Tonight, we went to see the show No Wake at the E59E59 theater, which is now conveniently just a walk away from our apartment now. The show is about a divorced couple who is reunited when they learn that their daughter, who has been estranged from both of them, dies from suicide. They spend the play navigating their conflicting feelings about their daughter and each other.

I’ve wondered a lot about how my parents interacted with each other after Ed died and how it may or may not have changed. From what I can observe during my short visits home, they both seem shorter with each other, snap at each other more quickly, and are quicker to raise their voices at each other than when Ed was here. But what I also wonder, which I’m sure I’ve wondered about here, is whether they’ve actually discussed the many events that led to their son’s decided passing and what they could have done that contributed to it. Or is it all just denial, a matter-of-fact statement of “he’s gone, so now we have to move on”? Have they actually discussed it? Did they ever acknowledge to each other how sick their son was and how he needed help that they didn’t want to give him? Probably not given who they are. Would they benefit from it? I’m honestly not sure. If I could ever picture that conversation happening, it would be one of those conversations where no one ever truly says anything meaningful, and you are left feeling like you’ve just wasted a lot of time.

“She was sick,” they kept saying during the play. But they acknowledged how useless those words are after a while because how are you supposed to respond to that? What do words like that actually mean?

To me, they mean, someone had a problem, no one in his life who could feasibly help wanted to help over a span of decades, and now he’s fucking gone and the tears his parents may cry are just a bunch of crap. It’s a sorry excuse for all the times they could have helped and simply chose not to, or even worse… to ignore and look the other way, or exacerbate the situation by calling him names and criticizing him relentlessly. All that is conveniently forgotten once he’s jumped off a bridge and is gone now.

Well, I haven’t forgotten.

I went to see the dentist yesterday, and with my cleaning, I also had to get some restorative work done on my two front teeth. I am a teeth grinder at night. It’s a terrible habit, but one that I am unable to control because what I do in my sleep… is when I am not conscious. So I wear this pathetic, childlike mouth guard at night, which is very unsexy, but despite that, the grinding continues. The guard is there to lessen the damage to my teeth, but the damage still happens. So the dentist took x-rays and saw there were some cracks in my front teeth that needed some help.

Can you imagine going to the dentist when you are 31 years old and being told that there are cracks in your two front teeth that need some sealant? That’s like being told you’re at risk for becoming toothless for the rest of your life, at least, for the two front teeth that really matter every single time you meet or speak with anyone.

I can never get any good news at the dentist. Ever.

In Trump’s America, history is repeating itself once again with white supremacist rallies and violence, leading to the death of an innocent equality seeking woman and the injuries of many more. What is really shocking is not what the self-proclaimed neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and people-of-color hating white racists say and do; what is really shocking is the people who you’d least expect defending these rallies as being representative of “freedom of speech” and opinion, or the people, whether they are colleagues, former colleagues, or people within your professional network, who think a quote like the one below are delusional or “total crap”:

“No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin or his background or his religion … People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love… …For love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.”

This was originally said by Nelson Mandela, and Tweeted by former President Obama after the Charlottesville act of domestic terrorism that happened this past Saturday. And someone posted this quote in my LinkedIn feed today, to which one very ignorant white woman responded that this quote was totally crap and all lies, that as if lions and zebras just “learn” to hate each other, that it’s instinct, so how are people any different?

So, I have a couple responses to that: 1) I didn’t realize that black people, white people, Chinese people, whatever ethnicity you want to name, were actually different species of animal the way zebra and lions are. That’s probably one of the most insulting and inherently racist things someone can say – that white people are innately different from any other race, or a comparison of any races in that sense; and 2) behavior towards people, towards things, thoughts, anything is very much learned, especially when it comes to expressing emotions, and it’s sad to see that people aren’t educated in school or in life enough to realize that. We’re not born thinking or knowing we are Christian or Indian or Muslim or anything; we are taught all those things. And in the same way, we are taught that one religion or race is superior to the other. Babies don’t have a clue what race they are or what religion their parents practice, and neither do most kids under the age of 5!!

It’s as though every day of 2017, I am becoming more and more aware of how delusional and short sighted my fellow Americans are. And every day, I kind of just want to bury myself under my sheets and not deal with reality.

Tonight, I reunited with a former colleague who experienced a lot of the same sexism and discrimination at my last company as I did. It was so refreshing to have drinks with a former colleague who felt exactly the way I did about the last place I worked, and as bad as it sounds, had it even worse than I did day to day. She experienced near daily sexism from her direct manager, and HR did pretty much nothing to address it. It was just accepted as the “way things were there.” And when you have a company where people hire their wives and best friends to report directly to them, who’s going to stop them from their bullshit and delusion?

It’s sad that companies still exist like this, even in the 21st century, even when companies as high profile as Uber are having their very public reputations unravel. But who cares about smaller no-name startups like my last company that are netting probably no revenue?

Toward the end of the work day, the sky literally broke. What was a clear blue sky suddenly turned dark grey, and the lightning and thunder came. The tumultuous rain soon followed. And just my luck, I had no rain coat, no rain boots, no umbrella. I was lucky enough to have a nice colleague who walked me to the subway station with his umbrella. I finally can say I have good-hearted colleagues.

When I got out of the train at 83rd street, it was pouring, and I had to walk in the pouring rain for four blocks and arrived home completely drenched.

I somehow managed to bring a bunch of bubble wrap home from the office during the office move to re-purpose for our apartment move. I slowly started wrapping up fragile items in the apartment and taping them up, and suddenly out of nowhere, I thought about Ed. He’s only ever seen my Elmhurst apartment while I’ve been in New York, and he never saw this apartment. If he ever saw this apartment, he’d be appalled at how small it is. And if he saw my new and upcoming apartment building, he’d probably marvel at how nice it was and ask me how much we would be paying for it. And suddenly I found myself feeling so miserable, lamenting my dead brother and how he’d never see me move into a nice apartment near Columbus Circle and never visit this new and shiny apartment his little sister would be moving into.

We’re slowly approaching his death anniversary, so I guess it makes sense that I’d be thinking about him more and feeling sad at his absence in my life. There’s so much my brother missed out on. He never truly got to experience the joys of adulthood, of truly having ownership over anything, of truly trusting another human being the way I trust Chris, or even the way I trust my closest friends. But these are the moments I think of him most — when I’m at new and pivotal stages of life, whether it’s a new job or a new home, where I think… why can’t I share it with my Ed? Why can’t he be here to be happy for me? Or, more significantly, why can’t he be here to share these types of news with me about his life? He never moved out of the wretched house we grew up in. And that infuriates me.

This year, he would be turning 38. That fucking hurts.

Whenever I chat with my friend who is in a neurology residency program, I always feel a little guilty talking about my life — everything from the trips I am taking to the flexibility of my job to the fact that I can work remotely (doctors… can’t really work remotely). But today, I actually got angry at her industry when she told me that at the current hospital where she’s working, there is no recognized family leave, maternal or paternal. When the doctors in the hospital have a baby, they have to take time out of their sick leave (which is only about a week and a half) and their vacation time (that’s only two-ish weeks). Then, they have to make up that time later. 

“What the fuck?” I just blurted it out, not that my friend minds my occasional potty mouth, but I was just in total shock and disgust. I know at this point, I really should not be surprised at all; the U.S. is the only industrialized country in the world to have zero legal paid family leave (wasn’t it only Papua New Guinea that didn’t… and it’s sad to even put ourselves in the same category as them?) and to not recognize that new parents should be with their children. But it hurts even more to think that those in the medical profession, people who are devoting their lives to the health and wellness of others, can’t even take care of themselves and their new family members, and their lives are discounted.

It’s no wonder doctors are committing suicide and burning out at faster rates than the average person. Their lives and even their babies’ lives don’t matter to their employers.