The ‘safe death confrontation’ is also very true, even if I don’t want to admit it. I think because for the longest time, I had been to more funerals than weddings that I developed a deep fear about death, not so much my own, but of those around me (that story may change if I end up getting diagnosed with a life-threatening disease). Because I went to so many funerals at a very young age, I just thought that people around me could drop dead at any time, and that frightened me. But I think we’d all live happier, healthier lives if we were more comfortable with the fact that death is an inevitable part of life, and that like he said, it is sadly one of the things that unites us all in terms of experience. It would also force us to do and pursue the things we want because we know our time here is not infinite. We’d be less fearful and more willing to take chances.

Fridays before long weekends are typically dead days at every office I’ve ever worked at. If employees have not taken the day off or decided to work from home (“work” is used quite loosely in that statement), they typically are at the office and only half there in mind and in action. No one really wants to be there, but they know they have to be, otherwise it gets counted as a paid time off day, and no one really wants that unless they are definitely doing something they deem “worthy” of a paid day off. Today, about half the office was actually in the office, but given the number of meetings and the chaotic chatter throughout, it was clear no one was that busy today. I ended up leaving the office just past 3pm. My clients had either all taken the day off or left their offices by 1pm to officially start the long weekend.

It ends up being a wasted work day, a day where you are working in name only but you don’t really get much accomplished. In that event, why don’t companies just give the Friday before long weekends off? I guess if they did, workers may just got lazy even earlier on the Thursday before, and then the cycle of laziness would just continue. There’s no incentive to work hard on the day before a long weekend, so as a group of people, we just don’t.

This weekend, people across the country will be graduating. I have a few friends who are graduating this weekend. One is finishing business school. Another is getting her long-awaited medical degree, which was delayed by a year because of her cancer diagnosis in 2013. I personally thought undergraduate was long enough. I had little doubt in my mind when I finished my undergraduate work that I would probably never set foot on a campus for additional study ever again.

I think learning is a lot fun when you do it at your own pace, when you don’t have to get graded on some dumb bell curve based on a test you spent weeks of sleepless nights studying for. Some of the best learning I’ve had is during my travels, re-learning all the U.S. history I glossed over through formal schooling, and through books I’ve voluntarily read myself since college. I’ve also learned a lot meeting different people and speaking to different people. I knew unless I was crazy passionate about a certain topic, I’d never do graduate school. So I didn’t.

If I had to turn the clock back, and if I really thought I could do anything this past week, I wondered what my life would have been like if I decided to pursue a social science like sociology or even political science. I’ve always been interested in how people interact in groups, how the dynamics change, and how our societies have been formed based on historical and personal life events. Being an academic isn’t all boring and theoretical as people think it is; many politicians such as Elizabeth Warren, whose book I am reading now, started in academia and are now influencing the entire country, if not the world. I would like to have a bigger influence on something, but what that something is — it’s still unknown. I still haven’t figured out what I’m going to be when I grow up.

A friend and I were catching up over the phone the other day, and we ended up spending over three hours on the phone. I really didn’t think the call would last that long, maybe half as long at most. She’s my friend who wants to be friends with everyone, who wants to give everyone a chance to “hang out” because of her mindset that the more, the merrier. There were brief times in my life when I have agreed with this sentiment, but for the most part, I disagree.

She told me that as she has gotten older, she’s realized that sometimes she really doesn’t want to do any small talk to get to know a new person as bad as that sounded, that sometimes, she just wants to eat and drink with people she knows and ignore the people she doesn’t. Does that sound bad? She asked me.

Not really, I said. It just means you are getting older and have realize that you can’t be friends with everyone, nor do you want to be. It won’t bring more happiness. If anything, it just provides a false sense of security. How many of these people are going to really care or cry if we died tomorrow?

I really am a disappointed optimist.

Chris and I are undergoing DNA testing via a DNA kit we are using from 23andMe. I was a bit skeptical about it at first, but I realized that it may actually be helpful and interesting to know for our future children and things they could potentially be at risk of. I’m already aware of things that they may be at risk of based on our family histories: heart disease, high blood pressure, prostate cancer, crooked and ingrown teeth, gum disease,near-sightedness, and potential depression and mental illness. That’s a long list of negative things to be at risk of and covers quite a variety of health areas.

The more I think about future children, the more terrified I become of all the things I hope they don’t have to deal with. I think about the mental breakdown my dad’s mother had when she was in her late thirties and how she was hospitalized for over a year when my dad was a little boy. I think about my mother’s traumatic experiences in Vietnam, and Ed’s initially gradual and then quickly escalated decline and eventual death. Maybe there’s even something dormant lingering in me somewhere, and it’s just waiting to unleash itself with a given external event that needs to happen. All of the mental illness that has been exhibited in my family stares at me grimly in the face when I think of having babies. No one wishes that their child inherits anything like this, but we have zero control over it. And while nurture has a strong role in shaping a child, nature does, as well, and the strength of nurture versus nature in a child’s upbringing in determining how healthy and happy and functioning he becomes is still quite hazy. So, it’s scary to do this testing because at some point I will be reading these results right on a computer screen. But it’s probably better to know than to remain ignorant.

I just finished reading John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars tonight. I will be honest and say that I was skeptical about the book when I first heard about it and after it became a movie. I originally thought what most adults might think — why do I want to read some teenage angst/tragedy book? What I’ve realized, though, after reading it to the end, is that it’s so much more than a teen tragedy or a “cancer book,” since as Hazel Grace, the protagonist says, “cancer books suck.” It’s a book that fairly accurately depicts young people who are so unlucky to be forced into a terminal illness, which also pushes them into a world of thinking about their own mortality far sooner than the rest of us do. When we are forced to grapple with our own mortality, we are also required to mature quicker, which makes us unlike the rest of our peers. We ask questions that others may never think to ask. We are also hurt by statements that other people wouldn’t think twice about. I was really moved by the depth of the writing and the development of these characters. They exhibit a maturity and understanding of the world at their age that only someone with a terminal illness would have.

When Augustus dies, Hazel reads through messages that friends and family write to him. She is very upset by one comment, where the friend writes something like, “Your memory lives on with us, dude.” Why would she be so offended by this? But then before she explained why, I already knew. Augustus had to die, but the assumption this friend has made is, you had to die, but I will live my life forever and ever in this world without you here. Don’t worry, though, you’ll be with me in spirit!” It takes a certain level of experience with death to be able to relate to this sentiment.

In the book, Green writes, “Grief does not change you. It reveals you.” It was a very emotive moment in the book. Grief reveals many parts of a person that may be unknown to others. It reveals strengths and weaknesses and areas of vulnerability that may have been hidden for a long time. I didn’t tear up when Augustus died. I teared up as I was reading Hazel’s reactions of anger and sorrow to those responding to Augustus’s death, to her anger around people who wanted to write for the sake of showing they were writing to him after his death, but who had never bothered seeing him in the months leading up to his death — not even once. “I’m sorry I didn’t get to see you, man,” one boy wrote. Hazel was pissed. And I was, too. Well, he’s dead now, so I guess you don’t have to worry about going to see him… or at least, saying you had the fake intention of seeing him!

As sad as it is, whenever I think about death and terminal illnesses, I always think about Ed. I think about how I prematurely lost him, how he prematurely lost to the world. The grief really never goes away. With cancer, you can say you died of a terminal illness. It’s “acceptable” in society’s eyes. If someone hears you died because you had a mental illness and committed suicide, it’s not acceptable and stigmatized. I’ll be long gone from this world when the day comes that suicide and mental illness are no longer denounced.