I need to sleep well on weeknights and fight off this stupid insomnia, and I’m averse to trying anything like sleeping pills, or even herbal supplements that claim to be “all natural” like melatonin. The idea of using something external and putting it into me to get me to sleep just doesn’t seem right. I guess I got my aversion to medicine from my dad at a young age. He always used to tell us that our bodies are strong and capable, that with time, if something is wrong with us, our bodies know how to fight it off (well, this obviously doesn’t apply to things like AIDS or cancer, but I think we all know he means minor things like colds and sore throats).

As I was thinking of things to soothe me, I remembered a tiny bottle of lavender essential oil I’d purchased in December 2013 when we visited a small lavender farm in Akaroa Harbour, New Zealand. Just the thought of it made me smile and remember that place, which is one of the most gorgeous spots I’ve ever visited. I took the bottle out and dabbed some on my neck and wrists, and as I remembered how beautiful it was there and how much we enjoyed it, I somehow managed to drift off into an amazing sleep last night.

And then I accidentally hit my alarm off this morning instead of snoozing it, and I missed my window to go to the gym. Well, at least I slept well.

I often see “lifestyle architecture” articles, whether they are in my Facebook News Feed, or just under recommended articles in places like LinkedIn or different business and tech websites I visit. One thing that I saw today was about a “no complaining” campaign, which challenges those who participate to not complain about anything for an entire month.

How do they define a complaint? Is saying that it’s cold outside a complaint? No, the rules say. A complaint in this case would be, “It’s cold outside, and I hate this weather so much.” Complaining is negative, the campaign says, and listening to other people complaining is just as bad; second-hand complaining is like second-hand smoke. It’s still bad for you.

At its core, it seems like a great idea. It would make us more cognizant of our words, who we are saying them to, and what exactly we are saying. But then there’s this fuzzy line I imagine, especially when I think about my family. If I just report back to Chris or my friend that my uncle said this thing (which is clearly dumb) or that my mom did that thing (which is rooted in negativity and cannot be misinterpretted), is that complaining, or merely reporting the facts? What that ends up being is just a discussion of negativity, which I’m not sure I would characterize as “complaining.”

My family really does complicate everything, even when they don’t realize it.

Today, I discovered a witty blog written by Mark Manson, an author and “life enthusiast” who quit his finance job after only six weeks to start a dating business. He wrote a piece about “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck” which really resonated with me. When you get past the fact that he uses the word “fuck: over 120 times in this 12-minute article, you realize how much truth there is in the words he says and how every single person on earth would probably benefit from taking his advice to heart.

He had another article I liked called “Why Some Dreams Should Not Be Pursued.” It’s counterintuitive because society and every single self-help book tell you to pursue your passions; pursue your dreams! What he identifies that is so true is that in attaining a dream, we all have an idealistic way of seeing that dream. We think that once that dream has been attained, everything in our lives will be perfect and we be fulfilled and achieve happiness. It’s pretty much crap, though.

What I thought about was going through school, taking those God-awful SAT standardized tests, getting A’s (and B’s) on exams and ultimately finishing high school and going to college. I always thought I’d feel calmer once I got into college. College would be easier! It wouldn’t be this grueling! Boy, was I wrong. It was a painful period of life academically and socially. We always think things will get better once we attain a certain level of something or get to a certain age or point in our lives. We just face new challenges and things to grapple with. As he so succinctly says:

“The truth is that pain, longing and frustration are just a fact of life. We believe that our dreams will solve all of our current problems without recognizing that they will simply create new variants of the same problems we experience now. Sure, these are often better problems to have. But sometimes they can be worse. And sometimes we’d be better off dealing with our shit in the present instead of pursuing some ideal in the future.”

A friend of mine has dealt with acne for most of her adolescent and now adult life. She used to tell me that she was excited to get past adolescence because then she would no longer have to worry about acne breakouts around her period. Well, she is an adult now, and she still has to deal with breakouts. In some ways, they are probably worse now then they were when she was a teenager. Oh, and to add to that problem, now she (like the rest of us) has wrinkle and aging concerns on top of that! Before, there was just acne problems. Now, there are acne and aging problems!

The older we get, the newer and crazier challenges we will face. Happiness isn’t something far and seemingly intangible we should be chasing. It’s just a state of being comfortable with what you have and the life choices you have made.

I had my second iMentor session today. Today’s prompt was “What are your dreams?” We were asked to think about what our lives have been like in the past, what they are like now, and what we hope they will be in the future. I asked my mentee if she has any dreams for the future. She simply responded, “No, not really. I just think about today. I think in the moment!”

She said something similar the last time we met, and the more I think about it, the more I can understand it. She doesn’t speak English with pretty much anyone other than me. She even speaks in Spanish with the majority of her teachers at school. She comes from a lower income background, and her mother had her when she was just 16 in the Dominican Republic, and they live in a crowded apartment in the Bronx. It’s hard to think about the future when you’re not even sure what you’re going to eat for dinner later today, or if tomorrow will even come.

The focus of this mentoring program is to get kids excited about the idea of going to college, and of course, to ultimately get them into college. I asked her if she thought about going to college, and she said no. I asked her if she did go to college what she’d want to study. She thought about it for a while and said that she wanted to do engineering. “Wow, why do you want to do engineering?” And then, she said she wanted to engineer homes for people who are poor and less privileged because she wants everyone, poor or rich, to have a home. “Everyone should have a roof over their head!”

I could feel myself almost melting, as cliche as it sounds, when she said this. She herself doesn’t have that much, but she still acknowledges that there are people who are far worse off than her that she hopes will have a chance of a better life.

I went to my second mentoring session at the Harlem K-8 school that I do mentoring at this morning, and the first project we worked on was to create our own super hero. Every person, mentor or mentee, had to draw their super hero and list down the three powers they’d want their ideal super hero to have. I thought a lot about my super hero and how the image of the super hero has changed a lot for me over the course of my life. When I was little, like other kids, I was inspired by cartoons like Batman and Superman, people who could fly, have super human strength, or could become invisible or do time travel. As I’ve gotten older and I think about super hero qualities that would be amazing today, I think… how would the world be if we had a super hero who could end all pain and suffering? What if we had a super hero who could fly and teleport to places instantly to cure everything from cancer to AIDS to depression and anxiety? American insurance companies would go broke and doctors and nurses would go idle, but the world would be a happier place.

We went around the room sharing our ideas. When we came to me, everyone (at least the adults in the room) listened intently, and the elementary school teacher leading the session looked like she was on the verge of tears as I explained why I wanted this. “So many people across the world suffer from visible and invisible pains every day that we might be completely unaware of, so it would be great if we had a super hero who could cure and heal all of their wounds and pains and sorrows.” Some of the kids were silenced completely.

It would have been great if there was a super hero who could have cured Ed… because that’s what it would have taken to help him — a real super hero.

So we’ve finally decided on the city for our wedding, and it certainly wasn’t an easy one to make. I’ve spent the last five weeks researching venues across Melbourne and Southern California, thinking most of that time that we’d be having our wedding in Melbourne since that’s where most of Chris’s family is, and where it would be easiest for both of his grandmothers to get to given their elderly ages. I also thought it would make the most sense since things are just generally cheaper there with weddings, and the exchange rate has only made the U.S. dollar even stronger there.

Then this past weekend’s trip to Los Angeles kind of destroyed the idea of our Melbourne wedding. And two venues in Southern California topped the list. I’m sure one venue in particular in Melbourne, who I’ve probably exchanged at least 50 e-mails with and have called at least four times, is completely exasperated and pissed that they don’t get my business and money after the time they’ve invested in me. I’ll be honest; I felt really frustrated after spending all that time researching everything from venues to external caterers to rental companies in Melbourne. I feel like it’s a sunk cost. I devoted so much time into that city, and now our wedding is no longer going to be there. I spent a lot of time on Southern California, too, but nowhere as much time was devoted to that.

I actually really wanted us to get married in Melbourne, not just because of Chris’s family and his two grandmas, but also because I know that this would be the one opportunity to force my parents to travel to Australia. I think it would be nice if they could come see what Chris’s family’s country is like, how he grew up, and what the culture is like there versus here. I guess now that we’ve made our decision, they will never come. And both of Chris’s grandmothers won’t be able to come to California. But it will always be impossible to please everyone.

When people say that wedding planning and research can be all consuming, they aren’t joking. I never thought I’d be that obsessed about it (though my friends would say otherwise given my anal, attention-to-detail tendencies), but this has become something that I’ve either had to work on or think about at all times of the day. I’ve thought about the pressure I’ve gotten from both my side and Chris’s side of the family regarding setting a date and a location, I’ve been insulted by ignorant colleagues regarding having a “cheap” wedding in Australia (due to the exchange rate) and “forcing” people to travel so far “just” to see me get married, and I’ve also encountered people who have just said, “well, you could always just go to City Hall and get married, then have a small dinner after if all this becomes too stressful. That’s what I did!” I’ve gotten a lot of productive and non-productive feedback regarding wedding planning. And of course, I’ve also gotten many pro-Melbourne and pro-Southern California comments. The pro-Melbourne comments tend to come from friends who want an excuse to visit Australia, or from those who are in Melbourne who probably don’t want to go anywhere else. The pro-Southern California comments tend to come from my lazy family who doesn’t want to travel anywhere, or my broke friends who can’t imagine paying for a plane ticket halfway across the world. It’s all understandable.

Then there’s the aspect of the “wedding” I haven’t put that much thought into, and that’s the bridal shower/bachelorette party, really the part that my bridal party is supposed to be in charge of. The pressure came for that out of a dream I had last night. Apparently, I told my friend that I wanted an “exercise retreat” for my bachelorette party. As a result of this, she and I went to scout out dance and workout studios to rent out for a full day. To “test” the floors to see how sturdy they were, we jumped up and down all over every floor and practiced air kicks to see if the floors would fall apart.

The dream seems pretty ludicrous, but I guess it adds some humor into what tends to be a somewhat stressful planning experience. I want all of this to be fun and enjoyable, even when it is stressful.

I’ve had a greasy head my whole life. If I don’t wash my hair for a day, the next day, anyone could tell that my hair was not clean because of that gross “wet” look it gets. I used to get away with it sometimes just by tying up my hair, but now that I work and oftentimes have to meet clients and other external contacts, that “look” isn’t really what I want to go for. And now, it doesn’t help that I go to the gym four days in a row each week. I can’t go to work with sweaty and greasy hair.

In an effort to be better to my hair and grow it out, I stopped blow drying it after every wash about six months ago. Now, I barely blow dry at all, even in the winter cold. I just let it air dry. It’s actually been a huge difference for me in texture as well as no split ends in sight. But then I thought about the hair washing, and I wondered how I could wash it less. My friend suggested that I just rinse my hair out at the gym after workouts and condition the ends. She insisted I try it just once to see if it worked. And I did. And it worked. I went two days in a row with no wash, and I wasn’t a grease ball at the end of it. I washed my hair on Saturday, then no wash on Sunday and Monday, and washed it today. It’s amazing how I was so resistant to trying this before, and I know I know it works.

I don’t have a large friend group. In fact, since the age of 15, I haven’t had a large friend group. Sometimes, this has bothered me, and I have moments or even days when I wish I had more friends with more varied interests, or a reliable local group of girlfriends who I could just hang out with from time to time who I could trust. Last year, I went to a number of Meetup groups to try to meet new friends, but there wasn’t much of any “click” that happened. The one girl I met who seemed fun ended up being really flaky, and that seems to be the common theme among people in New York. Everyone has a lot of options and doesn’t always want to choose you. In fact, they may never choose you.

When I was out in my group of six tonight, though, with Chris, I felt really happy. In these moments, when we are all sitting around a table, drinking good whiskey instead of taking stupid shots, and talking about the most random things, and friends from different areas of my life are all laughing about the same thing, I think, well, I have a lot to be happy about. My friends all fit my life in different ways, as they should, and they love me and want to spend time with me on my birthday, even when I don’t always want to celebrate it. It doesn’t matter that they may be five versus fifty. I have what I need right here.

I was thinking about Ed yesterday during all this wedding venue research, wondering how we are going to incorporate him into our day. And then last night, as though he’s been hiding from all the wedding research nonsense, he came back again in my dreams.

I enter a bright room, seemingly the room that I’d be in to get ready for my wedding day. There were large windows that allowed a lot of bright light to stream through. As I enter the room, I notice it’s a large round room with lots of people sitting and standing along the circumference, talking, getting ready, and adjusting their necklaces and ties. Ed is sitting by the doorway on a chair, and he’s adjusting the collar of his white button-down shirt. He has a tie hanging from his neck, and it looks like he’s about to put it on. He notices I am standing there looking at him, and he looks up and smiles at me.

“Hi,” he says to me.

“Hi,” I respond, not knowing what to say. I am confused because he is sitting there, alive and bright and smiling, and I was not expecting him. “You’re here…” I bend down and pull him into my chest. He doesn’t say anything and just hugs me back.