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.

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.