I went to my usual spot to get my hair cut tonight, and my hairdresser was as kind and bubbly as always. She works weekends but has Mondays and Thursdays off, and has a four-year-old daughter she supports with her husband. Her commute to Astor Place is long from outer Queens and involves a bus and a train. She probably doesn’t get paid much (haircuts at this spot only cost $25, which is a steal in New York City), so she depends on tips quite a bit; she can only afford to go back home to Sicily about every two years, which is sad because she sounds like she loves her family. It always make me frustrated to know how many people’s livelihoods depend on tips in this country. It just doesn’t make logical sense to me why they just cannot have a living wage to live regular, non-lavish lives.

She asks a lot about me, but I always feel guilty telling her things I am up to. I don’t feel comfortable telling her that I just came back from Spain; I especially don’t feel comfortable telling her that I’m leaving for Melbourne this Saturday. She knows I’ve been going there every year for Christmas since she started cutting my hair a few years ago, and she is always saying how jealous she is. Most of the time when people say they are jealous, it doesn’t mean anything to me. But when she says it, I always feel a nagging sense of guilt. I get to do and experience all these things she probably only dreams of. She works really hard, and she’s clearly very good at what she does. Am I really more deserving of all these things than she is? Probably not.

She also got an over 40% tip from me tonight.

Tonight, I had dinner with my friend, who is usually very chipper and positive. But as soon as I saw her when I arrived at the restaurant, she was clearly exhausted, with fine lines around her eyes and a dark cast over her face. She looked like she had barely slept in a week. Every response from her was a little snappy or annoyed, and she made lots of assumptions about what I knew that I didn’t know. It felt so odd for the first hour, as though I was having dinner with a stranger and listening to someone who I barely recognized. As the night went on, she broke down and started crying, and finally after she let her feelings go, she started resembling herself again.

A lot of the frustrations she was experiencing were from almost a month ago; she just didn’t have anyone to really talk about them with who would just sit there and listen and not say anything back. That tends to be the way people become when they don’t get to express themselves; they become a shell of themselves that becomes unrecognizable to the ones who truly know and love them, not just the self that they reveal to their colleagues or their superficial friends.

Most of my life, most of my friends have been of Asian descent. It’s partly because I grew up and went to schools where the kids were predominantly Asian. But what has always frustrated me the most is the constant Asian desire to not share our deepest feelings and frustrations, to not be authentic, to not share your opinions even when it’s the most crucial time to do so. Being neutral is not only boring, but it makes you seem like a fake person who doesn’t have thoughts. Pick a side; live a little. As the Jewish political activist and writer and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel once said, “We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere.” In my friend’s case, I feel sad that she didn’t feel like she had an outlet to share in the last three weeks, and that it took her a while to even open up to me tonight. These are the everyday lifelong battles we face in our relationships.

Christmas time is here once again. All of Park Avenue South is lit up with Christmas lights and little mini Christmas trees. Trees are being sold on every other street corner in Murray Hill and the Upper East Side. Store fronts are starting to get decked out in pine cones, wreaths, and candy canes. Some boutiques are even playing Christmas carols when you pass their windows. This time of year always makes me feel excited, but at the very same time, I always feel sad and teary, too.

People always say that holidays are supposed to be about family, but I will never have my own blood family to spend the holidays with ever again — at least, not in a meaningful way. I remember that I didn’t even spend Ed’s last Christmas with him, and every year it gets me choked up to remember how miserable he was that day when I called him to wish him a merry Christmas from the other side of the world. Being the person he was, he didn’t want to make it seem like it was a big deal, that my parents ignored the holiday altogether and ate a regular everyday meal, and our dad didn’t wish him a merry Christmas. Instead, he spoke cheerily to me about what a jet setter I was, spending Christmas in another hemisphere and country, asking me about what Chris’s family was doing for Christmas in 2012. I told him the day was already over in Melbourne and that it was already the 26th, or Boxing Day there. He seemed so surprised that I was almost 24 hours ahead of him yet speaking to him.

I try not to live a life of regrets. Regrets are so futile; they are empty feelings about things that you cannot change because those times have passed. But it’s hard not to look back and think of what I wish I had done with Ed. I can still hear his voice in my head, getting excited about buying Christmas gifts each year and watching cheesy Christmas movie reruns on TV. That’s why Christmas time is always a season I look forward to but simultaneously dread. I can’t have the joy without remembering the pain.

I’ve never really been that excited about Halloween. I still remember the days when we were expected to dress up for the Halloween parade at school, and how much I never enjoyed it. I always felt like the poorest kid, even though I obviously wasn’t (at least, now I know this). I still remember in first grade, my mom took me shopping at a Halloween store, and she said to me, “Okay, you can pick one costume, any costume. But just remember that you have to wear it every year until the end of elementary school.” She explained that she and my dad couldn’t afford a new costume for me every year (Ed wore the same Garfield mask trick-or-treating until high school. I had no idea how he felt about that because I never asked). I was only six at the time, but somehow, I was still rational even then. So I responded, “But I’ll be bigger then.” My mom nodded. “You will be, so that’s why we’ll have to buy an extra LARGE costume!”

So, I looked through all the costumes. I really wanted to be a fairy or a princess. But I wasn’t sure I’d want to be that five years in a row. So I settled on what seemed “neutral” at the time – a pumpkin/jack-o-lantern outfit. And that’s when I decided I would probably never like Halloween as a dress-up event for myself.

Today, I still don’t get excited about dressing up (and I haven’t dressed up since 2012), but I do admire the care that other people take in doing very elaborate makeup (my favorite I saw on Instagram was a dying woman who painted her neck so that it looked like her throat was split completely open), and I love seeing little babies dressed up in the most ridiculous outfits (this year’s favorite for me was a 2-month old baby in an ostentatious peacock outfit that was three times her size). Maybe I will get excited about it one day when I have a child to dress up, but for now, it’s not really for me.

I’ve been living in New York for over eight years now, but I’ve never really had what I’d call a regular neighborhood haunt that I’d continually go back to. Of course, there are places I’d rely on for takeout or cheap eats, but no place I’d gladly visit over and over because I liked the food, drink, the ambiance, and the service all at once.

Tonight, I visited Jones Wood Foundry with a friend for the very first time, even though it’s been on my Yelp bookmark list for years. It’s a British style pub with a very British looking bar, a beautiful and spacious back dining area, and even a hidden outdoor terrace. The fish and chips we had were very authentic based on what I’ve had in Australia and New Zealand, which I’m told are the same style as in the U.K., and the chicken tikka masala salad was fresh and used dark meat on the bone (major brownie points). The drink selection is huge, and the service was incredible. We had several people come over to greet us and ask if this was our first time, and they said they’d welcome us back as regulars in the future (whether that’s really true and whether they will actually recognize us — we’ll find out). And I learned a little fun fact about the neighborhood I’ve called home for over three years now: before this was the Upper East Side, Yorkville, or Lenox Hill, the area between 66th and 77th streets and Third Ave and the East River, was known as Jones Wood.

Maybe this could be a place to just stop by for a drink or a quick snack moving forward. I loved the vibe of this place and felt so happy to be able to just walk a couple blocks home after.

Like most people, as a child I loved Disney movies; I still do today. But as an adult, I am fully cognizant of all the negative stereotypes that are perpetuated by them (e.g. gender and race stereotypes, massive favoritism for people of European descent). I loved the music and oftentimes sang along with the songs. My favorite Disney movies were Beauty and the Beast, Sleeping Beauty, and Aladdin. Beauty and the Beast was a particular favorite for me because Belle, the main female character, was a bit of an eccentric, a total bookworm who obsessed over endless books and libraries and wanted more out of life than her “poor provincial town.” I loved reading when I was young (as I still do), so I immediately identified with her.

After the latest remastering and release of Beauty and the Beast on Blu-Ray, several articles have come out on it, particularly regarding the history of the main lyricist who worked on the songs for the movie, Howard Ashman. I had read a lot about Alan Menken, the composer who worked on Disney movies, but nothing about Ashman until today. This is when I found out that Ashman was a gay man who was dying from AIDS as he worked on Beauty and the Beast, and he died eight months before the movie was completed. He contributed a lot of very rich ideas to the movie; it was his idea to staff the Beast’s enchanted castle with sentient appliances that had once been human. These objects all felt alien in their object/appliance bodies, completely dehumanized. I’d imagine that’s what Ashman felt as he was writing the lyrics for these songs while dying. Ashman also loved to cook, and so he expressed his love for cooking and culinary rhyme with the song “Be Our Guest.” He worked until his death from his gay-friendly hospital via a phone patch to communicate changes to recordings and emphases on certain words or enunciations in songs, all of which were honored.

These beautiful songs and movies I enjoyed as a child have such a rich back story that I’d only be able to fully appreciate learning as an adult. Beauty and the Beast is more tragically beautiful than I ever thought before.