Tonight, we went with some friends to see a show at the Women’s Project Theater called What We’re Up Against, which is about the blatant sexism faced by the two women at a small architectural firm in the 1990s. The most enraging part of it is the “bro culture” and the blatant sexism that gets swept under the rug. The most disturbing part of it is that today, that’s still tolerated, and the most passive and subtle forms of sexism are so hard to define, but we just know it when we experience it. Like the sexism I faced at my last company, when you write it down on paper, it doesn’t seem so glaring. It’s very subtle. It’s like the time when my ex company’s former female legal counsel left (because of sexism), and she got replaced by a male friend and lawyer of the company’s president, my (male) colleague said to me that our ex-female legal counsel “just didn’t get it. She just didn’t know what she was doing. But (new male legal counsel) just gets it. He’s a dude (I kid you not — there was real emphasis on this word in his speech)! He just knows how to do this!” Oh, really? She just didn’t get it? But this man does, not only because he’s “bros” with the president, but also because… he’s a “dude“?

You try proving in a court of law that that was an example of sexism. You’d probably lose. But we both know that was sexism. This is one of many problems we face today even when we have it so much better than the many generations of women before us who got us to this “privileged” state.

Today, I had a video chat with a new colleague of mine who will be based remotely in Minneapolis to service our customers in the Midwest. We do these random one-on-one sessions with new hires on our team to get them acquainted with the rest of us and to make everyone feel welcome. I actually really like that we do this. The intention is quite good here.

One sad thing I learned about my new colleague is that she is a former opera singer who finally got disillusioned by the industry when she was told she could move forward with the San Diego opera only if she was willing to “give a certain amount of sex” to the director and ultimate decision maker of the opera. “Well, what can you do for me — I mean, sexually?” he propositioned her. “You’re not very good looking, definitely not the prettiest person we could put on stage, so you’ll need to provide for me sexually to get anywhere with us.” She was floored and immediately declined and walked out. And she left California, never to consider opera as a career ever again.

These stories are so prominent everywhere for women. We’re treated and looked at as objects by men who have too much power and are driven by money, power, and the desire to ravage any sexual object they want. And they make excuses they can do this because of their money and power, or because of the “time” that they grew up in as Harvey Weinstein did. Just look — President Dipshit does the same thing and is now commander-in-chief of this incompetent country that willingly and happily elected him. I shouldn’t be surprised, but it only makes me sad because sometimes when I hear these things, I feel as though progress is being halted.

My colleague whose father died from suicide the same year Ed did asked me about my walk this morning when I came into the office. He was originally planning to come and take his three kids and wife, but his mom had some melt down the weekend before and had to come over unexpectedly yesterday. His younger brother recently got married, and part of the agreement is that their mom would live with this younger brother and his new wife. Unfortunately, the adjustment in living with her new daughter-in-law wasn’t going very smoothly, and a lot of drama was ensuing.

“Why does she live with your brother?” I asked my colleague.

“Dude, she can’t live alone,” he said to me seriously, shaking his head. “She’s just not in a mental or emotional state where any of us can trust her living alone. She doesn’t trust herself living alone.” He said that she’s physically capable and moves around on her own, even is a teacher to first-grade children, but when it comes to actually running a house and leading her own life, she’s incapable of doing it, especially in light of being a widow.

I asked him why his younger brother has to live with his mom, and why don’t he and his wife and children? He shot me the look.

Oh, shit, I thought to myself. That sounds like my own mother. If God forbid anything happened to my dad, my mom would be 100 percent incapable of living on her own. Even when my dad was told he needed to get bypass surgery three years ago, she sobbed endlessly and said she wanted to die, too, if he died.

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.