Today and tomorrow are long days of our team summit, which includes colleagues of mine flying out from San Francisco and Los Angeles to spend time with our team. At our team dinner tonight, one of my colleagues was sharing that she’ll be leaving for Europe for a two-week vacation, and she mentioned to another colleague that I’ll be spending about 10 days in Japan soon.

“You’re always traveling!” a colleague exclaimed, half jealous and half frustrated. “When do you find time to just take off?”

Mildly annoyed, I responded, “I just make the decision and I go. If you really want something, you just do it.”

This colleague is obsessed with work. I’m honestly not sure if he’s more obsessed with work or making it look like he works all the time. I have a strong feeling it’s the latter.

After dinner, my Europe-bound colleague and I shared a ride home. She expressed her frustration with our workaholic colleague and said, “It’s really not that difficult to take a trip and enjoy life. If you want to do something, you just stop talking about it and just do it. Making it seem like you work all the time isn’t healthy, and the only person who is really losing here is you.”

I agree with her, but at this point in my life, I really don’t spend that much time thinking about people like this guy because I just think they are sad and pathetic and ultimately jealous of what I do and have. If all you want to do is spend time arguing with agency clients and looking at Excel spread sheets, something is terribly wrong with your life, and I don’t have time to talk to you. It’s that simple now.

Tonight, Chris and I went down to Chinatown for dinner to meet and eat with my cousins’ cousin, her husband, four kids, and friend, as well as my actual cousin and his wife, who have a dysfunctional relationship (and an even more dysfunctional one around their almost three-year-old son. My cousin’s cousin and her family are visiting New York from Montreal, and they reached out to us a few days ago to arrange a meal to see us. It’s actually pretty amusing (and dysfunctional to outsiders, I’m sure) that I won’t see my cousin and his wife in Brooklyn unless there is a visitor, or to celebrate one of their son’s birthdays. They have a marriage that no one would approve of in which they are constantly arguing and threatening to leave each other and take the kid with them, they can’t stand each others’ in-laws, and they don’t agree on anything regarding how to raise their son. So you can imagine why I want to be near that as little as possible.

I was actually looking forward to seeing our visiting cousin because from what I remember when I had last seen her four years ago at a wedding, she, unlike all of her siblings, has a personality and is fun to talk to. The funny thing about it is that I probably wanted to see her more than her own cousin did, and they’re technically the related ones, not me. My cousin made it clear he didn’t really want to be at the dinner and was just there out of obligation. He used his phone for a lot of the meal, barely said anything to the visiting cousin, and made little effort to talk to his wife’s sister, who also joined, or me or Chris. They also arrived late and left early because their son was at home with a fever, and of course, it’s a rush to get back to the child because who knows what could happen in the grandma’s care.

That’s what my family is — a lot of obligation and guilt and not a lot of actual desire to see each other. It’s sad, but it’s also comforting to know that those obligatory meetings don’t have to happen that often. And at least my cousin’s cousin is an interesting, seemingly normal person with a normal marriage and family life. Or maybe we can really just attribute that to their being Canadian and not American.

I’m going to admit this out loud: I actually miss my parents today. I saw them for five days in San Francisco and came back here, and well, they aren’t here. I go through a lot of complicated emotions when it comes to my parents. I love them dearly and know that they’ve done a lot for me to have the life I am so fortunate and privileged to have today. But I also grapple with the way they chose to treat Ed, in life and in death, and I struggle with the individuals that they are.

As loving and affectionate as my mother is, she can be extremely controlling and manipulative, much to the detriment of our relationship and the relationships she shares with everyone else, even including my dad. And as goofy and cute as my dad can be, he’s emotionally removed, childish and holds grudges like there’s no tomorrow, which drives me mad when I am with him for extended periods of time. I realized this past weekend that whenever I leave my dad now, I always hug him, and he actually hugs me back. And I realized that “now” means after Ed has passed. When Ed was still here, my dad never hugged me. The most he’d never do is pat me on the back when I tried to hug him. It’s a little different now, though, between us, I guess.

Sometimes, I wish I could see them more often, just in shorter bouts of time. I wish I could see them a little bit more than just two to four times a year when I fly home, usually for about a week and a half at a time. But then I remember how tense it can be when we’re together for too long, and I think that maybe we see each other just enough. I don’t know. Maybe I’m not sure what I want.

Today, I spent the majority of my day at the Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park for an all-day client meeting. Between endless meetings and presentations, I got to enjoy the perks that Facebook employees and guests get to relish during their visits to the Facebook campus: endless varied food options, from cold pressed, fresh squeezed juices to on-campus smoked BBQ, even crispy bacon vs. soft bacon as options (it’s *that* specific and catered to individual tastes here); a free for all ice cream and desserts shop; fully covered washed and folded laundry; even a poster printing workshop where you can create posters with images and messages to your heart’s content. The conference rooms have fun names like “Chips and Salsa,” and around every corner, there is a snack bar full of Mighty Leaf tea bags, an espresso maker, and at least 15 different types of energy and granola bars. The Facebook Fifteen is a true reality for most new employees.

If Ed were a ghost, he’d be a friendly one. I know this because whenever I come back to our house in San Francisco, although the air is cold and slightly damp, it never feels hostile the way you think it would if someone who once lived here committed suicide. The room we once shared growing up seems bright and warm. I know his energy still lingers all over this house, but especially in areas where he spent a lot of time, such as on the long couch in the living room, his desk in the dining room, and his bed in our bedroom, which we kept because my mom couldn’t bear to give it up. After all this time, it’s not like the energy of a dead person that lingers, but rather the energy of someone who is still alive and out there, somewhere.

Since he passed away, every time I’ve come home, one of the first things I do is dust and sponge clean his old dresser in our room. I clean his framed photo and dust the vases. I sponge off the top surface of the dresser as though it’s never been wiped before. It’s where my mom displays the large framed photograph of him that we had up during his funeral. It’s surrounded by two vases, two orchid plants that were given to us when he passed, and a koala stuffed animal I bought in Melbourne. I also leave his service program up there. I noticed that one of the orchids is actually budding right now and about to bloom. Maybe it senses that Ed’s two-year anniversary mark is coming, so it’s time to start flowering.

I’m not fully sure how I developed this routine. I think I became a little obsessive about doing it because in some way, it felt like a way that I was acknowledging him, like, “Hey, Ed! I’m home! I’m here! Can you see me now? I’m touching you! I’m cleaning after you like I did when you were alive!” I always want to see and communicate with him, so maybe this is my weird way of attempting to be more in-your-face with him, even though his face clearly isn’t here.

Two damn years. I still can’t believe it.

I just finished reading the last two Freakonomics books, Think Like a Freak and When to Rob a Bank. I’ve also been listening to their once a week podcasts during my walks and workouts. I’ve re-thought a lot of things since listening to their podcasts and stories, ideas that most people would be against. Some examples include not thinking big (who would have thought? But actually, this makes a lot of sense to me since I’m into the micro and the details, so I suppose I am biased), failure is not always a bad thing (seems to be a relatively new thought given tech startups and the new ways that we raise our children today to test different things out to find their passions and strengths), and that drunk walking is actually far more dangerous than drunk driving. I enjoyed their first two books a lot, but the third one just seemed like a recycling of their podcasts and blogs, so it was a bit disappointing.

One thing that they brought up that I’ve been pretty cognizant of since I was young thanks to my frugal parents is food waste. As much as 30 to 40 percent of food is wasted in this country — you know, the food that you scrape off your plate at the end of a meal, food that you tried at a buffet that you realized you didn’t like (then why did you take so much of it to begin with?), the vegetables that you left in your vegetable crisper in the fridge for a week too long. As much as 40 percent, I thought — holy crap, that’s a lot of food! Preserving food and trying to make use of all of it has been a slight obsession of mine since I started living on my own. I chop up and freeze leftover vegetables and chicken bones for stock. I freeze buttermilk from desserts I make to use for future pancakes. I even store the little bit of cornmeal I have left in the fridge in the little hope that I will use it in the future for something. The fridge and freezer are like my food waste helpers. Thank goodness for modern technology.

We live in a country of plenty here, so no one really thinks anything of it when they eat just half their plate at dinner at a restaurant and don’t want to doggie bag it. The restaurant just throws it away. When fruit rots in their fridge, it’s no big deal — into the garbage it goes, and then they can go to the market to buy more fruit that they may eat half of and then throw out the rest once it starts molding! It’s a frustrating thing to think about since I’ve been so aware of it from a young age. It’s one of those things that has stayed with me, my parents’ constant reminder that they barely had enough food to eat when they were growing up, that in their mother countries, there are thousands if not millions of starving children, so I try as hard as I can not to waste as much as possible.

I recently read an article about Michelle Phan, the makeup guru and entrepreneur who became famous by creating and posting makeup lessons on YouTube. She has been labeled as a feminist given that she is a female entrepreneur, and her general response to it was that she doesn’t think she is, as she thinks it’s important not just to celebrate women, but to celebrate men. It’s really sad that there are so many people out there, particularly women, who don’t understand that “feminism” does NOT mean that you just want to celebrate women, burn bras, and bash men; it’s simply about equality for both women and men. It’s that simple, really, yet it isn’t that simple to so many people, sadly.

People who think that the feminist movement was overdone or still is overdone have no idea how much they benefit from all the changes that have been brought on because of it to this day, every single day. I once had this science teacher in middle school who was great at science, great at teaching, but probably great at little else. He said to us one day, “I always got why you need to learn science and math and English in school. But why do you need history? What benefit does it really bring to any of our lives?” At the time, I was only 13 and thought all my history classes were so boring and all about memorizing facts and dates, so I kind of agreed with him then. Now, as a grown adult, I think he’s moronic for making a statement like that, especially to teenagers. If you can’t understand history and know it, you will be doomed to ignorance and a total lack of understanding of how and why things are the way they are today.

Women vote today because of the feminist movement. They can own property, decide who they can marry, actually divorce and have it granted because of the feminist movement. Rape crisis centers were developed because of feminists; rape is actually considered a crime now because of feminism. Marital rape became illegal just in the 1990s because of it. We can work actual professional jobs and sit in board rooms now because of the feminist movement, and not just as secretaries or typists, but as actual real business people and key decision makers. It makes me sad that so many women take these rights for granted and have no context behind these laws today. These rights are actually privileges we have today because of sacrifices that other women and men on our behalf made for us, for future generations so we wouldn’t have to go through the same pain and tyranny that they once faced. We owe it to future generations of women to ensure that they, even more than today because we still have a long way to go, become true equals of men in this society.

I hate it when people try to guilt people for feeling what they feel by saying things like, “There are starving children in Africa,” or “There are wars going on in poor countries where people are dying every day, and you’re getting upset/complaining about (fill in the blank with whatever first world problem you are annoyed about).”

I think that any remotely smart person in this country is aware that she’s pretty lucky relative to the rest of the world. In this country, we don’t have to worry about leaving our house and potentially getting bombed on the way to work. We don’t have to think twice when we drink water out of our tap. We also have so much food to eat that over 40 percent of all food bought here is wasted and thrown out (that is so sad). But I think it’s unfair to make the comparison to starving children or war torn countries when we discuss the problems we face. We only truly know what we face in our own lives each day, so why should we be guilted and shut up by the thought that there are people starving and dying elsewhere? I don’t think that when someone complains about not getting a job or a certain pair of shoes or even a restaurant reservation here needs to think about starving children in Africa as her first thought when she wakes up every morning. Yes, we need to be thankful for what we have, but to use that as a guilt trip is just unfounded. You could use that excuse every single time someone complained about anything here in the U.S., which is just stupid. Complaining is part of human nature. When it gets excessive, it’s terrible, but we will always complain about certain areas of our lives because that’s the way we are programmed. We can only compare what we have to what is facing us, not something that is thousands of miles away and out of reach.

A friend and I were having a debate about “good friends” and how good friends should never “grate on your nerves.” I used that term to describe what I sometimes feel when my closest friends disappoint me, as has been made evident in this bridesmaid drama that I’ve been pulled into in the last day. I told him that no one is perfect — we’re all going to piss each other off at some point the longer we are friends and the closer we become. That’s just the way it is. It’s like with family, who are “supposed” to be the closest people to you who love you. Part of the reason most of us have a love-hate relationship with our family is because we know each other so well, and when we know each other well, there will always be things we strongly dislike about the other. Spouses drive each other crazy, significant others do, etc. It’s just the way things are. His response to this was that he named two close female friends. Then he said, “In the ten plus years we’ve been friends, I could never honestly say that either of them has ‘grated on my nerves.'” He then suggested I open myself up to making new close female friends and stop dealing with the ones I have grating on my nerves. If I was that dismissive, I’d have no one left in my life.

I haven’t worn contact lenses since September 2, 2012. That was the day that one of my good friends had her U.S. wedding in Maui. Because I am kind of vain, I don’t generally like to wear glasses at special events, and because I cannot see very far (I’m negative 1.50, which isn’t awful, but I want to see things crystal clear on important days), I need to either wear contacts or glasses when I want to see all the details around me. Most of the time wandering around San Francisco or New York, I won’t wear glasses, but I wore contacts on and off for about two years and just got sick of putting them in and taking them out all the time. The maintenance of having those two-week long ones was awful. I hated cleaning them and making sure that there was no dirt in them. I hated spending money on the contact lens solution, which was not cheap and not covered by insurance. And now because I’m thinking about my wedding, I knew I was going to need to get contacts. Today, I got a trial of daily contacts, which means I wear them once and throw them out. That removes the maintenance bit. But taking them off was the biggest pain tonight. I had forgotten how to remove them, so I had to YouTube a video on how to take them out. After a few frustrating tries, I got both out, and of course the left one was more finicky than the right one. The optometrist today said that because my vision isn’t horrible, she strongly recommends against my getting laser eye surgery. “It’s just not worth it for your vision quality,” she said. “Your vision is good enough!”

I just want to see perfectly all the time, though. I guess it’s either contacts or glasses for the rest of my life for me. Damn vision.