I know we agreed not to discuss wedding planning until the end of the year, but I can’t help but think about where the heck it’s actually going to be. My family is mostly in the Bay Area (and New York), and his family is mostly in Australia, Singapore, and India. I have a number of friends who are on tight budgets or just plain broke, so asking them to fly all the way to Australia or some exotic location in the middle of the Pacific Ocean seems like a big request. He has not-so-mobile grandmothers in Melbourne and Chennai. We both have family and/or friends with babies. How are we going to get as many of our loved ones together as possible for our wedding day? I hope that the fact I am thinking about this now is not an indicator of how obsessive I may be as a bride. 🙂

The proposal happened last Tuesday in Rio. We told our parents that evening via the phone. My mother did not initially hear me, and then that transitioned into her hearing me (it was a bad phone connection given our sub-par Wi-Fi), but not believing it really happened. She said, “Are you sure? This is real? Did he actually say the words, ‘Will you marry me,’ or did he just give you a ring? You are sure?'” Leave it to my mother to make the happiest moments in my life seem like the worst and most ambiguous.

Since we arrived back in New York on Monday, she has made sure to ask me those same questions yet again, and then end the conversation by saying, “I’m happy for you… for now.” My response: “What is that supposed to mean – ‘for now’?!” She says, “Well, you haven’t even set a date yet. Sometimes there is a proposal or engagement, but the wedding never happens.”

It’s always comforting to know how predictable people in your life can be. And then when you think about it a little bit more, you realize the negativity that surrounds their psyche is something you will just never be able to penetrate. We can’t change other people as much as we may want, especially our own parents.

Our office got a Nespresso maker with a milk foamer, and yesterday, some colleagues and I were tinkering with it. I somehow ended up deciding to have a double shot of espresso with foam at 4pm. I should have known it would mess up my ability to fall asleep that night.

I don’t think I ended up falling asleep until past 1 this morning, but I remember the most convoluted series of dreams that I’ve had in a while. In the first dream, I’m at home with my mom and Ed. My mom has just come back from work. It appears I am in elementary school and Ed is in high school. She’s obviously had a bad day because she starts yelling at both of us about the single dirty dish left in the sink. “Were you waiting for me to come home from work to wash this for you?” she yells from the kitchen. “All dishes should have been washed before I came home!” She started slamming drawers and doors in the kitchen, and Ed sulks on the couch in the living room, rolling his eyes and giving me a sympathizing glance. I get really angry, and I run down the hall to my room, slam the door, and lock it. My mom starts screaming at me for slamming and demands I open the door. I refuse. I hear Ed cheering for me outside the door.

In the next dream, Chris and I are at some random museum where we are viewing miniature roller coaster ride models. A friend from middle school pops up, and she is apparently our docent for this tour. She seems like she doesn’t want to guide us and is being passive aggressive with me.

In the last dream, I am at work and feeling miserable. My colleagues are all ignoring me. I guess that’s somewhat familiar, but still unsettling.

Last night, I dreamt I was in a car in Lake Placid with my parents and Ed, except that it looked nothing like what I remembered from our weekend trip a few weeks ago with Chris and his parents. We were driving up what looked to be a massive plastic red slide, and I was wondering if that was supposed to be covered in snow for people to sled or ski down during the winter. Ed was asking where we were going, and I told him we were upstate in Lake Placid. He didn’t seem particularly excited about the trip at all. And the sky looked pretty gray and miserable.

It was one of those very uneventful dreams where nothing really great or terrible happened, and you wake up wondering what the point of all that was.

Today, Chris’s parents, Chris, and I spent the day exploring Lake Placid, walking around Mirror Lake, wine tasting at wineries that had grapes from the Finger Lakes, and finally hiking up Mount Jo, a popular mountain in the Adirondacks. Going up, while strenuous, was a straight one-mile hike, with some muddiness, wetness, and a lot of rocks. I was hesitant at first to suggest it since I wasn’t sure how comfortable his parents would be, but Chris insisted we do it, and they were pretty willing and were really positive about it the whole time despite being challenged by certain rocks and slippery areas.

Going down was another story. There are two trails to get up and down the mountain – the short trail, which is steeper and rockier that we took, and then the longer trail, which is supposedly flatter and easier. We took the short route up and decided to follow the fellow hikers in front of us and took the long trail down. Somewhere along the way, we lost them because they were going to fast, and we ended up at a stream that went straight down. I knew we were not jumping down this stream to get back to the parking lot. We ended up hiking all the way back up to the intersection of the long and short trail and hiking down the short trail to get back down, racing against the clock since the sun was slowly but surely setting. In the end, we were all fine and relieved to get back before dark. Chris’s parents were such good sports about it and even joked about it on and off throughout the rest of the evening; I think the muddiness bothered his dad more than getting lost and potentially spending the night at the top of a mountain.

I imagined this situation happening with my parents, and I know for a fact they never would have taken it as well as Chris’s parents did and probably would have yelled at me. They’d probably hold it against me and never let me hear the end of it. That’s usually what happens when we do something “bad” in our family. We’re never allowed to forget it, and then constantly get reminded of our blunders years and years later when it was so long ago that we ourselves have forgotten.

I went to see a primary care doctor to get my tetanus vaccination today – it’s the last vaccine I’ll need before our Brazil trip. Without even realizing it, the doctor I chose is actually originally from Rio and is Portuguese, and she gave me all these tips about things to buy (those thin cloths for lying on the beach, leather shoes), things to eat (fresh fruit from corner stores, but particularly those fruita do conde or sugar apples), and… well, what not to bring. She advised me against wearing the Tahitian pearl and diamond necklace I was wearing at her office, or anything else that could be perceived as “real” or worth money, as she said that local slum guys would just pull it off my neck. She told me to leave any fancy cameras at home. She also told me not to wear any clothes that look “designer.” “If you don’t speak Portuguese, you will be a target,” she warned.

I’m sure she was just trying to be helpful since she is originally from there and would know things I wouldn’t, but this doesn’t particularly increase my excitement about visiting Brazil. If anything, it would make me more paranoid and think twice… and maybe leave Bart at home, too.

When thoughts get dark, Ed comes back again.

I saw him in my dreams yet again last night. We were standing at the top of a hill where a family friend just bought a large house. It was one of those sunny, cloudless blue-skies days. Oddly, right at the center of the front lawn of the house was a long, skinny pole that went all the way down to the bottom of the hill. It was steep the way the steepest streets in San Francisco are, like the ones you can’t even walk up properly that require stairs to be built into the cement.

Ed effortlessly slid all the way down the pole to the bottom of the hill, then ran back up to meet me. I could see our parents standing at the bottom of the hill, and I could vaguely hear them arguing over whether doing this was a good idea. “You can do it! Just slide down. You don’t need to think about it so much!” he encouraged me. I keep staring down the pole at the base of the hill, and all I feel is terror at the idea of sliding down and potentially falling off the pole. “I can’t do it,” I whispered to him, yet he continues to encourage me on and on and tell me that I can do it. The last thing I remember is that at the end, I still wouldn’t slide down the pole.

While on a plane last night trying to get back to New York, I sat next to a guy who was a retired sanitation worker (over 25 years) originally from New York, but retired with his wife in Florida. He decided (since we were flying aimlessly from one undesirable city to the next to avoid the thunder showers) to tell me about his life, including his marriage, his two daughters, where he’s lived, etc. He had no interest in learning anything about my life (in fact, since my phone had died and I had no other way of checking time, he never even realized I asked him what time it was about three times before his neighbor kindly told me). He told me that when his two daughters went to college, he bought each of them a brand new car of her choice.

I was struck by his enormous generosity and told him. A lot of parents buy their children cars; not all of them would let their children choose it, and have it be brand new. He shrugged and responded, “Well, this is how I look at it: I’m not rich by any means, but we all have some money. While I’m alive, I want to allow my kids to enjoy that, and I want to see them enjoy it with my own eyes. It’s better this way than leaving it to them when I die and I can’t see anything!”

I was immediately overwhelmed and could feel my eyes slightly watering at this statement. In some ways, it’s kind of morbid because he’s anticipating his death, but on the other hand, he’s trying to be positive and ensure he’s able to enjoy life (with his family) as much as possible for the rest of his limited time on earth.

I wish my parents thought the same way – not because I want them to buy me a new car, mind you, but because they’d probably be happier and more fulfilled people.

Chris is in San Francisco for work this week, and he’s having dinner with my parents tonight. Yep, that’s right. He’s having dinner with them without me there. He claimed he was too busy to call them to make arrangements, so I had to facilitate their meeting time and location over the phone. Of course, since my mom doesn’t hear from him throughout the day, she worriedly asks me a number of times, “Are you sure he is coming?” Yes, Mom, he’s coming. I’m not having you drive across town to have you wait for someone who will never show up.

So it will be my mom, dad, and Chris sitting at a table tonight, most likely having pho, banh xeo, and banh cuon of some sort at a Vietnamese place in the Tenderloin. The strangest thing about this dinner happening is that subconsciously, in the back of my mind, I thought, Will Ed be there, too? I obviously remember my brother is not alive anymore, but there are moments I have when I think without really thinking about that, and I wonder if he will be at a certain place or doing a certain thing. Then I quickly remember again and think how ridiculous the thought was.

Anyway, he can’t be having dinner with them tonight because he’s coming with me to Chicago tomorrow. He’s never been to the Windy City before.

Tonight, we went to see the off-Broadway musical Heathers, which is based off of the cult classic movie of the same name from the ’80s. The first thing I think about when thinking about how I feel about this production is that I’m so glad I’m no longer an adolescent (and perhaps even happier that I did not have the “normal” high school experience of having bullies, football players and cheerleaders being the “cool cliques,” etc. I hated conforming then. I still hate it now). The second thing I think about is how fragile human beings are, and how tragic it is that so many people have had terrible childhoods that lead them into downward spirals of mental illness and suicidal tendencies.  It’s like we don’t take these people seriously. We just tell them to try harder at school, try harder to “fit in,” try harder to please those around them. Just try harder. If you try harder, you’ll succeed! You feel down today? Perk up and smile!! Maybe it’s more complicated then that, yes?

Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar is mentioned during the musical when an accidental death is faked out to be a suicide. Oddly, I read this book when I was just 12 because I had heard from a friend that it had similarities with J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, which I love. Sylvia Plath committed suicide when she was just 30 by closing all the windows and cracks in her kitchen, turning the stove on, and sticking her head into her oven. Her son, who she had with her husband Ted Hughes, also committed suicide at the age of 47 in 2009 by hanging himself. Sylvia Plath has a daughter who is still alive and is a writer and painter. I wonder what it’s like to be someone whose mother and brother have committed suicide.

Actually, I don’t want to know what it’s like.