Ed and I used to have mini debates since he converted to Christianity that in order to be considered a “good” person, you had to be religious. I used to tell him that religious people can be good, but that doesn’t mean they are all good. You can be a good person without being religious. He vehemently disagreed with me. I would pause and ask him, do you think I am a bad person because I am not a Christian? He would always hesitate and say, no, but you need to accept Christ in your life. It was always what he wanted for me – to be a church-attending, Bible-studying Christian.

Like me, he believed that Jehovah’s Witnesses were a bunch of cult freaks. My mother and aunt are JWs, as they are modernly called today. My aunt is in town for the next four months, and she called today to let me know she is temporarily staying with her friend Maria, a JW friend who lives in New Jersey who is a complete freeloader and who said negative things about my brother being “you know…”  She said this to my face. Anyone who bad mouths my brother while barely knowing him deserves to be burnt at a stake and could never qualify to be a good person. I’m refusing to see my aunt if she brings this judgmental, loser friend of hers. I wonder if she ever feels any guilt that she put my brother down now that she knows he is dead and never to come back.

Tonight, Chris and I met up with his cousin and her boyfriend, who are traveling around the U.S. for two months. For the next month, they are renting an apartment not too far away from ours in Manhattan and will be exploring New York, as well as nearby cities. We had a lot of drinks and ended the night at Otto with even more drinks, great pizza, and pasta.

I’m generally pretty happy to see Chris’s family and friends. Among everyone I have met, they have all been very warm, happy, positive, and entertaining people to be around. What I’ve noticed, though, is that people on my side, especially my family, don’t always tend to fit those descriptors I just mentioned. So Chris doesn’t always welcome seeing them all with open arms. I suppose it’s hard for him to be excited to see them when I am not very excited about seeing them. At the end of the night, Chris asked, “So do you think we could meet up with Russell and Christine and have a night like that?”

No way in hell.

On our way up to Lake Placid in the Adirondacks for the weekend, Chris, his parents, and I stopped by Hyde Park, NY, to visit the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Home. He and his parents are history buffs, and they’d give us all a run for our money with the amount of American history they know vs. what us Americans struggle to retain from our boring U.S. history courses in high school.

The frustrating thing about visiting all these presidential libraries (I’ve now visited six) is that somewhere, you will find mentions of how most of these presidents have cheated on their wives, and it was basically something that was just accepted. Even after falling ill with polio and never being able to stand up or walk on his own ever again, FDR still managed to have affairs with other women despite being married to someone as intelligent, well-written, and articulate as Eleanor Roosevelt. I hate men.

Tonight, Chris, his parents, and I went to see the off-Broadway show The City of Conversation at the Lincoln Center. It’s a story about how after a certain political decision is made, a family gets broken up for 30 years because of differing political opinions and spans the period from the Carter administration to the current Obama administration. The arguments, which get quite heated, are extremely realistic – people argue their points, get spoken over, yelling ensues, and ultimately no one is really listening to the other.

After watching the show, I thought about political debates in my own family between the different generations, mainly my parents’ and mine, and I’ve realized how one-sided they are; my generation, which includes my cousins, Ed, and me – is so scared to ever argue our points because we know that our nearly tea party/right-wing radical parents, aunts, and uncles, would just talk over us, call us naive and make it seem like our opinions are just passing, and then claim we aren’t educated enough (even though we’ve out-educated them all) to understand the “real” issues. It would never be a real “conversation” – it would be a waste of breath. I’m not actually scared to argue against what they say; I’m just so exhausted by how idiotic these conversations end up that I can’t be bothered anymore. Example: the last time my aunt and I argued over gun control, she actually said, “So you want to ban guns? Why don’t you ban pencils while you’re at it because you could stab someone with it!”

Once, I had an argument with my dad about Mitt Romney vs. Barack Obama, and he said near the end, “When you get to the point of making a lot more money, you won’t vote for Democrats anymore.”

A lot of the things that my parents’/aunts’/uncles’ generation get to enjoy, things like social security and pension, were created by the politicians claim to hate, and during their time of creation, were considered socialist. It’s as though they’re happy to reap the benefits of the past without realizing where these things came from and how they even came to be…. And then want to reject anything in the future that might help my generation and future ones to come. It’s just selfish and blind-sighted, and there’s no other way to put it.

I was thinking about all the agitating, hurtful, and sexist things I’ve been taught by my parents, and I told Chris that maybe one day, I should write a book with all these sayings as a guide on what not to say to children as they are growing up.

The most recent annoying thing was told to me today. After I left work and called my mom on my way to Gramercy Tavern to meet Chris and his parents for their arrival dinner (and his dad’s belated birthday dinner, as his birthday was last week), my mom said to me, “Remember what I told you. Don’t pay for them.” I told her how ridiculous she was being, and she yelled at me and told me to stop talking back. “We always pay for Chris when he is with us, so his parents should always pay for you when you are with them. And you aren’t engaged or married yet, so you shouldn’t be spending your money on people who don’t really care about you.”

Thanks, Mom. It’s always nice to be reminded that no one in the world genuinely cares about me other than you and Dad. And then it’s even nicer to be reminded that even after getting married, I still can’t fully trust my husband because as she likes to remind me at least a few times a year, “Do you remember what Scott Peterson did to his pregnant wife?”

A friend and I were chatting today, and I was asking about how her new job was going. She said to me that she was so busy learning and doing all of these new things that she hadn’t really spent much time thinking about how she felt at all – she was just doing it. I can relate to that; it’s easy to just do things because you have them scheduled and planned or because work just sucks all of your time, and then forget about your actual mind set while doing all of these things. There were times in my life I remember being like that socially – socializing for the sake of socializing, even when it was with people who I barely clicked with at all and didn’t even find remotely interesting. And in the last few months with work, I guess I haven’t spent that much time until now thinking about how I feel about it all. It’s been really busy, which seems like it would be a good thing… or is it?

Like my friend said to me today, is this really what I’m supposed to be doing with my life for the foreseeable future? Is there something else out there that’s for me that would be more fulfilling? Every time we make a decision, we’re also making a decision to give something else up. So when’s the next time I’m going to actively make a big decision that will affect my life?

Today, Ben asked if Chris was free to chat on the phone. The last time he did this, he got laid off from his job, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. Well, we found out that after three years of living in Toronto, he’s decided he wants to move back to Melbourne. His tentative plan is to move back at the end of the year. I suppose the cold winters got to him.

While it makes me sad to think about him leaving North America (and being a 20-hour flight away instead of a 1.5-hour flight), it actually made me think about my own situation and made me sad in that way. He feels a pull toward Melbourne, his home. Part of it’s lifestyle, part of it’s family and friends, and part of it is probably an emotional attachment to the place he calls home. He looks back on it and remembers fondly all these moments he’s shared with family and friends who are still there and thinks about how difficult it is when he leaves after Christmas to come back to Toronto.

I feel none of that. When I think of home, the first thing I think about is how broken my family is, how my dad doesn’t even have a relationship with his own brother and sister (my uncle and aunt), how my cousins disregard my parents and me and really just think of themselves. I think of how cold and hostile my parents’ flat is in the Richmond district, how the yard is in complete disrepair and unrecognizable from when my grandmother was alive tending to it. I think of how my loving brother is dead, and how he will never be there waiting with his arms open for me ever again. I remember how much of a stranger I feel when I walk through the streets and realize that everything is changing so fast that even a few months away means yet another thing that is unfamiliar to me. And I realize that pretty much all of my friends have left that city, and the ones who are still there – I’m not quite sure where they are heading in mind or in life.

Maybe no place is really home anymore for me. I’m not sure where I will settle, and I am undecided when it comes to where I really want to be. I’m not even sure I want to be in New York anymore.

Chris decided to do a makeup mentoring session with a mentee tonight, so I thought I would end up going home to eat dinner alone. I had saved banh bao for a friend who works nearby and told him I’d meet him after work to give it to him, and since he didn’t have dinner plans, I went to have some drinks with him at Bierhaus on 3rd Avenue. It wasn’t planned, but we had fun catching up and talking about utter randomness.

I was waiting for the bus to go uptown when Chris came home and realized I wasn’t there, so he texted me to see where I was. I told him I didn’t feel like going home to be alone, and he asked why. I guess I was feeling moody tonight, mad that there were events happening that I felt left out of, and the idea of being alone made me feel really lonely. I’m usually fine being alone the rare times I am, and I actually enjoy the quiet. I can do things like organize (I’m anal like that), read, catch up on e-mails, etc. But tonight was not one of those nights.

When you’re little and have no sense of what the world is like, your parents will most likely tell you that if you work hard, you will be successful. It’s not one of those statements that has five hundred exceptions and loopholes and “if” statements; it’s just a statement parents and people make to younger people, and we’re supposed to believe it. No one tells you, though, that “hard work” and “successful” seem to be subjective, and what “success” is to one person could be “failure” to another. No one tells you that you might get evaluated differently if you are white vs. black vs. Asian, or that as a woman, you might not be taken as seriously as an engineer or a doctor or any other field that is male dominated (which, if you really think about it, is really any profession that is not nursing, flight attending – really all the professions that have no intrinsic “power” associated with them). Sometimes, when you work really hard, you may not succeed. There – I just shattered a lot of poor kids’ dreams.

Last night, we went to see a show called Under My Skin, a show about how the male CEO of an American healthcare provider and a single mom/executive assistant from Staten Island end up switching bodies to experience life under the other’s skin. The play gave some good portrayals overall of what it’s like to experience being a woman vs. a man as the opposite sex, but I don’t really care what any guy complains about when he says he can’t control himself from getting hard or “blue balls” or whatever; we live in a man’s world, and as far as I can see, women have it much harder. I work at a male-dominated tech company; I would know, right?