Today, after six days of preparing, I did a mock business review presentation in front of my team over video conference. My company takes onboarding very seriously, and they want to make sure that everyone is set up for success properly before delving into their actual jobs. This is my seventh week on the job, and I haven’t done any “real” work yet. But given that this presentation is basically a test to see what I know and how I present and speak in front of customers, it was a little nerve-racking for me. I’m usually not that nervous when it comes to having small group conversations with customers and informal chats since I was so used to it at my last job; presenting internally to your team who you know is full of smart (and very opinionated) people tends to seem more scary because you know they will call you out on something if you get it wrong.

I think overall, it went as well as it could have gone. My peers have been very supportive of me, and it’s a comforting feeling that I definitely don’t take for granted. I’m also in an environment now that is conducive to constructive feedback, so however harsh it may be, at least there’s actually a true feedback loop now that we need to acknowledge rather than my last situation, where only the positive (and fake) feedback was given and taken. It’s not great to tell someone they did a great job when in fact, they did a really crappy job.

You know how sometimes, people reminisce about high school and say it was the best time of their lives? Those people must seriously be losers. Why would you ever want to be back in a time when people were going through growth spurts, awkward photo poses, acne breakouts, and SATs?

Four episodes into 13 Reasons Why, and I am feeling so grateful that that period of my life is so far away. Also from my perspective, it was so tiring being around a population of about 80 percent grade-obsessed Chinese Americans, most of whom had no personalities and were generic, and probably still are generic and bland.

Two weeks have flown by quickly in San Francisco. Between new hire bootcamp, new hire bootcamp homework, 1:1 meetings, team meetings, lunch meetings, and family/friend/colleague get-togethers after work, there’s been very little leisurely time for me to plop myself on my bed and decompress, to think about everything that I’m trying to learn and what all this is going to mean.

On Friday early afternoon, I set aside 45 minutes to catch up with one of my counterparts on my team. What was originally supposed to be a meet-and-greet and work discussion ended up being something I wasn’t quite expecting. Life outside of work had been quite excruciating for her in the last year, and she told me she was dealing with a lot of family baggage… mainly because her mother had suddenly passed away last year (about a month and a half before her wedding), and she was handling all the inheritances and legal aspects of death now. It was an emotional chat, and she was especially upset because Mother’s Day was coming up today, and it made her really miss her mom and the great friendship they had.

“I just feel angry,” she said. “I don’t even know what I’m angry at… maybe the world? I get so pissed when people actually try to say that life is fair. It isn’t. It isn’t at all.” She reflected on the devastation of her mom’s decline and death, how hard it was for her to get through her wedding day, though it was beautiful and memorable, knowing that her mom was supposed to be there. I felt myself aching as she described all of this. Her mom even helped her pick out her wedding dress and went to most of her fittings.

So this became a segway into a discussion about whether life is fair or it (it fuckin’ is not at all), what death actually means, what death means to us who are still living, and how we keep going despite losing those so close to us. It’s one of the rawest discussions I’ve had in 45 minutes with someone I literally just met in my whole life. At her request, we even talked about Ed, and I shared with her general details about him and his passing. And because I’m a crappy colleague, I made her cry even more sharing this.

My colleague apologized for prying, but I told her what I tell anyone who wants to know more about Ed and his life; I actually am very comfortable discussing it (well, I still get knots and choke up, but I end up spitting it all out in the end) and want to discuss it with whomever wants to listen and truly understand. My qualm is whether others actually want to know and understand. So I never get upset or feel taken aback when people ask. When I hesitate, it’s really because I don’t know if people truly want to know or are hoping I will just say my brother died in a freak car accident or a drug overdose or something that sounds more “normal” given his young age. And she said she felt the same and was angry so many times when people she thought would care or at least ask never asked, or never even asked her how she was feeling or doing. This resonated so much with me.

The second thing this makes me think about is my own mom. I was tearing up when she told me about how her mom passed, and how she literally just missed her only child’s wedding day by a month and a half. I don’t even know how I would have gone through my wedding if the same thing had happened to me. I could feel hurt in my own body. My mom, like every mom in every child’s life, drives me crazy to no end. She worries way too much about me and about everything that doesn’t even need worrying. I even tell my mom this all the time: sometimes I feel like she searches for new things to worry about to constantly be in a state of worrying about me. She obsesses over trivial things that I think shouldn’t have so much attention or care. She distrusts everyone and thinks they are out to get her and me. She also insists on feeding me until I could potentially gain 100 pounds and doesn’t understand when I tell her I’m too full to eat anymore (“but you barely ate anything!” even after I have already eaten a full plate of food…). But that’s my mom. She does it all out of love, even though sometimes her level of love and compassion make me want to rip all my hair out, shake her, and yell, “please STOP!!”

“Dads are important, and I love my dad, but my mom… that’s different,” my colleague said between tears. “My mom was like my everything, and I hate to say this, but yeah, I do love my mom more. Maybe all daughters do — who knows. And sometimes I don’t know what I’m supposed to do without her. I just love her so much.”

That’s like me and my mom. And for a second, the fear I had from when I was only four years old came over me again — the awareness that inevitably one day, my mom would no longer be on this earth with me anymore, just as my colleague’s mom had passed and left her. One day, she’ll no longer continue to try stuffing food down my throat. She won’t be here to pack fresh fruit and Chinese zongzi into my carry-on luggage. She won’t call me and ask whether I’ve had enough sleep or eaten dinner yet. One day, I will feel the loneliness that all of us feel when one has lost the human being who gave birth to and physically brought her into this world.

That thought is absolutely terrifying to me.

On Tuesday night, I met with a friend for dinner, and then I joined her at Local Edition, a speakeasy-type bar afterwards, to hear some live jazz, and also see her and a group of her friends dance. The dance floor in the bar is quite small, but she told me that it attracts quite a large crowd most Tuesday nights, many of whom are in her dance class in Golden Gate Park. Their moves were so fun to watch depending on the songs being sung and played; it looked like a mix of both swing and jazz dance.

One of the women who joined our table to watch was really quiet, but we made some small talk that eventually became a lot more serious than I thought it would be. She was asking me a lot of curious questions about my marriage, for whatever reason fascinated that I’ve been married only a year. When she eventually revealed she was also married, but had two children, that was when the melancholy became clear all over her face: her marriage was at its end, and there was nothing either she or or husband could do to save it. Everything was great until they had kids; then they slowly became different people, started fighting more, and eventually stopped communicating about important things completely.

“Don’t ever stop communicating,” she said to me. “If there’s one thing you have to fight against, it’s the end of communication because that will literally be the end of everything, and there will be no going back.”

I also had an Uber driver give me advice the other day to not have children: “JUST DON’T DO IT! IT WILL RUIN YOUR MARRIAGE!”

Yep. Can’t wait to have kids now.

My mom’s best friend, who is an amazing gardener and cook, invited my mom and me to her house for dinner tonight. “Women only,” she told my mom. I have no idea why it was women only (well, except her husband, who is disabled and had to be there), but it was really the most awkward dinner party I’d ever walked into. We arrived at their house at around 6pm, and everyone else was already there — about eight other people. They were all sitting in chairs along the perimeter of the room, and no one was talking — no one. It was so quiet that I thought we were the first to arrive… until I realized I was walking into a room full of mutes.

These are all Jehovah’s Witnesses, and one of them is actually one of my best friend’s estranged cousins. Their family is divided because of how Jehovah’s Witnesses religion has infiltrated their family, so everyone is removed from each other. No one was talking. It was like everyone barely knew each other, or maybe they didn’t like each other. Either way, I have no idea what was wrong with them. They all had expressions of hesitation and borderline fear or intimidation on their faces. After about half an hour of extremely awkward small-talk, the room finally became more open and talkative when we started discussing Shake Shack, In N Out, and Five Guys burgers.

Clearly, food unites us all, even those of us who may belong to a cult. We even all left with freshly cut roses from her garden.

This is my fourth week at my new job, and my second week in San Francisco for work. I realize it’s still early, but I still feel very positive about everything. I’ve been having a lot of meetings with different people and many one-on-ones with people across departments, and among the things that have struck me are how interested people are in me outside of work. What do I like to do? Where I am originally from? Do I have siblings? This seems like such a simple thing, but this wasn’t quite the case at my last company. I found a colleague who is a fellow Seven Sisters alum from Barnard. We discussed at length our experiences going to a women’s college and how it’s affected our lives and perceptions of the world. One colleague originally from Kentucky is also in a mixed marriage, and we talked about family dynamics around culture and color. Another colleague who loves travel and I bonded over our travel in Japan and how delicious the fish and tofu there are. The backgrounds here are so diverse; there are actually a lot of non-white people who work here, people who are not American passport holders or citizens, people who have lived around the world who have worked in industries ranging from education, consulting, finance, nonprofit, and even government. People are freaking smart here – really smart, and not just at their jobs. There’s a lot of perspective here and a desire for healthy and friendly debate. We have a Slack channel that is 100% devoted to discussing diversity issues, and there’s been a lot of healthy debate on it, which I’ve also contributed to. That was not the world I knew in my last job at all. And there’s a level of support and a true desire to support across departments that has been made very clear to me. This is all foreign to me, but it’s at the same time very reassuring. I kind of feel at home and like I can really accept being here, and that I will be accepted.

Tonight, our small new hire bootcamp team left the office a bit early at 5 to enjoy a happy hour together at a nearby bar. Our group of ten has been animated from day 1, and I’ve honestly enjoyed all of their company in some different way. The interaction across the group has been very positive, and it’s been fun to hear about everyone’s different experiences, from where they’ve grown up and lived to their quirks to their prior work experiences.

Two of the new hires on our team had previously worked at Adobe. Adobe is a company that is somewhat related to me because not only did I work for a company that got acquired by them, but I also spent a solid two months interviewing there for a Marketing Cloud position earlier this year. Adobe is oftentimes labeled pejoratively as a “frankencloud,” or a “company of acquisitions” that lacks innovation within itself, which is why it is forced to buy out other companies to then create the facade that it bringing the outside innovation in. What was so amusing to me was how much hatred these two previous Adobe employees had for the company. It was as though our new hire/sales bootcamp was becoming new hire/sales/Hate on Adobe bootcamp.

At the happy hour, they were interested in seeing what my experience interviewing there was like, especially since it was so recent, and both of them had left that company years ago. After interviewing with two internal recruiters and then the hiring manager, all the interviews that followed were easy. They asked basic questions regarding management experience, multitasking, and industry knowledge that any person even half interested in this type of role should know how to answer. But the most intriguing interview (from an over-drinks-conversation perspective) is the very last one I had, and that was with a guy who worked remotely from home, had been with the company for about two years, and clearly did not care at all about the Adobe interview process. He said to me from the get-go when he called that he thinks typical interview questions are bullshit, he doesn’t like that you tend to always have to reiterate the same story to every single person you interview 5-10 times, and he figured that since I had made it this far (and after reviewing my resume), he knew I probably had the aptitude for the job, so what questions could he answer for me that would cut through the crap. “The 8-10 interviews this company makes you go through is so stupid and senseless, and just a waste of time,” the interviewer said to me laughing. “I hate it, I don’t like it, but I went through it. So I know what you’re going through, and I feel for you.”

When was the last time you had an interview like that? He told me about all the politics, the lack of integration of the companies they acquired, but at the end of the day, he was there to do good work, provide for his family, and have a work-life balance. That’s all he cared about. All the other stuff didn’t matter to him.

And at the end of the day, isn’t that what most of us what — a comfortable salary, flexibility and work-life balance, and something at least a bit interesting to work on every day that prevents early onsets of Alzheimer’s?