My work friend has been in town visiting family from Amsterdam, so I agreed to meet her for dinner at Dumpling Galaxy in Flushing tonight. I’d had this on my Yelp bookmarks list forever and had been dying to come for a long time, but I was never able to make it work until today. Dumpling Galaxy is pretty much any dumpling lover’s dream: the biggest variety of dumplings you could possibly think of, all on a single menu. And if for whatever reason you don’t want dumplings, they have a pretty extensive Chinese menu that is supposed to be delicious outside of the dumpling section. This place certainly met expectations; my favorites were the lamb and green squash dumplings and the cod and fish roe dumplings.

I make a lot of judgments about people when it comes to food. One of the potentially worst ones is that there’s a high correlation between extremely picky eaters and people who are racist. Some of the other ones are… if you’re not willing to try new foods, you’re probably just a really boring human being. If you hate all Asian food, you must be a horrible (and racist) person. If you repel any and all spice… well, I just don’t want to hang out with you. If you don’t eat sweets, you must not be a very sweet person. But another one I want to add to the list is… if you don’t like dumplings, you probably cannot be trusted. Who doesn’t like some incredibly flavorful filling stuffed into a little dough, then boiled, steamed, or fried?

The New York Times food critic who came to Dumpling Galaxy said that a single bite of a dumpling from this place had more flavor than a large percentage of full meals in his entire life. That — that is how life changing a single dumpling can be.

Chris left for San Francisco for Dreamforce rehearsals early this morning, so I have the weekend to myself. I began what was supposed to be a productive Saturday by hitting the gym. While doing tabata exercises with my Aaptiv app, I was doing hinged rows when suddenly I stood up and immediately felt a twinge in my lower back. A sharp pain ensued any time I moved.

You’ve got to be kidding me, I was thinking in my head. My hamstring literally just got to 100 percent last week, and I started running again after nearly two months… and now my lower back is in pain?! 

I laid on the mat for a few minutes, contemplating my aging body and why all these injuries are happening to me one after another. How bad is this going to be, anyway?

Well, it wasn’t good. I went downtown to meet a friend for lunch, and every time I stood up or sat down, I experienced what felt like a stabbing pain in my lower back. I had to buy groceries, but there was no way I was going to carry them back on my own. So my friend graciously carried my shopping basket around and carried all my groceries home for me. It’s a good thing he lives so close to me.

All the signs of age are just staring me in the face. When I was lying on the mat in the gym this morning, I wondered if Ed ever experienced issues like this while at karate and just never told me. He always hid things from me because he didn’t want me to worry.

And to think that next year, I will turn 33, the same age Ed was when he died. How the hell can we possibly be the same age? This is just so wrong.

This is the fifth year that I’m fundraising for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention’s Out of the Darkness walks. Each year I do this again and again, I start it feeling cynical. Does anyone really care what I’m doing, or what my story is and how it’s evolved? Is it just a one stop donation, and then people forget about it in their everyday lives? What is actionable from this other than giving money to someone’s fundraising drive whose story you found touching?

I struggled with writing a story this year. I would start, stop, edit, delete, start again, stop, get annoyed, then delete everything. I wondered who would donate again. I wondered of the colleagues I’ve met in the last year, or gotten closer to, if they would donate. I wondered what they were thinking when they read my message.

I actually received quite a number of very touching, heartfelt messages from colleagues this year in the last couple days about my story and my fundraising drive. I’ve also received a lot of extremely generous contributions. I’ve been responding to each of them one by one, but the one I was definitely not expecting was from our CEO. He shared with me that he has compartmentalized his own family experience with suicide from over 45 years ago, and still doesn’t talk about it, but that he admired my ability to be so open about it to help others. He said he’s only shared this with four other people in his entire life. He also donated $1,000 to my fundraising drive today to support me. I was speechless. No one has ever donated that much to my fundraising drive, ever. And he barely even knows me.

Statistics show that people are more likely to donate to a fundraiser if they know the person who is leading the fundraiser. They’re more likely to donate more if they are closer to the person. This level of generosity was not part of these statistics.

I ended today feeling hopeful. People really do care more than I give them credit for. My cynicism is slowly shaking.

I work at a company that wants to democratize decision making via “digital experience optimization.” In other words, we’ve created a technology that allows businesses to do online testing and use data to drive their decision making. As we’ve grown and seek to become viewed as a more enterprise-focused business, what unfortunately also happens is that customers who are smaller and, well, pay us less money, tend to fall to the wayside in terms of love and attention they get. Sadly, this has affected customers in our nonprofit sector, who by definition are time and resource-strapped, but they really need someone to guide them in the right direction.

So I got tapped by our nonprofit/charitable giving lead to see if I could help some of these customers by reaching out to see what stage of testing maturity they are at, and what assistance we could provide them to be successful. The hardest thing with working with these customers is figuring out if they even want to be helped; as with any person, people can only be helped if they want to be helped. We cannot force things upon them. Now, what does that sound like?

It’s really annoying when customer frustrations remind you of the frustrations you have in your personal life with your own family.

I just finished reading one of the most gripping fiction novels I’ve read in a long time, Cutting for Stone. I’ve always been an avid reader, but with current events/daily news, podcasts, and food blogs and publications, sometimes it becomes a challenges to juggle all the content out there that I want to read. The amount of information to consume can be very overwhelming, so I’ve made a goal to read at least one book per month. Although I’ve been leaning more towards nonfiction (I suppose it’s in an attempt to better understand the world around me and how people think and why), I do still crave fiction and how imaginative it can be. I like the feeling of being transported into another life, another reality, even if it’s only temporary.

This book came recommended to me in March 2017 by my friend’s grandpa. I was in Arizona for her wedding, and during her reception, I had over an hour-long conversation with her grandpa, who was a retired heart surgeon. Being a Jewish heart surgeon in a red state, he certainly had a lot of opinions and perspectives that we discussed. It was a very intellectually stimulating conversation, as I learned so much that I hadn’t before just by speaking with him. He truly was as great as my friend always said he was, and so open about sharing. During this conversation, when he shared with me how passionate he was about treating patients with empathy and care, he told me the book that he strongly recommended I read to understand a doctor’s perspective, what pulled him into medicine and being a surgeon, and how strongly he felt about making a patient feel cared for and respected during treatment, and that book was this one. I immediately noted it down on my phone and finally got to it this month, and I have zero regrets.

The general synopsis of the book is this (there’s no reason for me to summarize it if the publisher already does it so well):

“Marion and Shiva Stone are twin brothers born of a secret union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon. Orphaned by their mother’s death and their father’s disappearance, bound together by a preternatural connection and a shared fascination with medicine, the twins come of age as Ethiopia hovers on the brink of revolution.

Moving from Addis Ababa to New York City and back again, Cutting for Stone is an unforgettable story of love and betrayal, medicine and ordinary miracles–and two brothers whose fates are forever intertwined.”

It’s a complex story that combines familial ties and drama, politics, religion, medicine, and love in a way that I never really thought about before. It details disease and medical treatment and surgery only in a way that a doctor could (the author is also a doctor and professor of medicine), but even as someone who knows very little about the study of medicine, I actually found these detailed explanations extremely interesting. And the story really draws you in after a slow start. The bond between the two twins is so strong that as they were conjoined twins at birth with their head connected, throughout their childhood together, and even as adults in troubled times, they found solace in sleeping together with their heads touching. Towards the end of the book, with all the tragedies and deaths that occurred, I found myself in tears thinking about their sibling love for one another. I know I truly enjoyed a book when I’m sad that I’ve finished it.

The power of sibling love. It’s like what they say in the book: it can be so strong that when one sibling dies, it’s as though something in the surviving sibling has died, as well.

These are a few of the quotes that really stood out in the book to me:

From the Middle East folktale “Abu’s Slippers”: “The key to your happiness is to own your slippers, own who you are, own how you look, own your family, own the talents you have, and own the ones you don’t. If you keep saying your slippers aren’t yours, then you’ll die searching, you’ll die bitter, always feeling you were promised more. Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.”

“Life, too, is like that. You live it forward, but understand it backward. It is only when you stop and look to the rear that you see the corpse caught under your wheel.”

“Wasn’t that the definition of home? Not where you are from, but where you are wanted?”

“We are all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We’ll leave much unfinished for the next generation.”

In another sampling of “Yvonne remembers her dreams” again, last night, I dreamt that I was standing in a music studio with Brian Littrell, the lead (or who I considered the “lead”) singer of the Backstreet Boys, and we were discussing the poet Billy Collins’s poem “Dancing Toward Bethlehem.” I’ve recently started re-reading poems that I enjoyed back in high school and college for nostalgia’s sake, and also because I’ve been reading the more modern poetry of Rupi Kaur. This was a very odd discussion, though, because we were exploring how to dissect and potentially rearrange this poem to make it into a song. I have no ear for anything, but Brian was attempting to make certain lines of the poem into a chorus and hum tunes for what he thought was fitting, while I was trying to figure out which parts of the poem would be good for a chorus and/or a bridge.

The strangest part of this entire dialogue and exchange was that we never once took our eyes off each other’s eyes. It was as though we had the poem memorized, and the only place our eyes could look towards was each others’.

I don’t even know what that means.

If you were interested, this is the magical poem we were deliberating over:

Dancing Toward Bethlehem

by Billy Collins

If there is only enough time in the final
minutes of the twentieth century for one last dance
I would like to be dancing it slowly with you,

say, in the ballroom of a seaside hotel.
My palm would press into the small of your back
as the past hundred years collapsed into a pile
of mirrors or buttons or frivolous shoes,

just as the floor of the nineteenth century gave way
and disappeared in a red cloud of brick dust.
There will be no time to order another drink
or worry about what was never said,

not with the orchestra sliding into the sea
and all our attention devoted to humming
whatever it was they were playing.