Category Archives: Contemplation

Wedding debrief

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I talked to my mom on the phone today since it was my first full day back from Europe, and she wanted a full download of the wedding events. I told her about everything from the food to the DJ to the fireworks, and of course, she said, “Wow, both their families must be rich!” I think if I told my mom that a couple got married in a haystack that she’d probably respond the same way. She wanted to know how much time exactly we spent with Chris’s parents, and if we gave a “decent” amount for the wedding, which is her way of trying to ask how much money we gave as a gift. There was no direct reply to that.

When it comes to money and how much people make, my mom tends to always assume that everyone else is rich except for her and my dad… and me, and that I tend to give too much to people who either don’t deserve it or need it. But she’ll always frame the questions as though I should be giving more. That’s the trap. So if I were to tell her an amount that seemed hefty, she’d respond and say I would go broke spending money that way on “everyone,” and then proceed to get mad at me. It’s the cycle of no-win situations when you are dealing with someone who likely has some sort of paranoid personality disorder. Everything is malevolent and a reason to be angry and suspicious and distrustful.

Meaning of “World Heritage” in Bordeaux

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Yesterday late afternoon, we took the TGV down to Bordeaux to visit the wine regions for which the area is famous, as well as the little medieval town called Saint Emilion. Today, we hired a guide to take us out to the Saint Emilion and Pomerol wine regions. Chris is more familiar with different wine varietals than I am, though we both enjoy wine and pretty much all alcohol, but Bordeaux wine has always eluded him given that it’s not so much the grape varietal that matters, but the chateau from which the wine came. There are thousands of chateaux in the area, though. That apparently has caused a lot of lack of understanding of the wine in this area not just for those outside of France, but also even for those in the Bordeaux region itself!

We saw and tasted many impressive and beautiful things today, but when our guide described to us the real meaning of living and working in a UNESCO World Heritage site, I couldn’t believe it and was shocked; I’d never even thought of things like that before. The town of Saint Emilion has UNESCO World Heritage status, which means that anyone that builds or owns anything within the town’s limits needs to have approvals for anything and everything that happens there. In addition to that, as an owner or builder, you can only hire certain contractors, certain architects, certain workers to construct for you. That’s another code for: you don’t really own what you own. You have to be dictated what to do and how to do it, and definitely how much money you are going to spend on it (which is clearly a LOT because these people will charge you as much as they can since they know they have the power to given the laws). It was tiring to hear how arduous the entire process was. What he described sounded like a retiree’s nightmare. This certainly wasn’t a place any French person would want to retire to no matter how quaint, quiet, and beautiful the town of Saint Emilion is. If anyone thinks it’s strict in cities like San Francisco or New York, don’t even think about this area.

Paris bound four years later

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I’m leaving for Paris today. The last time (which was my first time) I visited Paris, it was in June 2011. I’d never really traveled much at all when I went to France then. I was wide-eyed and excited, eager to practice my public-school-learned French (which means it’s extremely basic at best) and explore the world of butter and sugar and la joie de vivre. I stayed in two crappy hostels, one of which had a shower that had no separation from my bed, so every time I showered, my bed sheets got soaked. I even had to pack my own towels and toiletries. That hostel also had only a single toilet on every floor, which meant I had to share the same dirty, smelly toilet (it was so bad that I can still vividly remember how bad it looked. To give you an idea of how bad, it made some of the toilets I used in China seem squeaky clean) with about 20 other people each night. We also got kicked out after our third night because they said they had a policy of only reserving you a room for a maximum of three nights. So we ran around Les Halles and the Latin Quarter trying to find a place for our last two nights. I felt like such a loser — a frugal American running around Paris looking for housing in the summer.

My experience this time around will be quite different. We’ll be staying in the sixth arrondissement in the midst of all the major chocolate and pastry shops I want to visit, in a real hotel that will not only have a real bathroom and a real bedroom, but also its own private toilet and towels. We’re flying business class since we found a deal that was only $150 more than economy. Four years ago, I never would have consented to paying $150 more for business. I would have thought, but I could spend that extra $150 on pastries and other French treats I could bring home! But now I think, wow, how often do you ever see the price differential between economy and business be so tiny? The answer to that is never.

It’s a different life now.

Apartment prep

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We’re prepping the apartment for our guests who will be staying at our apartment while we are in France. The nice thing about having guests while you are away is that you are forced to have a reason to clean your apartment and make it tidy. The bad thing about having guests while you are away is that you are forced to have a reason to clean your apartment and make it tidy. Sometimes, you really just want to pack and get the heck out and not clean every speck of dust and make sure the bath tub is shiny before you leave.

AirBnB insures your apartment for about a million dollars when you have a guest staying over, but I still get a little worried before every guest comes, even if it’s not super rational, because I think of the things that don’t necessarily cost a lot of money but have a lot of sentimental value. These are things that if they were to break, I’d get really upset. The things I think about are things like my Disney World It’s a Small World mug. It probably cost no more than ten bucks, but I get really antsy when I think of someone dropping it. I think about the German and Austrian gingerbread-like houses we bought in Europe during the last two Thanksgivings, and I think of them shattering to pieces.

I still put away the mug into my underwear drawer before the guests come. It’s slightly paranoid, but I do it anyway. I’ll continue to do this.

Hemming woes

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I picked up a gown today for the wedding we’ll be attending next week. This is probably one of the very few floor-length dresses I’ve ever worn. Unfortunately, what that also tends to mean is that it needs to be hemmed since I am only 5’3″, and pressed for time, I need to do this myself. That’s actually not a hard job for me, though, in theory. My mom taught me how to fix simple clothing mishaps like holes, buttons, etc., and I took a sewing class when I was 12 on basic sewing, including hemming. Unfortunately, those above skills necessitate certain tools, such as an iron, ironing board, and even a sewing machine, none of which I have access to. So I did a hack hem with really basic sewing and measuring that took about 25 minutes, and it actually came out looking okay.

It’s a good thing I can come up with these things in such a short period of time and not have to go out and pay someone else to hem my dress. The estimate I got from the cleaner around the corner hurt just hearing it. The lesson learned here is that now, I need to invest in an iron and a small ironing board, even just for my small Manhattan apartment.

“All moms are crazy”

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I went out for drinks tonight with a good friend of mine, and we discussed my drama-filled days in San Francisco with my mom, conjuring up stories of how Chris has “hurt” her and my dad. My friend says loudly, “Your mom is crazy. All moms are crazy!” The bar we are drinking at doesn’t have that many patrons, but the ones who are in there all start cheering and agreeing. The bartender agreed and said that some people have mommy issues while others have daddy issues. She said she herself had mommy issues and got along perfectly with her dad.

“I don’t want to say she is crazy,” I said to my friend. “I think it’s kind of disrespectful.” My friend defended it and said she didn’t mean to offend my mom, but that’s not the point of what I was trying to say. I honestly believe my mom has a mental illness that hasn’t and will never be addressed or diagnosed. I mean, who else insists that everyone is out to get her and hurt her and keeps secrets more than my own parents at my mother’s insistence? We can’t just write people off as crazy when we know there is something psychologically wrong with them because it doesn’t address the core problem. We become the people we hate, the ones who make generalizations about “craziness” and then don’t acknowledge how harmful and serious these problems are.

Oh, Ed

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I think my brother read my whining yesterday, so he decided to pay me a visit last night.

In my dream, he never died. This seems to be a reoccurring premise. He’s here, a part of this world, and he acts as though nothing has happened. His death was just a figment of my imagination, and everything bad that ever happened in his life never really happened. “What are you doing here?” I ask him.

He has an insulted look on his face. “What do you mean?” he responds back. He sits there and stares at me, confused and not sure what the heck I am thinking.

“You died,” I say to him. “You left me. You jumped off that bridge.”

“What are you talking about, Yvonne?” He sounds frustrated. I don’t know what to say to him. I’m surprised, confused, hurt, relieved, incredulous, all at the same time. Did none of this ever really happen? Maybe I am the one who has lost grip of reality.

And then my alarm goes off, and I wake up. And I look up at the frame with his photos up there on the left side of my bed, and I realize that no, it was not a nightmare that he died. He really did die. That is my reality. His existence on this earth in the last few hours was my real dream.

How Three Survivors of Suicide Spent Their Last Days On Earth

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My friend sent me an article today with the same title as this entry. The article originated from a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” thread openly asking those who had attempted suicide and survived it how they went about what they thought would be the last days of their lives.

The three that are showcased in this specific article are very hopeful in terms of what they left that experience with. They all ended their stories by thinking in their “final” moments, “No, I do want to live. I don’t want to die. Please don’t let me die and give me one more chance to live.” Some even go into professions to help others who are struggling themselves, and it’s very admirable.

All of this sounds great, doesn’t it? It sounds hopeful, very “happily-ever-after.” It makes me really sad and teary to read accounts of people who have attempted. But the truth is that many stories are not this hopeful. Many people who attempt suicide are not doing it for the very first time; they have done it multiple times, and a lot of them really want to die, even in their very final moments. Ed attempted suicide just a couple months shy of his 18th birthday, when I was just 11 years old. I was about to start middle school; he was about to begin college. He popped too many pills and he thought he was going to die because he wanted to. But in what he thought would be his “final” moments, he said to me that he got scared and realized he didn’t want to die.

Then 16 years later, he attempts suicide again. And this time, he succeeded. And I truly believe he wanted to succeed this time.

I don’t think that’s what he thought in the second before he jumped off the bridge over two years ago, though. I mean, the witnesses said he paced back and forth for over 45 minutes. I’m sure he just wanted to get it done and over with. He probably wasn’t thinking he still wanted to live. He had given up. He had settled in his mind that it was better if he had never been born, as he had written me a few weeks before, and that God gave him a mental illness for a reason. No note, no last words, no nothing.

These are the stories you don’t get to see in weepy Upvoted or Reddit articles. There’s no happy ending here — just a sad, painful one.

Guns and mental illness

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I think this country really needs to shut up regarding the issue with mass shootings and linking gun violence to mental illness. The entire thing is so ludicrous that I can feel my face getting red and hot whenever I hear another ignorant Republican say that mental illness is the issue when it comes to massive shootings. Mental illness needs to be addressed; guns don’t need to be taken away, they say. If you want to take away guns, why not also take away pencils and cars because those things have the potential to kill people, too? No, guys. That’s not accurate or even relevant. When did people who were mentally ill suddenly become a violent risk to society in large droves? Yes, mental illness is a huge problem in this country because no one wants to face it as a real health problem but as a weakness that is stigmatized and must be ostracized and swept under a rug (or behind closed doors), but it is a very separate issue from guns killing people. The majority of mentally ill people are not violent or a risk to society. Ed had a mental illness, and he had zero capacity to cause any real harm to anyone… other than himself. A lot of homicide that happens in this country is done by people who are seemingly unaffected by mental illness. When John Oliver is calling out Americans only discussing mental illness to thwart the discussion on gun control, you know something is seriously screwed up. Deal with the gun control issue. Deal with the mental illness issue. Stop linking the two and blaming the mentally ill for the shootings and the awful number of deaths from guns every year. It’s not accurate nor is it even remotely true. Address the guns, damn it. It’s an embarrassment to me not only as an American, but as someone who has lost her brother to mental illness and suicide.

Meatballs

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I spent the early afternoon making meatballs for dinner since Chris was finally coming back from Australia after two weeks of being away for work and family. For the first time, I made gelatin out of leftover homemade stock, minced it up, and added it to my meatball “dough.” I formed each meatball, about 3.5 ounces each, and laid them out neatly on a foiled baking sheet to pop into the broiler before dumpling them into the tomato sauce I made.

As I formed each ball and gently placed each on the baking sheet, I thought about Ed and how much he liked meat. He rarely cooked. The few times he did, he never got praised for what he made. I guess I praised him once when he made chocolate chip cookies. He was so excited about finally making something himself… until they came out of the oven and didn’t seem that brown. He asked me why they didn’t brown as well as the cookies I’ve made, and I asked him if he remembered to use brown sugar. “Oh, no!” he exclaimed, disappointed. “I forgot to use brown sugar!” It was okay. They still tasted fine. Another time, he splurged and bought filet mignon when I wasn’t home, and he cooked and ate it himself. I think our mom ate a little bit, but my dad declined to eat any. He would have loved these meatballs, but I know he would have thought this recipe was way too complex.

I always look back and wonder if we should have spent more time doing things together. Maybe I could have asked him to cook with me, to share in some task that I found fun, instead of just asking him to help me wash the dishes afterwards, which was never fun for him or me. But the realistic side of me knows I would have been a control freak, and it may not have ended very well for either of us. I feel like we didn’t spend enough time together when I was around at home, and I feel bad about it now when I look back. It’s terrible to even think about this now because it’s clear the reason I think this way is because he is gone now. It makes me feel really crappy.