Growing up, I always look back on my childhood as though I was waiting for people to die. That sounds really odd, but until my late twenties, I could truly say that I had been to more funerals than weddings. I was aware from a very young age that death was inevitable and could happen at any time to any of us. I still remember when I first learned this when I was about four years old, and I would cry myself to sleep thinking that one day, I’d lose my parents and Ed. I was absolutely petrified.

When I was four, I just didn’t think that I’d lose Ed as early as I did.

I know some people and some cultures try to be positive. They say that in some cultures, supposedly there is no real word for “grief.” I guess I have been brainwashed because this is the only country where I’ve ever lived, but I have a hard time understanding how you could not cry at the idea of someone you love dying. The idea of going to a funeral and not seeing anyone cry is so odd to me. I’m too American.

I thought about this today as we had dinner at an obscure Japanese restaurant that was situated on Mulberry Street, right in between two funeral homes. It’s so strange to see funeral homes in Manhattan, this teeny tiny island that somehow manages to squeeze over 1.66 million people into it, a place where it’s common to meet people who not only do not own a car, but have never even driven one. Growing up and attending funerals, I’d always see a caravan of cars following a hearse that transported the casket in preparation for burial, cremation, or whatever the last resting place was. But here, when I see “No Parking – Funeral” signs, the small ones in front of funeral homes, I think, Who is going to park there anyway? Who even has a car to park when they attend a funeral here? Then, I think.. when a burial happens, how do people even get there? Do they take the subway? Or nowadays, do they take an Uber or a Lyft? I wonder how often Uber and Lyft drivers get requests to or from a funeral home or cemetery.

Funeral logistics just seem so different here to what I grew up with in San Francisco. I hope I don’t get to have first hand experience of what it’s like here anytime soon.

Tonight, we went to Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater to see Freaknomics Radio Live with Stephen Dubner, with the specific live journalism game show “Tell me Something I Don’t Know.” About five pre-selected contestants come on stage before a live audience and try to wow Stephen and his co-hosting guest with a fascinating fact on a specific topic. Then, a live fact-checker ensures that this is real. The audience (that’s us) gets to vote for the winner.

This was especially exciting because I’ve read three of the Freaknomics books that Dubner has cowritten, and I regularly listen to his Freakonomics podcast. I love that he has made economics something that is tangible to everyday people who are not obsessed academics or intense mathematicians, especially as I was an economics major myself.

And tonight’s theme was food! It’s as though they knew I was coming. Dubner’s co-host tonight was the Food TV personality and celebrity chef Alex Guarnaschelli. I had previously watched her on the food competition show Chopped, but I never actually enjoyed her as a judge. To me, she always came off as a bit snobby, stand-off-ish, as though she knew everything about food and all the possible flavor combinations that could work as though she were a food god (then again, I suppose a lot of professional chefs are like this…). But tonight during Tell Me Something I Don’t Know, I actually found her a bit more down-to-earth. She was definitely trying to be funny and charismatic and many times succeeded, but she just seemed more relaxed and natural on this show. Chris likes to make fun of me and say that my mind was really changed about her when she was asked what she believed to be the best cuisine in the world, and she responded Chinese, particularly noting that although both her parents are Italian, her parents both were highly fascinated by Chinese cooking and oftentimes made the family Cantonese and Sichuanese dishes. I screamed out “Yeah!” quite loudly, which took Dubner and Guarnaschelli off guard and they stopped to make some side comments.

If they end up not editing that out in the final podcast they will air in December, then this will be my little moment of fame when you can hear my voice in a publicly available podcast that is widely listened to by thousands, if not millions of people – moment of joy here.

In the last couple of months, we’ve been noticing that there’s been a cigarette smell in our apartment hallway. Sometimes it’s faint, other times it’s strong, but regardless, it’s still annoying. We’re technically not in a non-smoking building, so residents are actually allowed to spoke in their units with the condition that the smell cannot leave their apartment. Well, this is New York City, and it’s not like people are stuffing odor blockers under their doors, so there’s really very little you can do to prevent those types of smells from not leaving your apartment unless you open your window and smoke out of it… and who is really going to be that considerate and do that anywhere?

So I got home early today after a customer onsite meeting nearby, and our handyman came by to ask me some questions about the cigarette smell. In a nutshell, our building manager had narrowed it down to the new tenant at the opposite end of our floor (there are only six units per floor in our building), but she couldn’t legally say that in an email to me, so she asked our handyman to have a chat with me about it today and to keep an eye (well, a nose, really) out for it.

I guess this goes to show that she cannot use “guilty until proven innocent” in writing as her approach, huh? Doesn’t that sound familiar with our current events today…

Autumn coming to New York is also a reminder to us that Open House New York has arrived, which is a weekend in New York City where public spaces that are usually closed off to the general public, as well as private spaces like notable apartments and office spaces with interesting architectural elements, open up for viewing. When we’ve been here and haven’t been occupied with other activities, we’ve always made a point of seeing a few sites. This year, one of the sites we visited was the Westbeth Artists’ Housing in the West Village, which has been providing subsidized housing for artists since the early 1970s (and, as my research revealed, was also a site where the Manhattan Project was worked on during World War II). As of 2011, the highest amount of rent any one tenant was paying was $1,700/month, and for many decades, a wait list has existed for artists to get admitted into the building.

In a city as expensive as New York, it is comforting to know that housing opportunities like this exist to allow for creativity and the arts to continue. Westbeth is known to be the largest federally subsidized collection of apartment buildings in the entire country. And as an added bonus, family who live here are allowed to pass their apartments down to their children and future generations.

I occasionally wonder what my life would have been like if I had taken the less “practical” route. But this housing opportunity allows the children of artists to take the chances that I was too scared of ever taking.

Tonight, we saw a show with a short run called All Because of Infidelity. The show is about four different couples at different life and relationship stages, and all are either going through or have gone through periods of infidelity that they are forced to deal with. One couple is engaged and planning to get married in six months, but the woman is having an affair with another man at work that her fiancé is unaware of. The second couple has been married over 40 years, and during every wedding anniversary, they run through a “recap” of their married life together, which also touches upon his infidelity early on, as well as hers… though she received his “consent” to sleep with this other man to make sure they were both “even.” The third couple is made up of two gay men, one of whom appears to have a sexual addiction and has multiple sex partners on the internet, whereas his husband walks in on the internet relationships and is horrified, just wanting a happy married monogamous life. Finally, the fourth couple is in couples’ therapy after the man cheats on his girlfriend with a colleague (they may be in therapy, but contrary to what the man has said, his affair is still ongoing and he has zero plans to end it).

Infidelity is one of those things that everyone seems to have strong opinions about. But as I have reflected over many years, I don’t really think it’s the end of the world. Human beings weren’t really designed to be monogamous, otherwise why would so many people cheat? People are human; they get bored. They crave newness, they want different experiences. Being monogamous really isn’t for everyone, and I dislike the judgment that people get for cheating. Maybe the relationship wasn’t right in the first place. Over time, people evolve, and not always together. I don’t think our ancestors ever thought that we’d be living on this earth on average for about 79-82 years. Assuming you get married at age 30, that means that you’d be monogamous with one single person for 50+ years; that’s a LONG time to be in a relationship with just one person. Infidelity, if anything, is just a sign that perhaps the open communication in a relationship that may be desired is not being met. Monogamy is a social construct that only works if the two people in question are committed to making it work.

A friend once naively commented about people who cheat, “I don’t have time for that type of thing (cheating), and neither would the person I’d be with. Life is busy, and there’s too much to do to have time to mess around.”

It’s funny the judgments you hear people come up with… because cheating can be fun and exhilarating, that’s another way of saying, “I don’t have time for fun.”

I was taking a break and scrolling through my Instagram feed today when this Rupi Kaur post came up:

yesterday

when i woke up

the sun fell to the ground and rolled away

flowers beheaded themselves

all that’s left alive here is me

and i barely feel like living

depression is a shadow living inside me

We always say that it takes a village to raise a child. It also takes a village to help someone out of their depression, to help them separate the idea that ending pain does not necessarily mean s/he needs to end his/her life. The saddest part about that statement, though, is that even when people do show obvious signs they are struggling, the people who should care and give more attention do not. And then, it is suddenly too late, and those remaining have all these regrets of thoughts of what they could have done — should’ve could’ve would’ve. 

The laziness and inaction of human beings never ceases to anger me. That applies to voting, too, in today’s heated political climate.

The funniest thing about today’s day and age with social media is that people can “know” you and ongoing details of your life without ever having met you. It’s almost like in some ways, you are both celebrities to each other, but when you finally do meet in person, it’s as though you’ve really known each other this whole time. That happened when Chris suggested I meet him at a bar in midtown after work today, and lo and behold, there he was, having drinks with one of his direct reports who is living in Chicago, but who I’ve known of and who has known me pretty much as long as she’s been at the same company as Chris. We both follow each other on Instagram; she “friended” me on Facebook years ago, and has even donated to my AFSP fundraising drive. She even comments on my Instagram photos and occasionally sends me private messages through it. We chatted over drinks tonight, and she actually did not feel like a stranger at all to me.

There are certainly many evils to social media, but I can say that I am still on it and still feel like I benefit from its existence. These are some of the fun moments that happen as a result of it.

I was disappointed a few weeks ago when I received a notification that my primary care doctor, who I’ve been seeing for the last two years, had stopped accepting my current company’s health insurance. In this city, it’s one of the most aggravating and trying experiences to find the right doctor for anything. Her assistant said she’d happily see me as an “out-of-network” provider, but I immediately declined. My company is paying enough for health insurance for me; why should I have to give any doctor even more money out of pocket?! No one is that good in this crappy American healthcare system where we are constantly getting gouged left and right.

So, I was relieved when I called my gynecologist’s office today to find out that they have no changes in the insurances they accept and that I could still come in for a visit “in-network.” Well, there was a clarifying question.

Me: Does Dr. XXXX accept Blue Cross Blue Shield as in-network?

Assistant: Is it Blue Cross Blue Shield through your employer?

Me: Yes.

Assistant: Then great! We certainly do accept them.

Hmmm. What could this be about — the healthcare exchange through the Affordable Care Act…? We cannot even have those who are getting their own health insurance covered in the same way that we are covered because we have the luxury of having healthcare through our employers, whereas those others will just constantly get rejected left and right? This stupid healthcare system makes me more and more mad every single time I read an article about it or have a phone conversation with a provider like this. This should not be our normal.

A former colleague who was let go from my current company and I got together tonight for happy hour drinks. Around the time he got let go last year, his romantic relationship of over five years also ended shortly before that, so it was a massive double whammy in life for him. Although I knew that he had experienced a breakup around that time, I had no idea of the details behind it, or that they were together for such a long time. He revealed all this to me and what a shock it was tonight. I felt pretty terrible; I don’t even know how I’d react if I lost my job and my life partner at the same time. It would almost feel like a complete life failure in some ways to know that two such significant things came to a halting end all at once.

He said that although he had some really low moments over the last year, some much darker than others, when he read stories like the one about my brother in my fundraising drive message, it was like a reality check to him that his life really wasn’t so bad, that he actually had a lot of good things going for him, and that a lot of things made him happy. It made him happy to go out and run, smell fresh air, hike in nature, and be around his good friends. He had it really good, he concluded. Stories like my brother’s, as tragic as it sounds, gave him perspective. He eventually got a new job, and he’s been dating occasionally here and there to see what else could be out there for him. He seems to be taking control of his life as opposed to allowing his life to control him. I felt happy for him hearing this.

I do hope that when people read the story about Ed that it does give them some perspective. There’s a big difference between ending pain and ending life. I only wish Ed had been able to see that.