Category Archives: Hope

Signs

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I’m not superstitious. Black cats are just cats that are black. Opening an umbrella indoors in a Manhattan apartment is just a practical way to get your umbrella to dry and not grow mold; it’s not bad luck. I don’t care about the number 13. Actually, I’m lying. I like the number 13 because everyone else is so scared of it, and I am constantly amused when I go into new buildings and hotels to see that the floors jump from 12 to 14. If you wanted to rent me an apartment on the 13th floor of a luxury building in Flatiron or Union Square for super cheap just because it’s on the 13th floor and no one else will even consider it, hand it over to me. Go ahead.

But I’ll be honest. The company I’ve left was always slightly tainted to me because just days after accepting their job offer, my brother committed suicide. And two days after that, I flew home to prepare for his funeral arrangements and to mourn my lost brother, one whom I never even told I was switching jobs. I questioned everything about life when he died, including… was this job really the right decision? Could I be a coward and go back to the job I was currently on bereavement leave from and tell them to ignore my resignation? Was his suicide at this time a sign that this was going to be a terrible place for me? But I couldn’t go back; I just had to move forward.

And so forward I went. And I learned quite a bit — not so much about useful career skills, but more about politics, massively inflated egos, lack of ethics, politics, politics, and politics. Nepotism was quite heavy in there, too. It was like the world I was shielded from all this time. Ed’s probably like, “There you go! Have fun!”

Well, it’s all over now, Ed. Now, it’s another new start, one I also cannot share with you over the phone or in person. I will always associate this company with your death.

 

“Karaoke monster” friend

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Tonight, we went to meet my friend visiting from out of town at a karaoke bar. She’s a self-professed “karaoke monster” who Chris finds particularly interesting, especially after she’s had a drink or two. Why does Chris like her? In the past, he has said that she seems confident, she can talk about anything and seem comfortable, and she doesn’t shy away from controversial subjects. Chris doesn’t think this of a lot of my friends.

After a few hours of hanging out and having a lot of back and forth banter, I realized that I’ve never dated or been with anyone who really liked or got along with all my friends. I realize that’s a bit hard considering that I’ve never really had a single “group,” and so my friends are all very different from disparate parts of my life, but I’ve never had any partner readily accept all of them. One of my friends, who loves to co-mingle all friends as much as possible, once said that she doesn’t understand why people don’t “all just get along.” I think you only “all just get along” when you have no opinions and no desire to truly be yourself, because like Bill Maher says, if you are not offending anyone while saying what you think and being who you are, you must be a pretty dull person, or you are not truly being who you are at the core.

Grit

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I just started reading Angela Lee Duckworth’s book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, which is relevant especially today since during tonight’s mentoring session, we had a motivational speaker, Kinja Dixon, come in to discuss just that (though he doesn’t call it “grit”). Kinja reiterated the importance of hard work and repetition in order to achieve success, and perhaps more importantly for the kids in our program, he discussed how the definition of success is not the outcome, but the journey to get to what you think you may want.

Kinja exuded a lot of energy and was very engaging, and I’d imagine for the kids, he was even more so. All the kids asked questions and were paying attention, and even my mentee, who is oftentimes addicted to her smart phone (I’ve been slowly trying to get her to put that away the last few sessions), was fully paying attention and taking it all in. This specific mentoring group under Mentoring USA has probably been the best organized of the ones I’ve participated in. I think having a speaker like Kinja meet at-risk youth at schools and after-school programs across the country would be immensely beneficial in teaching the concepts of grit, perseverance, passion, and health. He is certainly living proof of the transformations we can make (in terms of physique change and mind change). We definitely cannot forget health as I was reminded during my pertussis bout in 2015; without health, we cannot have passion or any perseverance.

Open marriage

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Last week, I met a good friend, and we chatted about attractions felt to others while in serious relationships. She said that she and her partner were fairly open about these attractions, even though they aren’t considered conventional things to discuss or be open about. They even know a number of seemingly happy couples in “open” relationships where they either either together or married, and they and their partners sleep with other people. I’m not sure I could personally get on board with this (the mere idea of Chris having sex with someone else makes me want to claw someone’s face out), but I don’t see why society needs to judge other couples who are in agreement about this and are open about their external relationships from each other. What I’m genuinely curious about is whether the people who participate in open marriages are truly not jealous and are open to their partners being amorous and loving other people.

And then of course, Chris reminds me that the definition of marriage has evolved significantly over the last several decades. Now, for the first time ever, gay people can marry. People can divorce and be open about it, and there’s not as large of a stigma around it as before. I’m meeting more and more people in their late 20s and early 30s who are divorced, and I don’t really care. No one else does, either. Women are working outside of the home, and it’s considered completely normal and even expected, and with their higher level of earning power and independence from their husbands, they are leaving unhappy marriages when before, they didn’t have the option to do that, otherwise they’d be destitute and without a penny. Monogamy is really a religious idea that came from the Bible – devotion to your husband or wife until the end of your lives together. But I don’t think that many people think about that; we’ve been taught since we were children that we will get married and live happily ever after with one person one day.

The only very practical fear I’d have over open marriage is well, exposure to diseases. It wouldn’t be good to give chlamydia or gonorrhea to your married partner, would it? The other question I’d have is, what’s really my threshold for jealousy? You never really know until it’s truly tested in reality.

It’s been a while

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I woke up this weekend to look up at the framed photos of my brother on my wall, and I wondered why he hadn’t come to visit me in my dreams for a while. As Chris has noted, my dreams of him have evolved over the last few years. In the year after his death, we had all these scenes of him committing suicide in different ways, of fighting with my parents or telling me he was sorry that he left me. He insisted he still loved me and cared about me, but he had to leave. Gradually, the dreams have become better. Sometimes, he’d appear out of nowhere, and I’d run up to him and throw my arms around him, hugging him tightly and yelling how happy I was to see him again. Nowadays, in the last few months when I have seen him, we’re just doing ordinary things together: walking, talking, eating, watching TV. On Saturday night, I dreamt we were just sitting at a table while eating sesame noodles I made for us together. We said nothing to each other. All I heard was our chewing and the smacking of chopsticks against our bowls.

I’ll never quite be at peace with him gone, but as the years go by, I think I am more at peace with the fact that he is at peace, even if I cannot physically see him again.

Lady Gaga and Half Time

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I’ve never liked the Super Bowl, and I will never like football — at least, the American kind. But one thing I have enjoyed in recent years is the Super Bowl Half Time performance (clearly, I am not representative of the American populace). I was especially looking forward to Lady Gaga’s performance tonight after reading that the NFL explicitly told her not to say anything political during the show. I knew she’d do something to make it political, and that the conservatives would probably be too blind to catch it.

From beginning with “This Land is Your Land” to the order of the songs she sang, it was very clear she was saying she was against President Dipshit’s poorly thought out travel ban, as well as just him as POTUS in general. I loved seeing all the commentary on Facebook after the show, where users are moaning on about people trying to make a non-political performance political. Wake up, peeps.

Unknown words spoken

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Tonight’s mentoring session was not going well. Our group of mentors and mentees played a long game of Apples to Apples, but my mentee was not having it. She’s 18 years old, and like all the kids in this small program, she has specific medical and psychological conditions and is part of the foster care system. When the session began, she had just returned from the medical clinic because she was experiencing bad headaches, so she told me she didn’t want to participate today but wanted to sit and watch. Instead, she sat next to me and pulled out her smart phone, checking Facebook every five minutes and texting multiple friends. Well, I guess we weren’t bonding.

The last session, she was super quiet and hard to reach, which I expected would be the case. I tried to crack some jokes to soften her a little, and she eventually lightened up a bit (she was visibly on guard, as her shoulders were very tense). She gave me a hug before she left, and at the end of that session, I wondered if she just thought I was just some loser who was going to leave her like all the other people in her life had previously.

But after today’s session, the lead of the program told me otherwise. “I know she’s hard to crack, but she really is a sweet person,” our program coordinator told me. “After the last session, she actually texted me on her way home and told me how much she enjoyed talking to you and how amazing you were to her that day. She looks like she really wants to give you a chance. She’s the kind of person who, if she didn’t want to be here, she would just never come. And she came and wanted to be here today to see you.”

I smiled. Sometimes it’s the words unspoken that may never get shared that mean the most.

Another Christmas comes and goes

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It’s Christmas day in Melbourne, and also Chris’s 35th birthday. We’re all getting older slowly but surely, but at least we will be getting old and wrinkly together.

That’s the thing about Christmases, birthdays, and every significant day of every year forever; time is moving on, wrinkles are slowly developing, hair is greying, and health will gradually decline. Every year, Chris exceeds another year that Ed lived, and I gradually get closer to the last year that Ed lived.

Every December throughout the month, I have small day dreams of what life could have been like if Ed were healthy and happy, if we could spend Christmas together with Chris and his family. He wouldn’t have been deprived of his favorite holiday, he’d have a Christmas tree to decorate and admire as the lights flickered, and he’d get excited about all the delicious varieties of food on the Jacob family table.

And every December, I get angry thinking about everything my parents robbed my brother of, the unconditional love and parental support he never got to experience. And it makes me feel pain and anguish. Ed was just like every other simple child until he realized that he was never going to have good role models to look up to, and then he just decided to stop caring. Why should he care when he didn’t feel like he was cared for?

Christmas is supposed to be a happy time, a happy day. But it’s always marred for me because it was Ed’s favorite holiday, and he’ll never get to see it again.

I still think about visiting a medium to speak with him directly. It sounds ridiculous, but I think I will always be angry that he was taken away so soon. There’s too much left unsaid and undone.

2am work calls

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This work week has been absolute hell. Our team is way behind our revenue goal, and I’ve been taking client and conference calls at times anywhere between 1:30-7:30am, oftentimes waking up at 1:15 and staying up until 3, then waking up again at 5:30-6 for another set of calls. I cannot complain much about this given that I know I’m lucky to be able to work remotely at all, but of all the years I’ve come here and worked remotely, this year and this specific week have been the most brutal. I feel exhausted every day, and feel a little bad when I feel like dozing off when meeting with Chris’s family and friends. But, I am fortunate to have this choice to come here and not sacrifice my job.

My friend, who is doing her medical residency, is always so amazed every time I tell her I’m going on a trip or am spending 2.5 weeks in Australia and “working remotely.” As a doctor, she will never have the ability to work remotely. She will never have the flexibility I’ve been lucky enough to take advantage of. Hell, each year during her residency, she receives only two weeks of paid leave, and she needs to schedule them out almost a year in advance. In 2016, she took almost all her leave to attend our wedding and fly from Arkansas to Southern California, and that ultimately meant she missed two of her cousins’ weddings in California at other times of the year. It made me sad to know she made those sacrifices and missed out on those important family events, but I felt extremely touched she chose my wedding over her own blood relatives.

Attica

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Tonight, Chris’s parents took us to the renowned and highly respected restaurant Attica as our early Christmas present. Attica is on pretty much every list for the world’s best restaurants, and after dining here, it’s hard to see why it would not be on the list. Although Chris and I have been privileged enough to have dined at some of the best restaurants around the world and especially in New York City, the dining experience at Attica was in a world of its own. New York City’s Eleven Madison Park is probably the top overall dining experience I’ve ever had when it comes to uniqueness of local ingredients, presentation, and outstanding but unpretentious service, but Attica takes “local” to another level. The chef who has now bought the restaurant is originally from New Zealand, and he grew up on a farm where he was accustomed to eating things grown right in front of him. He wanted to bring that experience to his restaurant, and so he incorporates hyper-local ingredients that you literally can find only in Australia, such as wattle seed, bunya bunya nut, Santa Claus melon, plum pine (he’s obsessed with this, as it’s literally everywhere on the dinner and cocktail/mocktail menu), and anise myrtle, among other seafood, greens, and herbs.

Attica has its own back patio where the staff grows its own herbs and vegetables, and before dinner service, they snip the vegetables and greens minutes before being served. They also use the land at the Rippon Lea Estate across the street as grounds to grow fresh produce. And given that the air is cleaner and fresher here than it is in New York City, I’d trust this produce more than the produce being grown on rooftop gardens or back patios in Manhattan. Attica is one of the freshest dining experiences I’ve ever had, and with beautiful plating that is reminiscent of Eleven Madison Park. One of the dishes is kangaroo completed covered with thinly sliced purple carrot. We learned from one of the cooking shows featuring Attica that each of these dishes takes about five minutes for the kitchen staff to hand plate.

Another thing that was notable and unique about the restaurant was how diverse the kitchen staff is. With most kitchen staffs I’ve seen in New York, the people working in the front of house are primarily white, while the back of house/cooking staff are Latino/white. Here at Attica, the kitchen staff represents all colors and areas of the world. Accents were varied depending on the person, and it was refreshing to see this for the very first time in such a world-acclaimed restaurant.  Attica is representative of everything good and progressive about the world. Now, if only other famous restaurants could mimic this desire for diversity, as well as other major companies around the world.