I woke up early this morning to have breakfast downtown with my friend and his girlfriend, who I haven’t seen since I can’t even remember. I catch up with this friend at least once a month, but I don’t often see his girlfriend because our schedules are so different. She’s been working on a nonprofit project in her spare time, and they’re doing a fundraiser to raise money to help young children stay fit and active, so I donated money to it. I’ve donated money a few times to a number of causes, but this was the first time I donated and someone actually bought and wrote me a thank you card for donating. She handed me this card, and I said, what’s this? I didn’t do anything. And she says, no, you did! Thanks so much for donating. She wrote some really kind things in the note that clearly showed she wrote this especially for me, so this wasn’t some canned response she gave to anyone who donated. I was really caught off guard.

Gratitude is one of those things that seems to be forgotten in today’s digital age. People rarely avidly express gratitude past a casual “thanks,” and a hand-written thank you note, even after formalities such as weddings or funerals, seems uncommon now. I love and appreciate these things, though, and try to make sure I do these things. Chris’s grandmother recently expressed to Chris’s brother that she had attended a wedding and of course gave a gift, but months after the wedding, she’d never received a thank-you note, and she was really disappointed and turned off. Maybe my etiquette expectations around gift giving and showing gratitude are from another era.

I had my first positive dream last night. It was the day of my wedding. Somehow, everything came together nicely even though I had forgotten to pay my wedding coordinator her deposit or full amount. She showed up anyway without a hitch and said it wasn’t a big deal and that I could pay her after. Our photographer showed up on time and took lots of photos, and after the ceremony, he encouraged us to take off our formal wear and frolic on the beach. In the back of my mind, I thought, but we’re leaving all our guests behind! We’re abandoning them! But I enjoyed our running around the beach as our photographer took random photos of us. It was a pleasant time, and eventually, I forgot we even had guests waiting for us back at our venue.

Well, now I’m not sure if this is a fully positive dream, but I suppose there are some positive elements in it?

I met with my therapist today, and we discussed why I think I haven’t been able to sleep well since I’ve come back from San Francisco. She noted that it was a very emotionally charged period that left me feeling very angry and conjured up a lot of bad memories for me, but she wondered why the effects have lasted this long. Even last night, I couldn’t fall asleep until around 2am, which led me to skip the gym. It’s like a vicious cycle because if I can’t sleep, then I don’t make my morning workout, which means I will likely be less tired at the end of the day than if I did make that morning workout.

I realized with her that maybe the problem is that I’m almost setting myself up for failure by thinking about how I need to sleep and how I need to go to the gym the next morning, and by consciously thinking about that, my body gets mad and decides to rebel against my wishes. I’m idle in bed, and I know I hate being idle. Being idle annoys me, which means I’m irritated while lying in bed, and therefore I can’t fall asleep because I’m having negative thoughts about being idle and not being able to sleep.

She suggested I try meditation and the practice of being just with oneself. I think that may take some baby steps for me, since my last experiences with meditation were not fruitful in the least bit.

My aunt comes to New York at least once each year for about two to three months to visit her son and help him take care of his son… since he expects his mother to take care of his child. She also comes to meet with all of her JW friends and treat them to meals here and there. I can count on one hand the number of times I have met my aunt for a meal during her visit, and it was just the two of us dining together. She will inevitably always bring at least one or two other JW “sisters” and treat them to lunch or dinner with us. I can almost bet each time that it will happen.

So today, after mentoring, Chris and I went down to Chinatown to meet her for dim sum. Of course, she brought two JW friends, and they made friendly, superficial talk with us. I’m sure, as all Chinese relatives and people always are, that they were very amused that my fiance is not Chinese, and that he’s actually brown-skinned. They asked him (and me) the usual, ignorant Chinese-person questions that are directed at a non-Chinese person who has any type of relationship with someone like me, who is Chinese: “Do you like Chinese food?” “Do you cook Chinese food for him?” They talked about Singapore and Malaysia, and of course they were shocked when Chris said his dad was actually raised in Malaysia, and Chris himself had visited both countries a number of times. Chris even reminded me that my mom still asks him if he eats Chinese food now, after years of knowing him and feeding him.

Oh, Asians. I guess I get a similar reaction from his Indian relatives when they hear that I not only eat and love eating Indian food, but I’ve actually cooked some of the most complex and authentic dishes right in our own dinky Manhattan kitchen. That’s right, bitches. I’ve made dosa and appam! And I’m not Indian!!

The bad dreams still seem to keep happening. It’s not just one dream, but a series of dreams that all interweave into each other to the point where I’m unsure if they are all separate or part of the same twisted story. Last night, I dreamt that Chris asked to go on a “break,” which of course was pretty devastating to me. I felt so lonely.

Then, I was in a scene where this boy I went to elementary school with who lived only two blocks from my parents’ home was my friend in today’s world, but he was having a dilemma where his girlfriend was so distrustful of him that she would call him anywhere from 20-30 times a day when they were not physically together. He showed me her constant text messages and missed call log. I took his phone and threw it onto a couch, and he got really angry with me and said I had to treat his phone with respect. Eventually, he disappears, and I still have his phone. I’m watching the bubbles pop up every time she texts him. As the minutes go by, his entire screen is full of text messages from him. I finally unlock his phone, which had no pass code, and told her that he’s on his way to see her. I’m not sure why I did that, but I wanted to shut her up.

It’s not easy to understand, but I guess this is my subconscious.

I got into a tiny squabble with a colleague yesterday where we were trying to resolve a billing issue with a client. This problem has been pretty stupid to say the least, and the only reason it’s been prolonged over the course of three-plus months is because neither side, us or our client, wants to just pick up the phone and resolve the issue. Lots of misunderstandings happen over e-mail, and just because the words stare at you in your face doesn’t mean you will completely get what the person who wrote this email is actually trying to convey. Picking up a phone in about ten out of ten cases in my experience always resolves the issue — that goes for personal or professional issues.

It’s not a unique issue to this colleague; it’s an issue with pretty much every single person at my company, and very likely at yours, too. Technology has made us lazy and given us an excuse to not have real phone conversations or face-to-face interactions with people. Why call someone when you could just email them and wait for a response? So I expressed this to my colleague and was insistent that he just call the client; get it done NOW. My colleague shakes his head at me and half jokingly says I’m being angry and pessimistic.

This isn’t about being pessimistic or optimistic; it’s ultimately about looking for the quickest way to solve this problem. It’s being realistic, moron. Do you want to solve your problem or not? If anything, it sounds like you rather just sit there and complain about it then take any actionable step. Since my brother’s death, and as I’ve gotten older, people who just complain and don’t do anything actionable to resolve their problems get zero sympathy from me.

When I think about the question of whether I am an optimistic person versus a pessimistic person, my knee-jerk response I want to give is that it depends on the situation, and actually, I’d prefer to say I’m just a realist. It could be perceived as a cop out, but I try to take the attitude that is most realistic in any given situation. As an example: will my mother ever accept the fact that I’m not moving home? What’s the optimistic vs. pessimistic response to that? I could sit here and be lame about it and think that she’ll just “suck it up” and grow to accept it, but anyone who knows her even the slightest bit knows this is crap. So, the realistic response is that she will never accept it and will always be angry about it.

I decided to text my therapist the question of how she’d characterize me, optimistic or pessimistic. After a bit of back and forth so she could see how I’d characterize myself, she responded and said that if she had to answer the question in black and white, she’d say that I’m a “disappointed optimist.” I guess if what she says is true, then the world really has failed me, but despite that, I keep believing in it.

I went to see my therapist this afternoon. We spent most of the time discussing my anger since I’ve come back from San Francisco, and we also touched upon the upcoming Vancouver trip that Chris and I are planning to take my parents on. It will be the second trip that we’ll be taking my parents on, the second trip we’ve taken altogether when Ed has not been around. It will be the second trip that we’ll be paying for.

My therapist said she thought it was extremely generous and thoughtful to want to take my parents on these trips, and she asked why I wanted to do it not just once, but a second time, particularly given we know how difficult these things can be and my differences with my parents in general in life. I thought about it for a second, and I responded that my mom always wanted to travel to see other places, but my dad, being a hermetic and antisocial and anti-change homebody, didn’t see a reason to. My mom’s lived a really hard life and has had to experience and witness things that no one should have had to go through, I said. She deserves to see at least a little bit of the world, and if I want that to happen, I need to do it myself. No one else will take her — not even my dad. “And frankly, I’m scared that my parents will die one day never having seen anything of the world,” I said.

What this is ultimately about is that I just want my parents to enjoy life and be happy. That’s all I really want. I want them to do things they’d like to do that they may think are frivolous, but things that they’d gain happy moments from. I don’t think this is a lofty or esoteric type of wish; it’s actually quite simple. But with my family, the simplest things always have the potential to get extremely complicated.

Wedding invitations are far more complicated than I thought they’d be. When I first started doing this research, I figured I would choose a template we liked from one of the major sites like Wedding Paper Divas or Minted, customize the wording choice, decide what type of printing we wanted (letterpress vs. thermography vs. engraving vs. digital), and then call it a day. Little did I know I had more choices to make: those printing options are not the only ones. There’s also laser cut, foil stamped and different edge cuts to consider, about five million fonts that can be customized for names of bride and groom vs. the rest of the text, colored and textured envelopes, and did I even consider a pocket folder? What about letterpress invitations but digitally printed enclosures? What types of customized images would I like, if any? Do I want the invitation company to print all the guests’ names and addresses? How heavy should this paper be? Is there such a thing as having too heavy of a piece of paper for an invitation? Have I considered a return address stamp, press, or even sticker with our names on it? And to add to this, every budgeting wedding site keeps reminding me that the only people who will likely save my wedding invitations will be me, my bridesmaids, my mother, and my mother-in-law. Everyone else will throw them away. So if this is the case, is an expensive print method like letterpress even going to be worth it? What about selectively doing letterpress for a handful of invites and doing the rest digital? This is really overwhelming.

My mom hates it when we are at the dinner table and I pull out my phone to check the time or a text message on the lock screen. I’m not even really doing anything other than looking for less than 3 seconds, and she scolds me and tells me to put it away. She says that dinner time is family time. I agree with that, but I don’t object to checking a lock screen for a few seconds. Yet, despite that, when we are having dinner with my dad and uncle, she will happily pull out her phone (which is a dumb phone, so there’s really nothing on it to “browse” other than names in an address book, which is quite pathetic) and start tinkering around with it right in her face. I tell her to put it away, and she gives me a dirty look and says she’s just looking. It’s fun to discipline your mother as she disciplines you. She is clearly paying no attention to what is being said, nor does she care. She just wants dinner to be done with as soon as possible so she doesn’t have to see my uncle anymore. She claims that my uncle doesn’t respect her because she’s from Vietnam. What she doesn’t realize is that it’s for different reasons that are far more legitimate… and they are really about how she’s treated Ed and me growing up and how he doesn’t agree with it.

Why are there so many layers of disgust and contempt and grudges in this family? I’ve heard of some pretty terrible things, such as my dad’s best friend Bob who died last year, and how he was in an ongoing lawsuit with his own brother about their father’s inheritance that he had left behind. Because Bob took the most care of his father in his old age, his dad decided to leave his large inheritance just to Bob. So Bob’s brother wasn’t happy with this and sued him. It was never settled before Bob died, so I’m sure that Bob’s brother is still pursuing it against Bob’s wife and son now. Granted, nothing has gotten that out of control with my family, but I’d say that in some cases, it’s even worse. There are problems and grudges that have never been addressed or resolved, and no one wants to do anything about it. My uncle tried his best to reconnect with my dad during his heart surgery, but it fell completely flat because my dad is so socially inept and cannot see that his younger brother was trying to be there for him. He just gives short responses and goes into his own little world, tinkering with his pills and pill case and sorting out his medications as though no one else is there.

I was walking up my parent’s block today from work, and the sun had just finished setting. I had a slight headache at the end of the work day, and I wasn’t wearing any glasses to see things clearly. But then I saw a figure who looked just like Ed from behind — same height and build. He was even in Ed’s default “going outside” outfit — a loose black jacket, a white shirt underneath, khaki-colored pants, and black shoes. His hair was cut just like Ed’s, and his walk was just like his. It was so uncanny… I couldn’t believe it. I kept walking toward him as he walked, and finally he turned so that I could see his face, and of course, it wasn’t my brother. The man was pulling keys out of his pocket to get into a car.

As the man drove off, I felt empty again. I know it’s ridiculous to think it could have been my brother, but he seemed just like Ed even down to his steps and the way he moved his arms around. There are probably clones of Ed everywhere walking around, just waiting for me to find them and hope that maybe one of them really is him. And then, as per usual, I will be disappointed and have to move on with my everyday life.