I’ve spent the last three days in trainings and conferences. The first two days were for my company’s sales conference, and today was designated as management training day, where everyone in our company who is either a manager or a manager-in-training had to sit in on an all-day work shop on how to improve ourselves as supervisors of others. While a lot of the tips were very useful in terms of the usual known things (e.g. when pointing out an area where the employee can improve, make sure you don’t use the word “but” as a connector, and instead use “and” or just eliminate a connector completely), a lot of it ended up coming across as very generic. For example, the last session of the day included us identifying “problem employees.” These people were labeled things like “the criticizer” or “the one who goofs off/wastes time.” The problem with these labels is that as most human beings are, we’re multifaceted people and workers. Chances are, there are very few people who just fit into one of these categories; we all kind of embody a lot of these qualities, just at different times and in different circumstances. And just because someone may spend a lot of time socializing in the office and seemingly “wasting time” doesn’t necessarily mean that she doesn’t meet her deadlines or comes to meetings late. The workshop presenter’s advice was to be as specific as possible when giving feedback and managing people, yet her presentation just felt too general, without enough complex real-life situations. It’s almost as though she is not practicing what she preaches herself.

Yesterday, I got an e-mail notification that someone I did not know donated $100 to my AFSP donor drive. When I logged into my account and read the message from this person, I realized it was a friend of my cousin’s. She said she found my work admirable to help others in light of this tragedy, and that my cousin spoke often about my brother, considering him like a little brother. He told her that he thought about my brother often.

While that sounds very touching, the sad part about that is that it’s easy for an outsider to think that my cousin cared a lot. My cousin rarely paid my brother any attention. He hadn’t spoken with him in over three months before he died. Sure, he sent him birthday and Christmas gifts, but part of love is actually being there and giving attention.

I’m grateful for the generous donation, but I’m just sad that this friend has no clue what the real story behind my cousin is.

I spent a good chunk of my day today booking airline travel and hotel accommodation to then have it all rescheduled by a client, which led me needing to call both the airline and hotel and change the reservations on non-exchangeable, non-refundable rates. That was a lot of fun. It was even more fun when I was told by a sour American Airlines agent that I would be charged a $200 change fee despite the fact that it was within the 24-hour window to get the amount credited to a different flight. The agent was not polite at all and insisted that 24-hour hold policy replaced the 24-hour cancellation window.

That’s the thing about boring day jobs where all you do are repetitive actions. There’s no real excitement to the day, so you feel a need to be a little mean to your innocent customers when they just have simple requests. It adds some element of fun to your day, right, to be a little mean and fierce to people you don’t know and will never meet eyes with? I don’t really believe in karma, so I won’t make a comment about karma. But I will say that if you hate your job, you should either quit or at least search for a new job and not take it out on innocent strangers.

Last year, Chris’s younger brother quit his job and left Toronto to move back to Australia. But before he did that, he spent about two months traveling around Southeast and South Asia, exploring areas that I haven’t been to yet, including Nepal, India, and the country side of Malaysia.

Is it sad that the first thing I think of when someone quits their job to go travel for an extended period of time is health insurance? What will they do for health insurance? What will they do if something happens to them, God forbid? Oh, wait. Ben is an Australian citizen. Australia has universal healthcare. He doesn’t have to worry about what happens to him because job or no job, he has health insurance fully covered.

Even with Obamacare now, it’s scary to think about not having a job and relying on the broken system that we have now. I just can’t understand people who don’t think that the right to life also means the right to healthcare, because without health, what do we have? We don’t really have a life, do we? The concerns that plague us as young Americans aren’t even thoughts at all in the minds of people in Canada and Australia, who don’t have to worry about these same senseless things. I thought about this when a client told me her colleague left the company to travel Thailand for a third of the year. Maybe she didn’t get health insurance and just winged it. Let life take its course!

I’m too much of a thinker to be that spontaneous, though.

How do people continue to fund raise for the same cause year after year? How do they sustain donor attention and donor support from the same people in their circles?

I’ve realized that a lot of the donations I’ve gotten for the AFSP donor drive are from people who are new to me, mainly colleagues that have started within the last year, after I did my first Out of the Darkness walk, who would not otherwise know my story about my brother. Three of my colleagues were incredibly generous and donated $100 each; I was so shocked and touched at the same time. But would they still donate next year, or the year after that, and the year after that? My story will evolve every year, but how do I keep people understanding that this is not just a one-time effort to get attention, that I really believe in what I am fund raising for, and that I believe we as human beings have a bigger purpose in this life other than just earning money and earning a living and simply existing?

I don’t know how to answer that. I just have to ignore the people who ignore my cause, otherwise my cynicism will grow, which is exactly what I don’t want. My level of cynicism should either stay the same or go down. Otherwise, Ed will probably be pissed at me.

Today marks the 70th anniversary of the world’s first atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. On the sixth of August every year, people in Hiroshima gather at the Peace Memorial Park to mourn those who died as a result of “Little Boy.” Most of the major news publications posted articles with coverage from Hiroshima, as well as reminders of what actually happened. I was listening to a BBC podcast discussing those who were comparing coverage of the Hiroshima bombing around that very time seventy years ago, and they noted how the U.S. government refused to show photo or video coverage of the actual victims who affected and/or died during the bombing; they would only show remains of buildings, as though the bombing killed no one. It removed all humanness from the bombing, and none of the photos or details of the effects of the people were released until the 1980s in the U.S. As someone who has had the privilege to visit Hiroshima recently and actually visit the museum that has extremely detailed photos and documentation from the bombing, I felt so angry being reminded of this.

The BBC News podcast I listened to also mentioned a survivor of the bombing who has traveled to the U.S. to speak out about the atrocity and continued effects on the few remaining survivors to this day. She is now in her late 80s, but she says she feels compelled to continue speaking about the event publicly so that people remain aware… because if she doesn’t do it, who else will?

Oddly, it made me think about my American Prevention for Suicide Prevention donor drive that I am doing for the second time this year in honor of Ed. Last year, I was so overwhelmed in the beginning with the outpouring of support I received, even from those I didn’t even think would care, in the form of words and extremely generous donations. This year, I sent out an email with my story to those who had already donated last year, as well as a subset of my colleagues. The donations have been slow to trickle in, which made me feel disappointed. Is it because I already did this last year, and so therefore it’s not as touching or “new” to people? Are they going to get tired thinking, is she really going to do this every year, and does she really expect us to donate every single year?

Cynically, then I thought, it’s like the way Ed’s passing was handled. In the beginning, everyone seemed, at least superficially, concerned and like they wanted to be supportive. But as time went on, the care and the compassion little by little started to diminish. It’s back to the regular ways of life. Forget that ever happened! Back to normal! Well, perhaps back to normal for you, but it will never be back to “normal” for me. It’s grabbed everyone’s attention in the beginning, but we live in a society of short attention spans. Everyone cares… for just a little bit. And then, they either slow it down or just stop completely. But why can’t more of us have the attitude of that 80-something-year-old atom bomb survivor in Hiroshima? She works and continues doing what she does because she wants people to be aware. She doesn’t want the awareness to die. So what’s wrong with the rest of us? It’s just too much work, or too hard, right, or so the excuses go?

These are the moments I lose faith in society and those people around me, even the ones who say they love me and care about me. If you care about me, you care about the causes I care about — maybe not as deeply, but at least the core goal of them and what they are trying to achieve. If you don’t, then what are you trying to do and achieve in your life that is so much more important or better?

The air conditioner in our living room died today. The odd thing was that I didn’t even realize it — Chris did. He notified our super about this, who will look into this tomorrow, but as I realized that the air was not cool while preparing dinner this afternoon, I thought about the couple of years I lived in that third floor Elmhurst apartment and didn’t have an AC until my landlord gave me the one his former tenant left behind. I can’t even believe I somehow managed to sleep with just a fan blowing on me for two summers.

I guess that’s what you do when you are young, don’t think you make that much money, and are cheap: you think you can “tough” it out without “luxuries” like air conditioners, and you deal with crappy fans and somehow think you are better for it. You’ll save money by not buying an air conditioner! Your electricity bill won’t go up! You don’t need all that, right? In retrospect, I regret being so cheap and pathetic. I never had a low income while living in New York. I was always able to live comfortably and do what I wanted. I could have been more comfortable all those summer nights and not have woken up dripping in my own sweat, feeling like I was sleeping in an oven.

Life is short. You should live comfortably and at least allow yourself a comfortable night’s sleep. It’s the least you owe yourself.

I can’t believe it. Today is my dad’s 67th birthday. I don’t know about you, but 67 sounds kind of old. When I’m around my dad, he doesn’t seem 67 to me; he seems much younger. His voice is still as strong as it’s always been. His grip is like a 20-something-year-old’s. He has a lot of childlike qualities, for better or for worse. His hobbies include model railroad and caring for tropical fish. He has boxes and boxes of unopened model railroad parts all over the basement, and two large tanks of tropical fish that he’s still adding to. He can spend hours tinkering with all of these things. Maybe it might seem like a 67-year-old’s hobby to some, but when I watch my dad taking care of these things, he doesn’t seem that old at all. He seems like a little kid in a big person’s body, wondering how he got to be this age and this old. Where did most of his hair go, and how did he get those wrinkles on his face? How did he get married and raise two children with his wife, and have to go through the untimely death of his first born?

It’s hard to watch our parents grow old because we know that inevitably, they will not live forever and will die like the rest of us. Each birthday of my dad’s that passes now, as awful as it sounds, the first thing I think about is that it’s another birthday that my brother never lived to see, whether he wanted to see it or not.

To more and more of my dad’s birthdays that Ed will not see.