I was thinking about my car rides back home in San Francisco last month and how depressing it was listening to whatever AM radio station my parents always have on. It’s a local AM radio station in San Francisco that basically reports everything depressing and local: the latest car jacking, the innocent college student who got held at gun point in the middle of the Inner Sunset, a girl who got kidnapped and was found murdered in a random ditch. It’s no wonder my parents go through life always assuming the worst is going to happen and fearing everything and everyone they meet; the limited amount of media they consume makes them anxious to live their lives fully because they are just crippled by fear and hate.

I read a decent amount of news nearly every day. On the weekdays, I start my morning commute with theSkimm and the Morning Brew, and anything I want to learn more about, I dig into later in the day. It’s a bit exhausting to read the news every day, especially since yes, a lot of it can be extremely depressing and blood-pressure spiking. I don’t read all of it because I enjoy it (ahem to the current moron in the White House), but rather because I want to make sure I can at least slightly stay informed. Then I started finding out about ways to listen to the news, kind of like my parents, except actually informative and useful news, via daily news podcasts that give you a brief but well rounded summary of current events, such as theSkimm’s own podcast and NPR’s Up First. I don’t completely love how theSkimm is written because their daily email summaries sometimes can dumb down the news and seem like it’s targeted towards airheads, but I do like the random pop culture news articles and the interesting quotes that they provide at the beginning of each email.

And this morning, when I was listening to Up First, I realized… I wish this was the way my parents consumed their news. It would be great if they heard about the good, bad, and neutral news. It would be better if they heard more about other cities and countries and continents. The world does not revolve around San Francisco. They wouldn’t have to constantly be listening to latest kidnapping or murder and thinking that events like that happen every second on every corner of every street in the world. How does it benefit any of us to be informed of every event like that? What exactly would we be learning from any of that?

The U.S. is so family unfriendly. I never really thought that much of this… outside of the fact that American employers are obligated to provide a total of zero weeks of paid leave to their employees after the birth or adoption of a child, that new mothers are constantly discriminated against when they return to work, that visibly pregnant women cannot feasibly look for new employment, that new fathers are discouraged from taking their full paternity leave (if their employers even provide it). So you know, not too many things, but enough to get my blood boiling. Then, I started noticing it even more when I began traveling more internationally. I noticed things like… completely separate bathrooms for families and actual baby changing rooms that were separated from the main restrooms. I noticed a baby carrying seat in the women’s room stalls so that a mother can properly pee without needing to hold her infant or toddler down. I saw women openly breastfeeding without any cover-up, without people staring at them like they were offensive to God. I heard announcements at airport gates for pre-boarding for families with children. These things never happen here. The latest thing I’ve noticed here in the U.S. is breastfeeding rooms popping up in airports; I was truly amazed by this. Truly.

So I got even more infuriated when I accompanied my five-months pregnant colleague to Old Navy today just a few blocks from our office to find out that they had no maternity section period. We asked a worker when we walked in, and she embarrassingly told us that there was no maternity section at any Old Navy in all of Manhattan, and if we wanted to find a maternity section, we either need to go to Queens or Brooklyn locations for Old Navy, or order online and do in-store pickup. The other option was that on the second floor, they had all their maternity returns for the pieces that didn’t work out.

Ummm, what?

“So basically, pregnant women aren’t allowed in Manhattan?” I asked the worker. She laughed and said she had brought up this issue multiple times to the manager of the store, and he would respond, saying they didn’t have enough space “for that.” The store worker eventually agreed with me. “We’re really just not friendly towards expectant mothers. It’s sad.”

When we went upstairs to view the returned maternity pieces, it was very clear to us that a lot of women were shopping online for maternity wear and doing in-store pickup; the store manager was just completely short-sighted and literally being a dick towards pregnant women. This is just another form of discrimination, another form of being anti-family and ultimately, anti-woman.

“So, I basically have two options,” my colleague said to me, sighing. “I can go to the really expensive maternity wear stores and pay $100-200 for a dress, or I can shop at Old Navy for reasonable prices, but only online!”

Why do we live in such an anti-family, anti-woman society?

The office was like a ghost town today. I was one of a total of six people who decided to show up at the office today, one of whom left shortly after lunch time. Here, people tend to come and go as they wish. We’re generally flexible with working remotely, and everyone seems to mind their own business. Summer time is also a popular time to take vacations, so there’s that to consider, too. But as I waltzed into the office at around 9:45 this morning, I started thinking about the office days of my mom and how this would never, ever fly.

Usually, I call her as I am leaving work, so sometime between 5:30 to 6pm. If I ever call earlier than that, she just assumes that something catastrophic has happened… like I got fired/laid off/something like death has happened. The concept of coming in “late,” or “leaving early” are kind of a big deal to her — “is your boss okay with that? Did you ask your boss’s permission?” She doesn’t realize that here, no one really wants or cares to keep tabs on anyone like that. That’s not how this office works, and selfishly, I hope I never, ever work at a place like that. I’ve told her all of these things probably over a hundred times by now, but she still worries and is concerned… because she’s my mom, and to her, that’s what moms do — worry about their kids even when the kids have reassured the parents a million times.

It’s a privilege, though. I recognize that. So when I complain and get angry about anything at work, whether it’s some isolated moronic incident or general politics that seem to happen every single day, I remind myself that of all the office crap I have to deal with, it’s not even a tenth of what my mom had to endure in her working days.

I would not want to be a delivery person… ever. They are probably one of the least appreciated professions in this entire city, yet they likely work the hardest. As someone who is lucky enough to work at a company that offers free lunch every day to its employees, I get the option of ordering on my corporate Seamless account every day and choosing either delivery or pick-up. Sometimes, if the weather is good and the restaurant isn’t too far away, I’ll opt for pickup, getting a quick break and walk in while also saving a delivery person some work. But other times, I’ll just have the food delivered to me. And I always, always tip the delivery people.

Unfortunately in New York City, what this often means is an underpaid, perhaps even undocumented delivery person taking a bike with his helmet, juggling multiple food orders on his back or over his arms, getting from point A to B to C to D. I’ve seen these guys on my walks along fifth avenue in the Flatiron during lunch time, and honestly, I kind of feel sorry for them. So I get a little annoyed and really have to walk away when I find out that some of my colleagues do not add a tip for their delivery people (ugh), or they whine endlessly when their delivered food is even just 15 minutes late.

While I realize that eating later than you’d originally planned isn’t ideal, especially when you are in back-to-back meetings and feel really swamped at your fancy tech company, realize how lucky and privileged you are to a) get a free lunch paid for by your employer and b) get it delivered to you, every single work day. I bet that delivery guy who had to juggle a dozen orders and is on a tight time delivery schedule doesn’t have that luxury. And frankly, it’s probably not his fault that your food is late; it could be the kitchen’s fault. It could be bad traffic. So don’t take it out on him. He probably needs his tips more than you need your on-time lunch, or your free lunch, or, in this case, both.

There are rich people, and then, there are the super rich of the rich — you know, these are the kind of people who just randomly decide that they want to drop $10,000 for a Birkin handbag or $117 million for a Monet or Renoir painting, and it’s really no big deal for them. We got a taste of what that looks like yesterday afternoon, when we attended a divorce auction for an extremely wealthy couple who is in the midst of divorce proceedings. Chris found a flier in our mailbox advertising that the divorce auction would be held at the JW Marriott yesterday afternoon, and in addition to an endless collection of diamonds, rubies, sapphires, and emeralds, we’d also be getting the ability to bid on authentic fine art, from artists ranging from Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, and Van Gogh, to Miro and Peter Max. This was completely insane to me.

The flier stated that all of these items were simply in storage for the longest time, so not even a private family was actively enjoying them in their own home. This completely infuriated me. In my opinion, paintings by artists as famous and talented as Monet or Van Gogh truly need to be made public; why should only one person or a small circle of people be able to enjoy them? It just seems so selfish.

Oddly enough, the auction was not that large, and it was likely because we were in the middle of the summer period, when many of these “units” who would be bidding would likely be out sunning in the Hamptons or traveling to Europe for their summer vacations. Those leading the auction kept making statements making it very obvious that they were insulted at the prices being proposed for bidding. I couldn’t even believe it; an authentic Van Gogh went for only a few hundred dollars; a Camille Pissarro went for $7,500. It seemed almost like robbery. But hey, what a deal for the people who bid and won the auction on these!

We didn’t last very long; we left probably about an hour and a half into the auction. It wasn’t as exciting as I thought it would be, and I was hoping to see a bigger variety of works. Not to say that the collection was something to sneeze at; it just always shocks me, even though it shouldn’t, how much wealth some families have, and exactly how selfish they are with it.

Last night, Chris and I went to see the Broadway show What the Constitution Means to Me, which is a 2017 play by Heidi Shreck. It was first produced at a smaller theater downtown, and after gaining a lot of traction, opened in off-Broadway in 2018. And this year, the play made its Broadway premiere in the spring.

The general storyline of the play is a woman who reflects back on the speeches she gave as a teenager about the U.S. Constitution and then talks about how she feels about it now, both based on her own personal life experiences from her teen years to the present day, as well as regarding the experiences of women in her own family. She switches between her 15-year-old self and her current adult self several decades later.

The part that struck me the most was how she reflected that overall, the Constitution does not necessarily outline what is your right; it’s actually mostly there to outline what is not your right. And a large part of the Constitution is fully dedicated to the lack of legal protection for women, as she highlights the 2005 Supreme Court case of Castle Rock vs. Gonzalez. The Supreme Court, led by Antonin Scalia then, somehow incredulously ruled that “shall” does not mean “must,” as in, “law enforcement shall protect victims of domestic abuse. Jessica Gonzalez had gotten a restraining order from her then-husband, who then kidnapped their three daughters, shooting and killing all three of them to death. Gonzalez tried to sue the police for ignoring multiple reports of her husband’s abuse and kidnapping, but in the end, she was overruled.

This is the country we live in, huh? I knew it was bad, but I didn’t realize it was that awful, especially since this case just happened 14 years ago. That is in my lifetime.

The real cincher here was when she stated, “More American women have been killed by violent male partners in the last century than Americans have been killed in wars, including 9/11,” Schreck said in the show. “That is not the number of women who have been killed in this country; that is only the number of women who have been killed by the men who supposedly loved them.”

The entire theater went so silent that you probably could have heard someone drop a pin. I couldn’t even hear anyone breathing. The saddest thing about this statement was that I actually wondered a few years ago what the statistic was for the number of women who have died from domestic abuse, in light of learning about the 2015 Pulitzer Prize winning series written about violence against women in South Carolina. In the series, which I read in full, we learn that in South Carolina, abuse against pet dogs has a harsher and lengthier penalty than abuse against one’s wife. In other words, pets have more rights than women, yet women are human beings. Pets… are just animals.

This is the reality we live in… here in the 21st century, in what is supposed to be one of the most developed nations in the world. And no one seems to care or want to do anything about it.

Today, we went to Manhattan Chinatown for a massage, grocery shopping, and a quick early dinner before our show. Chris always makes fun of me because of how excited I get before our Chinatown treks. He knows that I love grocery shopping in Chinatown, and because he is who he is, he loves to poke fun at me endlessly about it.

What can I say? Lots of reasons exist to get excited about shopping in Chinatown for food: it’s the only place in Manhattan where I can reliably get a good selection of all the Asian vegetables I want (hello, morning glory/kong xin cai, gai lan, amaranth, among a dozen others, while Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s only recognize bok choy; where I can find the freshest in-season “exotic fruit” for a reasonable price (six mangoes for $5 in May? $3/pound for longans in July? $2/pound for rambutans in August? Sign me up!); where I can get freshly pressed and made rice noodles and tofu if I wanted (honestly, I rarely buy these… which I am a bit embarrassed to admit). In addition, once I finish buying all my fresh food, I can move onto things that I can stock up on and store, whether it’s fresh egg or wheat noodles for the next day’s dinner (or our freezer), 100% sesame seed paste, or the best brand of soy sauce available in the U.S. for a reasonable price ($1.95! for nearly 16 oz.!). And after all that, we can get a cheap, tasty, and filling meal at a local restaurant before heading home to fill our fridge and freezer. That’s a pretty productive trip!

While I love shopping in Chinatown here, it also makes me reminisce about all the delicious fresh food in markets we’ve visited in Asia, as well as the meals we ate that were always screaming with freshness. In Vietnam, every noodle dish we had was unmistakably made with freshly made rice noodles… never, ever from dried rice noodles that were reconstituted with water. You could just tell from the bite and the chew of the noodle between your teeth. Fresh herbs and raw vegetables were always neatly assembled and laid out with almost every meal, no fail. They looked as though they’d been just washed and picked. In China, all the dry noodle dishes we ate were prepared with just assembled and tossed sauces. And in Thailand, all the curries and dressings used for our salads were made in a mortar and pestle as soon as we finished ordering. Asia was the Land of the Fresh to me. If freshness is key in food to you, Asia is where it’s at.

Today, Chris and I met up with my friend, her husband, and a friend of hers visiting from out of town. My friend and her husband live in San Francisco, but because her friend visiting from Singapore was in the States but had never visited New York before, she decided to take her to New York for some sight-seeing. She recently got married, and she and her British husband are settled and living in Singapore, which is where she was born and raised. She talked about always wanting to live in a place like San Francisco or New York, but she felt like she was too old for that.

“That’s the kind of thing you do when you’re young,” she insisted. “My friends all did that before they got married and had kids. Now, I’m too old to move around and have that kind of fun life.”

So, what is she saying.. that because she’s in her mid-30s, any exciting life prospects in terms of living and exploring are all just dead? I told her that anyone is really capable of doing what they want to do, and that the real limit is the mind and not the age. It’s actually really fitting to discuss this since the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times have recently published articles with themes of “It’s never too late to start a brilliant career.” Oftentimes, when we think of really accomplished celebrities and minds, we forget that most of them didn’t start that path until they were in their mid 30s to 40s. Success and adventure aren’t always something just reserved for the young and eager. My former colleague and friend, who is married with a one-year-old daughter, just relocated from Amsterdam to Hong Kong. She said she doesn’t want to move back home to New York and that she’s not done exploring and living in other places. She’s 36, probably a similar age to my friend’s friend today.

You kind of get what you want out of life. When you arbitrarily set limits, you limit yourself. If you want to make something happen, you can make it happen — assuming you are relatively self sufficient and leading a comfortable life. It would be a different story if you were living paycheck to paycheck, inundated in student loan payments or needing to support and take care of aging parents who had no other form of help. I always get annoyed hearing people creating these artificial limits for themselves and not even realizing that they themselves are doing this. Society can say whatever it wants, but what you choose for yourself is just that – choosing for yourself. I suppose you need to differentiate that for yourself first, if you ever get there.

My mom has been getting pretty impatient with me, but she tries to hide it. Given she’s my mom and I’ve been in this mother-daughter relationship with her for 33.5 years now, I can always see through her, her facial expressions, her body language, her tone, her words, even over the phone. I always know what she’s thinking about, even if she never fully spits it out.

She’s not very pleased with me because when she asks me, “So, any news?” or “Is anything new?” or “Have anything exciting to share with me?”, I pretty much always respond no. What she really wants to hear is a) that I am pregnant, b) one of my good friends is pregnant, or c) one of my unmarried friends is finally either getting engaged or getting married.

She insists that she wants what is best for me and my friends, and that what is best for us is that we all get married and have children. She was in shock when I told her that one of my friends explicitly said she did not want children at all. “She’s making a mistake,” my mom said. “She will change her mind. Just give her some time. She will realize she wants children and then have them then.” That’s not really how it works, Mom, but I’m not saying anything to that because I don’t want to have this discussion with you.

If my mom had it her way, I would have gotten married by 25, had my first child by age 26, then had my second and third child by age 30 and been done with child bearing by then. That was 3.5 years ago, and since I don’t even have one child yet, I’m extremely, extremely behind the schedule my mom wants.

The greatest thing is that she doesn’t get to control my body or my reproductive organs, though. I will give her the “good news” when I’ve decided it’s okay for that. In the meantime, she can continue to wait and perhaps do something else more productive for herself.

A colleague and I took a walk in today’s blistering heat to get some iced matcha tea. He’s been pretty unhappy for the last 7-8 months and has been actively looking for a new role. He was telling me about his latest offer on the table, the trade offs he’d have to make if he accepted this job. He said he realized that although he complains about his current job and our company now, he really doesn’t have it so bad after all because there are so many horrible jobs and companies out there that are 100 times worse than where we are today.

What I also thought about while on our walk is that when colleagues leave, it’s always kind of the same pattern: you chat a lot when you work together. You take walks and go out for coffee and tea breaks, you text and Slack actively and enthusiastically while you are working together. And then, when that person leaves, he will invariably say he will keep in touch, we’ll be friends, we’ll still meet for coffee or lunch. It might happen once or twice after he leaves, but then it will trickle off, and you’ll be nothing more than Instagram or Facebook “friends” — loosely connected, faintly aware of each others’ lives based on what you share on social media, but really, nothing else. Of course, there are exceptions to this rule, but this is generally how it goes.

It’s kind of sad. In that sense, we’re all replaceable as colleagues, friends, confidantes. No one really matters that much personally, even when you might think for a second they do. That “bond” you shared will be replaced by another bond he will share with someone else in just a few months.