Category Archives: Contemplation

Gift in the mail

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Today, we received a wedding card and check in the mail from one of Chris’s mother’s cousins, who was invited to the wedding but couldn’t attend due to conflicting travel she and her husband had already booked. I was surprised to see this in the mail even after Chris’s mother had told me that this cousin had planned to send us a gift. Unless it is a very close friend or family member, I’d never expect any gifts if the person didn’t attend the wedding.

It’s so weird — the whole wedding gift giving thing. There are friends and family who attended the wedding events and did not give any gift, and then there are friends and family who did not attend any of the events and gave generous gifts. I wonder what their thought process is when they ultimately decide to give or not give a gift and whether it is guilt that drives them (for the sake of having face) or the pure desire to just give.

Cousins and cousins

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The funniest thing about having the majority of close family and friends all in one place for your wedding is seeing what the dynamic is like not just in how they act around each other, but how you act with all of them in one place. Who are you going to spend time interacting with, or the most time interacting with, and who are you going to have the most fun and laughs around?

Having my cousins in the same place with most of Chris’s cousins was interesting and clearly revealed who I cared and didn’t care about the most. Chris’s cousins are like my own family, the functional family I never had, and they are fun and enjoyable to be around. I genuinely enjoy spending time with them and have had many a session when I have laughed so hard that my ribs ended up hurting. With my own cousins, I barely spent any time conversing with any of them, and they made no effort to talk much to me or approach Chris and me at all. In fact, my cousin and his wife and children who came from Redwood City barely said anything to us until I went to their table, and they left without saying goodbye or thanks for having them. My cousin and his wife and son in Brooklyn left without saying bye early… in fact, they barely said hi to me at all. They actively chose not to socialize with anyone and instead were all rude during the reception speeches, talking amongst themselves with whatever gossip and negativity they like to occupy themselves with, and allowing their children to make lots of noise without discipline. This resulted in a lot of glares from Chris’s aunts and uncles table, who actually did care to hear our speeches and came because they truly care about us. Chris’s parents later asked who those people were at that table and suspected they must be my cousins. I’m sure they noticed I barely talked to them at all. It says everything about how much we value each other.

The end of the wedding period is over and is sad because it was so much fun, but it’s kind of nice because now, I have no reason to be proactive or in touch with any of those cousins, or my dysfunctional aunt, who decided to complain about her estranged son and his children she didn’t know about to me, and also came to my wedding wearing jeans. As always, the world revolves around her in her head, even when her niece is getting married. Colleagues later commented that this was the ultimate way to disrespect me and my parents, but in all truth, I really didn’t care and dismissed her presence right away. I’m getting better at ignoring idiocies in my family. It’s the end of my relationship with family members who truly don’t care about me, and I don’t really think about much seriously.

19 days

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The people who told me that I would think I had all my wedding stuff together and organized and figured out… until one month before the wedding — those people are sadly so right.

We are 19 days away from the wedding, and I feel like there are still too many things to finalize that we haven’t done. This is why people hire wedding planners.

Because of our catering company that we chose, we are using probably the most inefficient and least intuitive event planning/diagram coordinating applications possible. I can’t even figure out how to lay out the ceremony chairs the way I want because it will not let me delete or add individual seats, only rows. This job should be done by a monkey, not by me.

Little blob

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I spent the evening in Tampa tonight with a friend’s friend, his wife, and their 1.5 year old son. He’s probably the smartest little child I’ve ever met. He mimics everything that we do – high fives, jumps, yells, even chest beating. He’s also the happiest and most expressive little toddler I’ve ever seen. Today during our dinner of ribs, barbequed chicken, baked beans and slaw, he even ate our food cut into bits, all on his own, interchanging between using his little baby fork and his hands, along with a pretty decent pile of baked sweet potatoes. This child has the palate of God’s children.

Every time I see them, of course we spend a bit of time talking about children, child-rearing, and my potential future as a mother. I read their little toddler bedtime stories tonight, and he loved every minute of it – all my little explanations, imitations of animals and trains, and facial expressions. “He was so enthralled with your story telling!” my friend exclaimed. “Wow, you’re going to be a great mom one day!”

Maybe I will be, but I am absolutely terrified. The idea that a little blob could come out of my body and be 100% dependent on me is quite surreal. I told him this, and he said everyone feels that way. I suppose that is true.

“It’s scary in the beginning, and I felt the same way when he was born,” my friend said. “But after a while, you realize that babies aren’t that complicated after all. When babies cry, it’s always one of three things: 1) they’re hungry, 2) their diapers need to be changed, or 3) they’re tired and need to sleep.”

If only it were really that simple.

Twitter

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I tried to make a group client dinner reservation for Roux, a popular restaurant in Tampa, and they made it really impossible to get through. I tried calling their phone, which resulted in a failed voice message system that produced loud beeping sounds and refused to let me leave a message. I attempted making a reservation through their online booking system, and they would not allow me to make a booking for more than 10 people via their site. I called again and again. This was just not going to work. Finally, I decided that I would need to Tweet them on Twitter to get a response. Within a day, their PR and communications manager messaged me back and called me, made my booking and set up fixed menus for me.

It’s amazing to see the power of Twitter. Of course, in fear that I would potentially give them negative publicity via Twitter, Facebook, or another channel, they tended to my every need and continued to respond to all my e-mails within an hour or so. Social media works very, very well.

Friend’s friends

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A good friend of Chris’s who lives in New York coincidentally got pregnant over the summer and found out her due date was one week after our wedding. This was especially sad news because we knew she and her husband would have happily come to California for our wedding.

While it’s sad that she can’t make it, we understand her predicament. She’s offered to take us out to celebrate early this Friday. What is not sad is when you realize that associated friends who were invited did not even have the decent manners to RSVP to the wedding period.

This is my cynical side speaking, clearly. As soon as I heard she wouldn’t be able to come due to giving birth, I made a silent bet in my head that the two associated friends who would have come if she had come would decline. They didn’t even decline; they didn’t even RSVP. If someone is so generous to invite you to their wedding, the least you could do is RSVP in a timely manner with a ‘yes’ or a ‘no.’ Chris reached out to one of them over Facebook, and he gave some rambling message about not being able to come with excuses that were clearly his way of saying, “Sorry, dude. I just don’t care enough if <mutual friend> doesn’t go, either.” It is sad when you are over 30 and you are still just a follower.

To make matters worse, he reached out separately to me to apologize. What is the point? I really didn’t care at that point and simply responded, “Don’t worry about it.” It just kept getting worse because he kept responding. “That’s the most upset I’ve ever heard you,” he responded back with… Again. “We should hang out some time soon. I miss you guys.”

I didn’t respond to that last bit. No, you don’t miss us. Stop faking that you want to see us and spend time with us, and just move on. We have.

I don’t want to spend time on or with people who don’t make any effort with me. It’s not worth it. The older I get, the more valuable I realize my time is, and the more I do not want to waste it on people who just want other people to be their conveniences in life.

Anti Valentine

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The hype every year is nauseating. Every time I walk past a bodega or corner store, all I can see are endless red roses, red carnations, red everything. I listen to colleagues of mine who are on their perpetual first date, and they are green enough to want to do a first date on Valentine’s Day. Others in committed relationships stress over where to eat on Valentine’s Day evening. Why are you people going out at all?

Valentine’s Day is one of those over-hyped, stressed out holidays that needs to be done away with. Why, instead of buying all this chocolate and flowers for your love on Valentine’s day, don’t you just appreciate him or her a little bit more every day?

One year, I remember I was dating a guy that I thought I was fond of, but I quickly realized what a miserable human being he was. He got me a small bouquet of tulips on Valentine’s Day. I hated them. I knew I hated them because as soon as I put them in a vase, they immediately slumped over. Ever since that Valentine’s Day, I had decided that Valentine’s Day kind of sucked. I still believe that.

 

Gym renovation

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I returned to my usual gym after a very long two-month hiatus to discover that they not only renovated the group fitness studio floor, but also the women’s locker room. All the floors have been redone, the sinks and makeup stations have sparkling granite counter tops, and the showers have been modernized. And in an effort to make the locker rooms more modern and chic, somehow Crunch also decided to remove every single full length mirror, make the locker room benches about half the length they used to be, and replace the old lockers, which had plenty of hooks for hanging jackets and purse, with new lockers that have a very inefficient swivel hook right in the center. And the little changing stations we used to have outside the showers are now gone. Now, I am forced to dry off and be naked amongst all my fellow female morning gym go-ers.

Is this what it means to be modernized in today’s gym — to aesthetically appear pleasing but from a utility perspective be useless?

Engagement photos

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Our photographer finished editing the full set of our engagement photos, so I sent the gallery to my parents so they could see them. My mom said she loved the photos and said we both looked really good in them, but she critiqued my choice of wearing jeans for half of them. “Why are you wearing such weird clothes in the first half?” she asked. “Who wears jeans to things like this?”

My mom has had a life-long hatred of denim and anything jeans-related. She’s always looked at them as working men’s clothing, the type of clothing you wear if you are changing tires or working on a construction site. She has no idea why anyone would want to wear jeans every day or why anyone would find them attractive or comfortable.

“But that was meant to be the casual clothing photos,” I said to her. “I’m more dressed up in the second half.”

She doesn’t care. The jean hate continues.

Dream recap

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I was walking up to Grand Central tonight and talking to my mom on the phone when I decided to tell her that I dreamt that Ed never died. I guess I thought to tell her because she brought him up. Well, what I left out was that I also dreamt that although he was alive, she had died. But hey, she doesn’t have to know every detail, right?

“He said he never died,” I told her. “He said he is still here with us. He said he has always been here with us.”

“He never died?” My mom repeated pensively. “He never died… Yes, you know that when Armageddon comes, Ed will be resurrected, and he will live on paradise on earth with us forever.”

My mom loves her convenient truths. If paradise on earth really existed according to Jehovah’s Witnesses’ beliefs, then Ed and I wouldn’t “qualify” because we were never Jehovah’s Witnesses to begin with. We would go to hell. And neither would our dad qualify, and heck, my mom hasn’t converted a single person yet, so she probably wouldn’t have made the 144,000 person cut off, either! But at least our mom thinks Ed is a good enough person so that he could be resurrected, so that thought was kind of comforting.

She said to me that since Ed has passed, she has seen him in dreams only twice. I told her he comes to visit me at least a couple times a month since he passed. She expressed half surprise, half envy.

“He comes to visit you… in New York?” my mom said to me, confused. “But how doe he know the way to get there? He could get lost.”

Even in dream life, in the after life, in heaven — wherever my sweet, innocent brother continues to live another form of life, our mother continues to worry about him. After death, he still lives somewhere out there, and because she knows this, she continues not just to pray for him, but to worry if he is safe, happy, and at peace… and if he won’t get lost on the way to New York to visit me.

What our mother doesn’t realize is that now wherever her son is, Ed can’t get lost. He cannot be in danger. He can’t feel pain, and all he can do is feel peace and be happy. That’s why every time I see him now, he’s always the happy one, and I am the one crying and sobbing when I see him. I really should be happier when I see him in dreams, but I can’t because I am selfish. I miss him in this life where I am, where I live. In his new world, he has found peace and happiness. It is a daily struggle to accept and for me to be at peace with his peace.