Category Archives: Contemplation

Hopeless hope

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I met with my therapist yesterday after not seeing her for about four months. She was busy sunbathing in the Hamptons while I was occupied with busy Mondays filled with revenue reports. We spent some time discussing my series of bad dreams of betrayal, my time in San Francisco, fights with my mom, and my friend who failed to be a part of my bachelorette weekend.

We spent the most time discussing why I always feel the need to defend the people my mother puts down. “If you know based on history that she will never see your point of view and will always use this as the beginning point of a fight, then why do you keep defending them?” she asked me.

Well, there are several answers to this. First is that I hate it when things are unjust, and I cannot stand people being attacked without any valid reason. Second, I am kind of deluded myself because I hopelessly hope that one day, she may actually listen to what I am saying and realize there are other perspectives other than her own. Third, it’s a lose-lose situation for me regardless of what I respond with because no response satisfies her, and she will find some way to turn the attack on me. If it’s not this conversation, it will be in the next conversation.

So at the end of the day, I just become more self-ingratiating by believing that I am standing up for what’s right when it actually causes even more agony for me. Maybe I can be just as deluded as my mother.

On a hike

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My parents are spending this week in Monterey. They’ve been there a million times, but I guess that’s what they like to do — go back to places with which they are familiar. Surprisingly, though, after I showed them photos from Point Lobos State Reserve, they actually decided to go there to hike it and see it themselves. I was really surprised because in most cases when I have given them recommendations on things to see and do, they rarely take me up on it because it’s new to them, and therefore foreign. My mom raved about how mild the weather was and the pretty scenery.

It makes me happy when my parents discover new things that they like and enjoy doing because it doesn’t seem to happen enough. They get too caught into their usual boring and everyday routines, and the curiosity to discover a world outside of what they know is rarely there. Maybe I shouldn’t doubt them as much as I do and keep suggesting new things to them.

Single friends

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I invited a friend over for dinner tonight to help eat all the food that Chris made me this week, and we discussed online dating, weddings, and being single. He is eight years older than me, and everything in his life is going well from work to friends to charity work — except for his romantic prospects. He’s always jokingly asking me if I have any cute and smart single girlfriends, but the truth is that I don’t — at least, not ones that are in New York City, or ones that he’d be into given their personalities. He makes it obvious that this is really dragging him down, and he’s been in a bad mindset in the last few days. I want to help him, but I can’t.

It reminded me of my college-time obsession with the show Sex and the City and how the show discussed being single in your mid- to late-thirties, when most people are seemingly getting engaged, married, and having children. My friend is going through the male version of this, except he’s not getting one night stands as easily as those female characters were. The more I think about it, the more I think it’s not great to be single in New York City. Yes, you think you have a lot of options, but those options end up screwing you over because then you feel like you don’t need to commit to just one person. That doesn’t even just apply to romantic relationships — that applies just to agreeing to meet someone for a meal. I feel that frustration myself from the friend perspective. So if I think it’s hard to make real friends here, I don’t even know what it would be like if I were single today at my age in this city, trying to find “the one.”

Shorter stays

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I’ve been discussing my mother’s situation with a few different people, and it looks like we all agree that perhaps I should shorten my stays when I visit home and potentially increase the frequency to make up for the fewer days. The last time I came in June, I was there for about five days, and luckily, no real fight happened; everything was as calm as it could have been. This time around, the stay was about 11 days, and we had four arguments varying in intensity and length. It really takes an emotional and psychological toll on me when these things happen; I feel stressed to the point where I can feel a physical change in my body, and then all I think about are all the dumb things she had said to me that made zero logical sense. It would be different if I didn’t care about them at all, but I really do; ultimately, I just want my parents to be happy, but it doesn’t seem that I can really make that happen on my own. What is really preventing them from being happy and leading full, rich lives is their own mindset and all the negativity that surrounds it. It’s their distrust of the world, their disgust of other people like my aunt who actually do lead happy lives despite having many elements of dysfunction and imperfection. They will always be like this, and it’s my life-long struggle to just accept them the way they are and the way they will continue to think.

Series of nightmares

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For my first three nights in San Francisco, I had one nightmare after another. In the first dream, an old friend from college is confessing to me that she committed a murder of someone she hated, but because she thought I was such a pure person, too pure, that she had to frame me for the crime, and that soon, the authorities would find out, and I’d be put in jail. I asked her why she would do something like this, and she responded that she felt that people that were too good needed to be punished for trying to outdo everyone else in the world who tried hard to be good, but couldn’t be.

In the two subsequent nights, I had bad dreams, but I couldn’t remember what happened. I just remembered that the theme that kept appearing was of betrayal, of people who I thought were supposed to be good who were turning against me or blaming me for things I never did.

I have a feeling I know why I had all these bad dreams in my trip back. It’s because I’m always questioning how loyal people really are to me, and what they’d really do for me when life got tough or if they were put in a real position to defend me or do something in honor of me to prove their dedication. It’s hugely an influence my mother has over me — to never fully trust anyone and to constantly be questioning their devotion. I think as the years have gone by, I’ve gotten better at putting a halt to the process of obsessing over it, but it always has its way of creeping into the back of my mind, especially in light of the fact that the bridal shower/bachelorette weekend is one of those main moments in life when your friends or whoever is organizing on your behalf is somewhat intentionally put on the spot to show their love and dedication to you.

We can never escape the influence of our parents, even when we try our best to. It’s like that quite from the book The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom. Ever since I read that book shortly after Ed passed away, this quote has stayed with me and popped itself into my thoughts more times than I can count: “All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair.” Ed was shattered beyond repair. I am damaged but trying to repair myself every day. This is my painful reality.

The photo frame with a hidden message

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Today, I met briefly with a friend and her daughter at Spreckles Lake at Golden Gate Park. I cannot remember the last time I walked through that area, but Ed and I used to go all the time on the weekends as kids and feed the ducks by the water there. It made me feel nostalgic to walk along the lake today with them and see the ducks and the remote-controlled boats gliding across the water at rapid pace.

My friend and her daughter came to my bridal shower and gave me a silver photo frame from Gump’s. At the shower when I was opening gifts, she told me that there was a story behind the frame, and today, she shared it with me.

She told me that her husband was at work the week before the shower, and somehow dozed off, and when he did, he dreamt that he saw Ed. Yes, that’s Ed as in my Ed, my brother. He couldn’t quite make out his face clearly and could only see black, but he knew it was him. “Isn’t your wife attending a bridal shower this weekend?” Ed asked her husband.

“Yes, she’s attending a bridal shower,” the husband responds.

Ed reveals that it’s his sister’s bridal shower. “What is your wife getting as a gift for the shower?”

Her husband finds this amusing and said he actually had no idea, as they hadn’t discussed it.

“I think you should get her a photo frame from Gump’s,” Ed suggested. “I think she’d like it.”

The dream ended. Her husband woke up from his nap and asked his assistant to go to Gump’s and pick out a photo frame. He then took the photo frame back home to my friend, and said that she had to give this gift to me. “You can’t ignore a message like this,” her husband told her.

Ed’s still out there watching over me. My friend says this was his way of being part of the shower, of speaking to her husband and knowing that the message would get back to me. I’m not sure what I felt more when I heard this — happiness that his presence is still here, or sadness that he physically is no longer here.

I miss my Ed. I love you wherever you are.

Not the same

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I was at dinner tonight with two of my best friends, eating deep dish pizza and discussing my last relationship. “We didn’t realize he was so critical of us!” One of them exclaims after thinking about things we discussed as a group over my bachelorette weekend that just passed. “It’s not a big deal,” I responded. “It’s all over now.”

“We’re surprised you never told us,” she continued. “You’ve been more open about the things that Chris has said… which is why I have a less rosy view of him than I did of Arnold before.”

That’s true. I have been to a degree. But I think what I failed to express tonight is that I feel like enough about me has changed from the last guy to Chris where I just say more of what I think, for better or for worse. I’m a bit more blunt. I offend people more often now because frankly, they can’t handle the truth and people’s real opinions. I get tired of always having to get everyone’s input before voicing my own. What we all fail to do as human beings who have human relationships is to be honest with each other about things that really matter and are dear to us. I don’t feel the same way about life as I did before Chris or before my brother passed. I feel like my mindset has changed a lot, and I can sit here and talk or write about how it’s changed to convey it to people, or, I could just say what I want and do what I want and let people judge for themselves whether I am the same or not the same. I need more honesty and am constantly seeking it because I don’t think I get enough of it.

Bachelorette weekend

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The weekend my friends planned for me included a purple and green-themed bridal shower, some nice dinners and a brunch out, hiking at Point Lobos State Reserve and picnicking, spa time and gel manicures at the Marilyn Monroe Spa in the Hyatt Regency, and a number of bachelorette games both slightly naughty and nice. It’s clear a lot of thought went into the planning of this. I’m very touched by all the work my friends did to pull this together.

My friend was so exhausted planning this that after the bridal shower was over and we finished cleaning up, she had to “decompress” for a bit before getting in the car to drive down to Monterey. I guess we’re not all natural planners and handle stress differently. I remember when I planned her bridal weekend three years ago, and my “tense” period was in the two days leading up to the event. There’s always this feeling that as the planner, you have to make sure everything has to go perfectly and as you envisioned it. But I guess I was more militant than she was in terms of setting timelines for things, which tends to help when you have a group larger than two people.

I always look back and wished I had done a few extra things for that weekend to make it the “ideal” weekend, especially when I would hear about ideas that other colleagues had carried out for their friends and family. I actually enjoy event planning and the details of it. Maybe one day in the future I’ll have the opportunity to do it for someone else. And if I don’t, I hope I get to enjoy someone else’s labor that went into an event like this.

Different friends forced together

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I’m really happy that I had all of my friends and family together in a room yesterday, and also grateful that I was able to successfully get five of my friends to spend a weekend with me. Three of them have never traveled with me before, and all five of them have very different personalities and preferences. I don’t really like a certain “type” of friend, which is a good and a bad thing. It’s a good thing because it means I have a variety of friends with different interests and perspectives, but it’s bad because once they are all in a room together, for some reason even though they might like me, in most cases they don’t really like my other friends. The last time I organized a birthday event for myself, I was painfully aware of how awkward it was and decided to never have a big event ever again… well, except for this weekend and our wedding.

All the usual things played out as I thought they would: one friends’ desire to make sure everyone was happy became exhausting when it came time to actually making decisions because it meant everyone had to agree; exhaustion tends to happen when we don’t have someone who is assertive enough to put her foot down. Another friend decided to sit in the front seat of one of the cars and instead of navigating, lazed around, so that resulted in slight delays arriving at final destinations, almost getting lost, and frustrations for the driver and myself. One friend didn’t have much interaction with the rest and seemed to only interject occasionally to say the not-PC comments that the rest of us would have thought about minutes later; we’re clearly not as quick-thinking as she is. The fourth friend amused with her sarcasm and occasional confusion when she didn’t understand a joke was a joke. My last friend was probably the smoothest sailor and took everything as it came. She was also the lightest packer ever.

It still ended up fun, mostly as a learning experience for my friends who don’t know all the crazy things that have happened in my life and in my family’s. It was like a constant unraveling of exactly how dysfunctional my family is. One of my friends was so exhausted by the stories that she just left the room. Maybe not everyone wants to hear how crazy my family is, but I think it’s good to know about people’s backgrounds because it helps us understand them better as individuals. You can’t really understand anyone unless you know what they have gone through.

David and Goliath surprise

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I came back to the office today to move seats, as our office space has expanded, and with a bunch of desk and screen cleaners, I also found a hardcover copy of Malcolm Gladwell’s David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants sitting on my desk. Well, that’s kind of funny because this book was actually on my reading list. No one’s name was in the book, and since no one claimed it after I went around asking, I decided that I’m taking it with me to read while I am in San Francisco. Gladwell’s books are always easy reads for me while at the same time still being thought-provoking.

The reason I wanted to read this book is that my friend recommended it to me when I told him Ed’s life story and how he thought he was doomed for failure. “He should have red David and Goliath,” he said to me. “Maybe it would have given him some strength.” Maybe. But now that he isn’t here, I guess I will read it for him. The book’s basic gist is that sometimes, people who are the “underdogs” whether through status, what they have, or what they don’t have, can sometimes use that to their advantage and prevail with more creative problem solving skills and other crafty responses to life’s questions and scenarios.

To be honest, just from reading the book’s description, I’m not 100 percent sure it really would have helped Ed. It would be great to have books to read like this, but it’s a completely different thing to have people around you who actually will encourage you and not just put all their energy towards crushing your soul, calling you worthless, and criticizing you as much as they possibly can. That’s what causes people to jump off bridges — literally.