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?

I thought I was lucky when I got on the cleared list for standby for an early flight back to New York this afternoon… until we approached the vicinity of LaGuardia Airport and the pilot announces that the weather is too tumultuous to land. Granted, the same thing happened to me yesterday en route to Chicago when we landed in Detroit, but this time, we were headed to Syracuse… and THEN to Buffalo because when we arrived in Syracuse, the storm clouds quickly got there, too. After a very turbulent flight, we landed in Buffalo and stayed there on the plane for over an hour. We eventually got back to New York, just over three hours after the scheduled time. And again, I have no one waiting for me, and no one checking up on me to see if I’m okay.

Sometimes I wonder what it’s like to really not have anyone at all that you care about who cares about you. Then, if you were to go missing, either on the streets of your city or on a train or in a plane, what happens then? Who’s your emergency contact to list – no one? Who is supposed to claim your body if you die? I guess in those cases, you just get buried, un-embalmed, in an unmarked grave with an unmarked stone in a barely identifiable cemetery. I wonder what it feels like to be that alone, that lonely.

It’s just my luck. I made it out to Chicago (after getting my plane diverted to Detroit for weather reasons) and there are thunder storms here. When I get to my hotel room and push aside the curtains in an attempt to see my glorious view of Lake Michigan and the Navy Pier, instead, all I see is mass fog. There goes my idyllic ideas of strolling down to Millennium Park in the early evening to get photos of Bart with the Bean and Buckingham Fountain.

Chris is out in San Francisco, where the temperature in Fahrenheit will hit 90 tomorrow, and I’m in a city I love at one of the worst possible times. He’s happy and relaxed, and I am tense and irritated… and alone. He says he feels like he’s gotten that feeling back about why he loves San Francisco; I am sure it’s because he’s a) not staying at my parents’ place, which is full of tension and negative energy, b) the weather is incredible (and abnormal), and c) he’s visiting all the glamorous parts of the city I never take him to when he comes to visit my family. There’s nothing glamorous about the Richmond District. All the above makes a big difference when you are in a city deciding whether you like it or hate it.

I have no one here to see, so I have dinner by myself at a nearby Italian restaurant at their bar, watching other people converse and congregate. It’s funny how weather can affect one’s mood so much. I just want to go home.

Though many who know me would say I’m very vocal and outspoken, especially when I am displeased, the truth is that I actually feel very awkward and unsettled when it actually comes to confrontation. Nothing makes me feel more squirmish or red-faced than trying to express dissatisfaction and anger with someone. And with a voice like mine, I rarely come off as sounding commanding and aggressive; I usually end up sounding far more mild and girlish than intended. I stayed at the W Hotel in Midtown Atlanta the last several days, and I didn’t really feel like it was up to the same standard as the Ws I have seen and stayed at before. So instead of asking to speak with the manager after I checked out yesterday, I went home last night and wrote the GM an e-mail complaint.

I received a cookie-cutter response to my feedback e-mail and felt pretty pissed this morning, so I sent another e-mail to this non-response and told them that it was ridiculous that they would send me what sounded like an auto-reply that had absolutely no thought, nor any offer of compensation, when I am an SPG member paying a pretty penny for my stay and future stays. So then I got a really apologetic response, plus an offer for bonus points, plus an offer to be handled completely by the GM from the point of my next booking to my departure.

Sometimes, it’s really worth it to suck up my red face and complain.

Today, I arrived in Atlanta for another work trip. I’ll be here until Tuesday meeting clients, so I set some time up to meet with an old high school classmate who is down here getting his MBA at Emory. This classmate and I talked on and off throughout high school, and other than Facebook, we never really kept in touch since then. The last time I was here a month ago, I posted a photo of Atlanta skyscrapers, which prompted him to message me on Facebook and ask to catch up.

He was just as quirky and awkward as I remembered him to be, except now that we are adults, the awkwardness comes in around conversation topics that I don’t really embrace, like “when are you getting married?” and “by the way, most of the girls around your age are already married!” He told me he dated someone for five years to eventually break up with her. She was indirectly pressuring him to get married; he did not have marriage anywhere on his radar. This is why men suck.

Believe it or not, though, it was still a good meeting and dinner.

…Especially after they have filed theirs and you think something may be wrong with their filing. It’s better to let the IRS tell them that they will get audited rather than you tell them that they could be wrong. Remember – parents are always right, and their children are always wrong.