Category Archives: Hope

Vacationing with parents

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I was having an earl grey latte tonight with a friend in town for a conference, and she was telling me about her next work “conference” she needed to attend, which happens to be in Shanghai. Unless I’m listening to someone tell me that they are traveling internationally on business for a specific customer or pitch, or to train some new hires/open a new office, I generally hear “international work travel” and immediately think it’s bullshit. I have a friend who started a new job earlier this year, and immediately he was asked to travel “for work reasons” to Singapore, Indonesia, and Vietnam. When he came back, I point blank asked him how much “real” work or training he did given that this trip was less than a month into his new role. He sheepishly admitted that it was a vacation disguised as a work trip, but no one internally wanted to admit it.

Well, all power to these people. They get to travel on their company’s dime and enjoy themselves. If they have the opportunity, why not? But the conversation immediately went a little sour (or at least, in my head, it did) when she said that her mother was also coming along, too, and that they’d be spending a week traveling in China together. I physically felt dread in my limbs, and this wasn’t even me traveling with my own parents.

To add to this, a colleague I’m friendly with just got back from a six-day trip to London with her mother, and she said that she felt like coming back to work was actually a vacation because it meant she didn’t have to listen to her mother complain about all the food and how expensive everything was, nor did she have to pose at each tourist site and take 20-plus different photos of her mom.

Chris says I just attract “mama-whipped” people in my life. “What is wrong with you — you just like spending time with people who take their mothers on vacations, don’t enjoy themselves, then come back and complain to you about it all!” he claims.

Well, I don’t really look at it that way. Maybe I just attract people who want to create the ideal “mother-daughter” relationship with their moms, but it never ends up turning how they’d like it to be? Don’t we all aspire to some better state of being?

The way that I look at taking family vacations with your parents as an adult is — in an ideal world, it’s time spent enjoying a different place in the world as adults in a family. If the child is paying for it, it’s a way of saying, “Hey, Mom! I’m doing well enough so that I can not only afford to take myself on a vacation, but I can take you on a vacation, too! Now, you can be proud of me!”

…..

Okay. I just re-read that statement, and I realize it’s almost like the child is trying to prove herself. Or potentially give bragging rights to her parents so that the parents can come back from vacation and brag to friends and relatives about it… which we all know is definitely going to happen. I guess at the end of the day, deep down, no matter what background you come from, no matter what your relationship is like with your parents, every child wants her parents to be proud and happy for her. That is what this is really about.

 

 

My supportive love

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After sending out a reminder email last night to previous donors and friends from my Gmail list who have not yet donated this year and also sending out a very public message via our Team Slack channel, my inbox has received over a dozen new donation notifications in the last 24 hours. Chris has been closely tracking the progress of my fundraising drive as he does every year, and him being him, he is very competitive and has a lot of commentary about the other people who are “competing” against me for the top fundraiser spots in this year’s Manhattan Out of the Darkness walk. He’s unhappy about the fact that every year I’ve participated, all the people who are usually ahead of me in fundraising are a part of a team, which means that they have more power in numbers in terms of raising funds. So, with that logic, there should be a differentiation between “team” rankings vs. “individual” (that’s me) fundraising rankings, and they should not be grouped together and ranked. I kind of get this rationale, but at the same time, each team member of a team has his/her own page, and therefore they are responsible for their own numbers.

A real message of annoyance from my husband today:

“Bottom line …no. 1 isn’t a real individual fundraiser, …no. 2 as defined as 2 ppl, no. 3 is suspicious, and no. 5, I have said a lot already plus works for AFSP  … and all of them are teams. You win!!!”

I love my baby even when he’s being super cute and excessively competitive. My general response to all this is that at the end of the day, we’re all just trying to raise money for an important cause that often gets overlooked, so the rankings or the teams versus individuals don’t really mean that much to me. But my heart warms when he says combative things like this because he is always the most supportive and thus always wants me to win. I have the most supportive and loving spouse. Ed would be proud and grateful.

Donation reminders

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According to the AFSP website, sometimes it takes as many as five reminders to get people to donate to your chosen cause, so it encourages those who are fundraising not to be shy about sending reminder emails and messages. I always feel like they are a bit of a nuisance; if someone wanted to donate, then they would have just donated the first time around, right? But hey, people get caught into their everyday life, so maybe one or two reminders wouldn’t be a terrible thing.

And in my own personal experience, this advice is definitely accurate. The reminders do work: with my email outreach during the first round, I received 19 donations. With my second reminder email to those who did not already donate, I received 15 donations. And with my third (and final) reminder email I sent just tonight, I received one very generous donation (that was only 20 minutes ago). Maybe the reminders aren’t so terrible or annoying after all. Maybe we all could use a little nudge here and there.

The everyday things that will never happen

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I dreamt last night that Ed came to visit at this apartment. We strolled through Central Park and the streets of the Upper West Side together. He explored the apartment building, asked me random Ed-like questions he’d normally ask if he were around, and marveled at all our new appliances and how modern our apartment looks. It was like a real life event, except it wasn’t real life at all. It was a potentially normal, expected event.

There wasn’t anything unusual or momentous about this dream. Nothing dramatic happened, nothing out of the ordinary or tear-jerking was observed. The most depressing thing about this is that it will never happen in real life. I thought about this as I woke up this morning. Those everyday events that you get to share with people you love — introducing them to your home, your neighborhood, the city you live in — those experiences will never be shared between Ed and me because he just isn’t here anymore. That’s what made this dream so sad.

Dumpling Galaxy

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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.

Aging and painful body

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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.

 

 

the generosity of colleagues

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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.

Helping nonprofit customers

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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.

Racism justified then, racism justified now.

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Today, we started our holiday weekend in North Carolina by having a Southern biscuit sandwich breakfast and driving out to Greensboro, North Carolina, to visit the International Civil Rights Museum. Although the Little Rock Nine at Little Rock Central High School tends to be more well known and covered in American history courses around the country, the “A and T Four,” also known as the Greensboro Four, the four black activist students at North Carolina Agriculture and Technical University, is also a notable group: In February 1960, they protested segregation in the form of sitting at the “Whites Only” lunch counter at the local Woolworth’s, which ended up sparking a movement across the entire south that emulated this sit-in against “separate but equal” in the thousands. The museum provides a fully guided tour, and it is built where the old Woolworth’s with the lunch counter actually was. They preserved the lunch counter/diner just as it was back in 1960 when these sit-ins occurred. It reminded me of the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis that was preserved where MLK was assassinated by building it into the Lorraine Motel where he was shot and killed on his balcony in 1968.

Our guide, Dillon, did an incredible job recounting endless facts of the atrocities that happened during this period in our history and the Civil Rights Movement in general, and you could tell by the way he talked that he truly cared and was emotionally invested in social progress for all. He became the most choked up recounting the lynching of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old black boy who came from Chicago (non-segregated) down to Mississippi (obviously segregated) in 1955 to visit relatives and was kidnapped, mutilated, shot and killed, and then dumped with weights attached to him into a local river. All of this happened to him simply because he had a debated interaction with a white woman, who ended up accusing him of touching and flirting with her. This led to her husband and his half-brother kidnapping him and brutally murdering him. They said that Emmett didn’t understand the social and racial ‘caste’ system of the South.

Emmett’s name is memorable because he came up many times during history courses, and his sad, gruesome story is at every major civil rights museum and monument across this country, including the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, the Brown vs. Board of Education historic site, the Rosa Parks Museum, among others, that we’ve visited. His mother, so enraged and distraught at the injustices her young son faced, chose to have an open-casket ceremony so that the world could see with their own eyes what the white racist South had done to her poor son. This is not something anyone would wish on anyone, even those they hated.

Not only did those two white men get away with the lynching, they publicly said while being recorded that they did not think they did anything wrong. They were fully acquitted. Nothing ever happened to the white female accuser, even though she very recently admitted (because she’s still alive) that she actually lied during her testimony and what she said Emmett did never actually happened. Even though I’d heard and read about the story before, Dillon gave a far more detailed account of what happened, and it disgusted me when it suddenly hit me: I realized how similar this was to the false accusations that white people have today against black people that cause the police to accost, arrest, and even shoot and kill black people. These stories have become more and more reoccurring in the news in the last several years. A black owner of a popular hipster lemonade shop in San Francisco almost got arrested while opening the doors of his own business one morning because a white person called the police, saying that it looked like some black man was breaking and entering into the shop. A white man prank called 911 to lie and say that a black man was pointing a rifle at people while walking through Walmart in Ohio; the police showed up and shot innocent John Crawford, simply because he was a black man. Crawford is now dead, and his family is trying to get justice and is failing to get the peace that they deserve. And there’s also the case that seemed the most senseless to me in Philadelphia when a white female worker calls 911 because of two black men in the store who haven’t bought anything. These two men got arrested for “trespassing,” and Starbucks in the end had to mutually agree to let that white female worker go, and publicly apologize to the world for how stupid and short-sighted they had been in this occurrence.

All of these stories are the modern day 2018 versions of the Emmett Till lynching. When I hear these stories, I think it’s just the more “acceptable” and “nuanced” way to be racist and discriminate now. No one wants to acknowledge it, especially our Republican and white supremacist “friends.” But funnily enough, when I did a Google search for “Emmett Till” after we left Greensboro, this July 2018 Huffington Post article entitled, “The Word of a White Woman Can Still Get Black People Killed,” is one of the first results that shows up, which hits the nail on the head of all the feelings I had leaving the museum.

These echos, these parallels, these evolved iterations of discrimination, these are just one of a myriad of reasons that history is so important. You’re supposed to understand the past to learn what’s worked, what hasn’t, and not to repeat the horrors of the people before us. If you want to ignore the past, you will just be more narrow-minded for it in disregarding the atrocities of the past, and instead, you will continue these atrocities into the future and blindly believe we live in a new, different world. The world is certainly getting better, but that’s because of the people who are actively working to create progress and social justice for all, not the ones who are just sitting around denying anything is wrong to begin with.

But you know what also made me sad visiting a museum like this? In the same way with really well written, balanced pieces of everything our country debates about, from gun control to healthcare to gender and race-based discrimination to immigration, the people who would truly benefit from learning all of this will likely never come. Ever. And that is really depressing to me.

Going solo at a wedding

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A colleague and I were talking about the concept of going solo to a wedding. He told me  that he hates going to weddings since he’s almost always attended without a plus-one, and as an introvert, he hates socializing with people he doesn’t know. People tend to pair up at these events, and as someone who goes without being paired up, he feels like the weird outlier. Weddings make him want to go to the corner of the room and fall asleep.

I am actually quite the opposite in mindset. I’ve gone to a lot of weddings with a date, but I’ve also attended quite a number without a plus-one and have been perfectly fine; in fact, at the weddings I’ve attended by myself, I always had a really notable and memorable time. At the last wedding I went to alone in March 2017, I had so many conversations with everyone from the grandfather of the bride to all the friends in attendance of the bride that I still thought about them days after I left. I consider myself more of an introvert than an extrovert; maybe a “closeted” introvert because most of my colleagues would never label me an introvert since I’m generally fairly social and friendly with everyone, especially new people. Being social at events like weddings is always a gamble, especially if you don’t know many people in attendance, but the worst thing that will happen is that the person you speak with will bore you to tears for a few minutes (or however long you allow), so then you just move on to the next person. It’s not so bad, really. If you do have a plus-one and you’re having a separate conversation that isn’t going so well, you can end it and latch onto whatever conversation your plus-one is having. That definitely can act as a crutch in times when you do not feel like being the screaming extrovert.

Today, I had a number of really interesting conversations with friends and relatives of the groom, and even had a chance to catch up with some of the groom and bride’s friends who I’ve previously met. I went a lot later than I thought I would and really enjoyed myself. And even if Chris had come with me, it’s not like we’d be glued at the hip to each other; we tend to be fairly independent people and have our own conversations at social events unless it becomes relevant to include one another due to where we are standing or the topic at hand. I’ve always loathed couples like that, anyway.

When chatting with friends and family of the groom today, it was so obvious how loved he is by the people in his life. And it was even more obvious how much he loved all of them, including me. He and the bride love food, culture, travel, and of course, the people in their lives, and that was pretty much everywhere as a theme of their wedding, being here in diverse and beautiful Vancouver, having local and sustainable foods and even ice cream on their reception menu, ensuring transportation is provided to and from the wedding ceremony and constantly checking in with people personally to ensure everyone has arrived safely (when you’re the groom!), and even providing the most thoughtful wedding favors in the form of local and organic maple syrup (because who leaves Canada without bringing home maple syrup?), a Canadian airplane magnet, and even a compass with their initials on it — all wrapped in a little drawstring patch with a map of North and South America.

When they first met, they bonded over their shared passion for films. So their wedding ceremony was actually full of famous movie quotes of films that they enjoy. It was so great to see their personalities and passions come through everywhere. They wrote their own vows, short and sweet. Surprisingly, this is the only wedding I’ve been to, well, other than my own, where the couple wrote their own vows.

Instead of table names, they went with photos of significant people who had passed on in their lives who could not be there to share in their wedding day; when they described this, I immediately started tearing up, especially knowing how close Adam was to his stepfather, who passed away just a month before Ed did. He is someone I have heard many things about from my friend, especially that he was likely the most intelligent person he’d ever known in his life; I was actually seated at that table. He was also very close to his biological father, who had passed many years before, who was represented by another table. It’s the personal touches of a wedding that always get me… assuming they are done.

During the MC’s speaking moments here and there, he noted that the bride is actually not a stereotypical “bridezilla” at all, and that on the contrary, she’s been extremely calm and collected throughout the wedding planning process. It is actually the groom that has been his own version of a “groomzilla,” obsessing over the little details and all the possible things that could go wrong, even as the wedding was happening today, even the choice of words coming out of the MC’s mouth, which were quite comical and borderline questionable (funny to me, though) at times. It is certainly true of the friend I know, but I know he does it out of love. He knows people are flying from around the country and the world who normally do not do a lot of travel, and so he wants to know that they all feel like he’s provided them a wedding that was worth traveling all this way for. It’s part of how he shows he loves the people in his life, by obsessing over whether everyone else is having a good time and enjoying this experience he has provided. His amount of care and generosity truly knows no bounds. I felt very grateful to be a part of this day for him and his new wife.