99 percent of his patients, but it’s all because of my grinding problem. Why do I get food stuck in my teeth everywhere so much more than I ever could remember before? Oh, that’s because of my grinding, too, which created those gaps. Strangely, my retainers still fit perfectly. I guess the gaps don’t affect the actual bite structure.

These are all signs of age. And I’m only 28 going on 29 soon.

A colleague of mine has a friend who works at LearnVest and was able to give away friends and family passes to their annual LearnVest workshop event this year, so she invited me to come with her tonight. There were over 2,500 people who attended the event, the majority being young working professional women, who LearnVest originally targeted when they began in 2009. There were a couple of good speeches around happiness, what defines it, and how money fits in, but for the most part, the topics being discussed were already things I was aware of and have been actively doing.

I guess I take for granted a lot of the things I learned in my money workshops during my college years, as well as advice I’ve been given from my dad as well as finance books I’ve read shortly after graduation. Given all of that learning, I just always thought it was the normal thing to do to at least contribute 10 percent to my 401K and retirement funds, to spend no more than 25 percent on housing and rent, or to have at least three to six months of ’emergency funds’ stowed away in the sad event I’d lose my job. I always knew that once I would have children, I’d buy additional life insurance right away in the event that I’d tragically die prematurely. I guess these are the things that I have no idea about when it comes to what the average other person is doing. In some way, I live in a money bubble because I feel out of touch with what the average person does with her money. I cannot relate at all to people who live paycheck to paycheck, and I can’t relate to the women who think it’s the norm to buy at least a pair or two of shoes a month.

It was a good reminder to hear today, though, that there’s really no such thing as having “enough” money. It’s always relative, and we tend to never think we have “enough.” People with a million dollars think they need three times that to be fully satisfied. People with $3 million think they need $9 million to have enough, and so forth. We get settled into our new “status,” and nothing ever becomes enough. And if you asked me today if I thought I had “enough” money to afford a child, I’d say no. Nothing seems to be “enough” no matter what your net worth or salary. It’s really true among people I know.

Today, my cousin, who is taking three months of unpaid time off to “tend” to his two-year-old son, and I were having an instant message conversation online. His baby, who supposedly needs five different therapists five times a week because of multiple learning disabilities that he and his wife believe the child has, is being smothered by the two of them. They could probably give my mother a run for her money when it comes to who can be the most overprotective parents in the world.

I’m telling him that I think he and his wife seriously need to consider marriage therapy. They clearly have no respect for each other and don’t listen to each other at all; she calls him an “awful father” every day. He has no respect for her job and thinks she should fulfill traditional female roles at home and not do paid work, even though she loves her job and works for a company that takes pretty good care of her. I tell him that I’ve done therapy before and found it very helpful. He is clueless. He asks, “Why would you need to go therapy?” All three of my male cousins lack any sense of emotional intelligence, so I responded, “To deal with Ed’s death, the circumstances around it and how it came to be, and to come to terms with how stupid people in our dysfunctional family are like you.” His response? “Oh.”

Sometimes I read certain entries on this blog, and I can’t help but think that if someone else read this, they’d think I’m making up all these stories. No, this was not made up. This is real… sadly. I wish I were making this up.

So, my mom called tonight to let me know that I did something to hurt her terribly on the Friday before I left. She was hurt so badly that she has thought about it every day since I have left. It’s been five weeks now.

Apparently, that day, she asked me to bring a glass of orange juice to my dad in the bedroom. He wasn’t in the bedroom when I got there, so I figured I’d give it to him when he came back upstairs from the basement.

Supposedly, I’d already set out a glass of orange juice on the dining room table for Chris when he got back from work that afternoon, so it was there waiting for him.

My mom asked why I brought the glass of juice for my dad into the kitchen. I said he was rummaging through stuff downstairs and I’d give him the orange juice when he came back up. She snapped at me, took the glass downstairs, and gave it to him.

Clearly, what I have proven to my mother through this incident is that I care about Chris more than my dad because I had a glass out for him already (I don’t remember this and doubt its validity… especially since I distinctly remember pouring him a glass after he arrived), and I wouldn’t go downstairs to the basement (that you can’t even safely walk through without tripping over something) to give my dad his juice.

“You care about this boy who isn’t even your husband yet more than your own father; your father does EVERYTHING for you!” she yelled today. “You’re supposed to put your parents first before everyone! You hurt me so much that day that you don’t even realize!”

I think the term “hypersensitive” and “overreactive” are terms that don’t even begin to encompass what my mother is.

Yesterday, I went to my cousin’s baby’s birthday party at his new apartment in Brooklyn. After 1.5 hours of commuting, I finally arrived to a sea of barking orders from my cousin’s wife to my cousin. “Didn’t I tell you to get the cake? Did you even hear me? What did I say about spreading the food out on the table? Can’t you do anything? How did you let Ryan drink out of Zachary’s bottle? Weren’t you watching him?” It was probably one of the worst public treatments of a wife toward her husband I’ve ever seen — it far surpasses how bad it’s been in previous times I have seen them together. The last time I saw them was this time last year, as pathetic as it sounds. My cousin seemed so helpless, squeaking out quiet responses every time each barking order came out of his wife’s mouth.

I wonder if this is part of the reason that my cousin’s baby is seeing five different therapists five days a week. Maybe he can tell in his own way that his parents have an extremely unhappy, horrible marriage, and that they are priming him for a life of anger, resentment, and dysfunction.

I had a dream that it was Ed’s funeral again, except this time, the funeral took place in a large cathedral-like setting with stained glass and long aisles. I walked down the aisle to view him in his casket, and I notice that for some reason his head is positioned so that his chin is pointing straight up. I immediately notify the funeral service director and start explaining how ridiculous and unconventional that type of positioning is for a viewing/funeral ceremony, and she disagrees with me, saying that this is the norm. We continue to argue and eventually she relents and says she will do what I wish.

The clock says 7:25. I’m assuming it’s an evening service that will begin at 7:30. Chris insists that I try to relax by going outside, where there is a playground with lots of swings. Go on the swings, he said. It will calm you down.

The service eventually commences, but my parents are so displeased with the entire thing that they demand that the service be done over again completely the following evening. How are we going to get all these people to come back for a second funeral of the same person the next day? I wonder. I don’t want to get either of them angry, so I say nothing.

I think it’s the first time I can remember where I’ve actually dreamt of his funeral after he passed away. I’m used to seeing him living in my dreams and speaking to me in some way. I don’t want to see him dead in my dreams. Isn’t he already dead in real life? Dreams are supposed to be for us to live out what is not our reality.

My mom was clearly angry when I called yesterday evening. She is really mad that I am going to my cousin’s baby’s second birthday party, which is happening this Saturday in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, which is about an hour and a half commute from my apartment. She had a really nasty tone with every sentence that came out of her mouth, and she said, “I told you I didn’t want you to go, but you don’t listen. You never listen to anything I ever say. But I just want you to know that I do not want you talking to his wife — she is a devil. There, I said it. She’s a devil! DEVIL!” I told her to stop saying that, and she just kept repeating the phrase, “She’s a devil!” that I finally said, Okay, this conversation is over. Goodbye. And then, I hung up.

There are two reasons she hates my cousin’s wife (she isn’t a big fan of this cousin, either, but she wants to focus on her hatred of women most of the time). The first reason is that when my cousin and his wife came to visit San Francisco in 2009, my mom treated them to lunch. My mom is the kind of person who counts every time she treats you and will hate you forever if you never treat her the same number of times. My cousin’s wife profusely thanked her and said that when she and my dad were to come to New York next, she’d tour them around the city and make sure to take them to a good restaurant. Well, in spring 2010, my parents did come, and not only did my cousin and his wife not take my parents anywhere, but my cousin’s wife didn’t even show up to the dinner that we all had together because she had to stay late at work that night. I didn’t mind because I understand how hectic work can be, but my mother was furious and was yelling about it the whole night, taking it personally, as she always does. Stupid me, I defended my cousin’s wife, saying that you can’t control work when it comes in.

The second reason she hates my cousin’s wife is that she found out that she told my cousin to “just get over it” when my brother died last year, knowing that my cousin and my brother were very close growing up. My cousin loves to complain about his wife, and apparently, he told my mother this. What a bad idea. Granted, that does sound like an extremely heartless thing to say, but knowing that my cousin is a complete chauvinistic jerk to her, I can understand that she just wanted to hit him where it hurt. For very clear reasons, my mother was very upset, and typical her, she’s held both grudges ever since. She’s told me she wants me to have nothing to do with either of them and their child, and at most, to just send a gift but not spend any time with them. I’m going to the birthday party because of the baby, not because of my cousin or his wife or their dysfunctional marriage. She just doesn’t understand because she’s so blinded by her own hatred and the grudges she refuses to let go of.

Sometimes, I think about all the things I can’t stand about my mother, and I wonder if I have some form of those qualities. And then I get freaked out by it because I think, I don’t want to become what I hate. Isn’t that what every child seems to fear — that he/she will become the worst qualities of his/her parents?

Last night, I dreamt that my parents were arguing over something minuscule (initially, it didn’t really seem like a dream because isn’t that what happens every day in real life?), and suddenly, my dad starts verbally attacking my mother quite viciously and unfairly. I immediately feel enraged, and I start defending her and telling him to knock it off. Instead of my mother being excited that someone, her daughter, is standing up for her, she ends up yelling at me nonstop, telling me how disrespectful I am being for getting involved and that I have no right to speak that way to my father. I grow even more angry at the fact that she doesn’t realize that what I’m doing is good, so I walk out. She’s still yelling as I slam the door shut.

In real life, I’m sure this same thing would happen. That’s why I never get involved in their arguments.

While ticking off another thing on my to-do list tonight, I had the TV going in the background, and a Mastercard commercial came on, advertising that Mastercard has a site you can visit that will help plan your next vacation. The whole theme behind the commercial was around kids demanding that their parents actually take a vacation, asking questions like, did you know that the average American does not use up all of his/her vacation days in one year? That’s paid time off that is not even taken off! It’s wasted. What is wrong with all of you? You’re supposed to be my role models in life!  

The United States is known as a country of infinite possibilities, the land of opportunity, the place where everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed and achieve as much as he/she possibly can. But there’s a tradeoff to being here: you’re considered lazy or unambitious in general if you are the kind of person who actually makes it evident that you enjoy taking time off, or the kind of person who thinks that taking “just” five consecutive days off of work at one time is too short. We’re brainwashed into thinking that we should be working our lives away, that our lives should be work. Because what is life outside of work, anyway — nothing, right? If you aren’t doing paid work at an office or a grocery store or unpaid work by taking care of your children, you must be doing nothing with your life. It’s why you always hear inane stories of people finally reaching retirement and then getting depressed or bored because they have no idea what to do outside of “work.” How about — enjoy life and do things you actually want to do, not just things you need to do to survive and put food on your dinner table?