The week has really gone by too quickly, and now, Chris’s two cousins are on a bus, on their way to Newark Airport, where they will connect in Hong Kong and be off to Melbourne and Sydney respectively. It was like they just arrived, and their seven days with us (or rather, me, because Chris was away in London for work for the bulk of their stay) really lasted only seven seconds, and now they are suddenly leaving. I got the same feeling I had when I was saying my good-byes to Chris’s parents when they left in May, which is the same feeling I got in my throat and stomach when my parents and Ed left New York to go back to San Francisco in July 2011. His family becoming my family is only becoming more and more real, and I can feel it in myself every time I see another one of his family members. It’s a very surreal feeling, but a good one, really.

In Chinese culture, it’s the norm for Chinese families and friends to fight over the bill after a meal has ended at a restaurant. The driving force behind it is the idea of “saving face,” or really “having face,” because it shows that you want to take care of the payment and want to treat everyone, and can afford to do it and want to show your care for those people at your table. The frustrating thing about it, though, is that the people fighting over the bill tend to not all want to pay the bill, but they just want to have a big dramatic show of trying to get the bill, even if they don’t want to pay. It sounds very negative, but it’s true. Usually, it’s already been made clear before the meal who pays, but the fight happens anyway.

Well, last night, Chris’s cousins wanted to pay the bill for real, and I wanted to pay the bill for real, so we proceeded to engage in the biggest bill brawl I’ve probably ever personally experienced. We were in close quarters at J.G. Melon on the Upper East Side (where I’m willing to bet NO fight over the bill has ever occurred given the clientele), and we fought like there was no foreseeable end — it resulted it pulling, ripping the bill into two pieces, toppling over of items on the dining table, the waiter coming over to let us know that he had only one copy of the bill, “so please do not destroy it,” and my biting both of them on their arms and fingers.

At least in these dramatic cases, it’s nice to know that all parties fighting all genuinely want to pay the bill. It’s kind of a nice, comforting feeling. But I still won’t let them win. This is when winning does matter.

Over dinner tonight, Chris, his two cousins and I sat in a cozy booth at Beauty and Essex discussing everything and anything. They told us about how they were just in Toronto with Chris’s brother, and how straight faced he was when they were directly asking him when they thought Chris and I would get engaged. He said he reckoned that their cousin and his girlfriend in Singapore would most likely get engaged before us, and they thought nothing of it and thought he was serious with this belief.

They also mentioned that they discussed Chris’s brother’s relationship with me, and he had told them that he looked at me like a sister because of how close we had become and how often we communicated. I suppose I never actively thought about it before, but in that moment, I immediately felt really emotional because I realized how true it was. We really do act like siblings. Even though he is technically four months older than I, I look at him as though he is my younger brother, and we talk and bicker the way brothers and sisters do, but we immediately get over any differences, if there are any, and carry on like nothing has ever happened. He really is like a second brother to me.

Of course, then I thought of Ed, and I felt pain inside. Ed will never get to meet this guy that I call my second brother. Even though that meeting may have been slightly awkward considering how quiet Ed was and how gregarious Ben is, it made me so sad to think that Ed will never get to meet Ben, and Ben will never get to meet Ed. Chris’s parents will never meet Ed; no one in Chris’s family will ever meet him. There are so many moments and experiences and people that he will miss because he left my world this time last year. He’s missed our engagement, and he’s missed us sharing it with everyone we love.

I love Ed and miss him every single day. But I can feel that he would be happy knowing that I have Ben in my life now — certainly not as a replacement of any sort, but as someone extra in my life who will love me in a very similar capacity that he is no longer physically capable of.

Two of Chris’s cousins who live in Melbourne and Sydney are here in New York visiting us for the next week as the last stop on their big North America holiday for the last several weeks. I’ve met them a couple times before in Melbourne around Christmas, but this is their first time visiting us together here in the States.

Everyone on Chris’s side of our family knew that we were engaged except for the two of them, and Chris had purposely planned it this way so that we’d at least be able to tell two people in his family in person about our engagement. Chris’s other cousin and girlfriend were on FaceTime with us when they arrived, so they also got to witness my telling the girls that we were engaged. It was one of those really special moments when there’s so much screaming and laughter and smiles that you know as it is happening that it will be one of the most memorable moments in your life. It was the highlight of our day today, telling them about our engagement (or really, my just saying, “We have news. Guess what?!” and then sticking out my hand with my shiny engagement ring), and since Chris captured it on video, will forever be one of those videos that will get played over and over, and be a captured moment we will never tire of.

After spending the day with them hysterically laughing, being terribly loud and attracting attention everywhere we went because of our crazy volume all together, I realized that they are really like my cousins now. I feel comfortable telling them anything and everything about myself, even to an extent that I may not even share with my own friends. And my own cousins? Forget about it. I’ve finally accepted in mind after many years of struggling that my own cousins, at least the three from my dad’s older brother and wife, and I will never have a functional relationship. They will constantly disappoint me and fall short of my expectations no matter what happens in our respective lives. So it will always be a work in progress for me to just choose to stop taking everything so personally that they say and do (and… don’t do, in the case of not acknowledging or caring about our engagement) and to realize that now, I have new cousins who actually do care to know who I really am and love me and will be ecstatically happy that Chris and I are spending the rest of our lives together. Chris and I are not the only ones happy about this. We have special people in our lives who are happy for us, too.

We’re leaving for our Brazil trip tonight. I’ve gotten into the habit of telling my parents about my international trips about one to two weeks before I leave, except when I go to Australia for Christmas with Chris. The main reason for this is so that they have very minimal time to worry about all the potential dangers I could encounter, and the secondary reason is so that they have less time to nag me about why I apparently don’t understand the value of a dollar and how hard it is to earn money (even though I have been 100% self-sufficient, and not in any debt, ever since I graduated from college just over six years ago). I tend to get nagged about “wasting money,” and “why are you taking a trip instead of coming home to spend more time with us?”

This time surprisingly, neither of my parents had much of a reaction when I told them I was going to Brazil. I don’t really think that my mom knows where Brazil is or what the World Cup is. When I told my dad we were going to Brazil, he immediately asked if it was for the World Cup, and he seemed surprised in a positive way. He also didn’t raise a single question about safety or violence the way pretty much every older adult I know has. Maybe my parents are finally accepting the fact that I’m going to continue traveling and making my own decisions for the rest of my life. Or, maybe they have just given up on me. 🙂

Since upgrading my poor, obselete iPhone 4S to iOS7, I’ve been experiencing a lot of bugs. Apps I regularly use, such as Facebook, Instagram, and even mail, take 5-10 times as long to load as they previously did. The worst issue I’ve encountered since this “upgrade” is that one of my favorite apps, 1 Second Every Day (1SE) constantly crashes. I will be cutting a video for a given day, and it will crash. Then, it will only allow me to cut and save a video if I only use the very first second of the video, which defeats the whole purpose of cutting the clip. It’s made me fall severely behind because I’m trying to make a 1 Second Every Day video for each month.

Then I realized I could stop complaining about it and just reset my iPhone when the app repeatedly crashed. What a good solution. 🙂 And now I’ve finished April and May finally and have caught up!

Tonight, I watched Happy, a documentary made in 2011 that explores what truly makes human beings happy. It combines scientific studies as well as personal experiences of individuals all over the world. My friend recommended it to me after he saw it. He said it really made him think more about all of the stupid first world problems we have and complain about, and he realized how he had to curb some of that thinking (the biggest one being “I don’t have time to <fill in the blank with something you know is important but you are just too lazy to do>”).

Based on the research, the scientists found that 50% of “happiness” is out of our control and completely based on genetics (great, not sure how I fare there), while 10% of it is based on our circumstances – where we are, what we are doing with our lives, who our friends and lover are and how they treat us, etc. That leaves 40% completely up to us – the actions we choose to take, the mantras we live by, the thoughts we allow ourselves to have. Most people are surprised when they hear that only 10% of happiness is based on life circumstances; after some thought, I completely understand that because as people, we tend to adapt, some slower than others, to whatever new situation we are in, whether it’s braces, diabetes, a missing arm, or anything. The scary thing is that half our happiness is completely genetic, and that 40% that we are in control of has to work that much harder to what we are predisposed to (notice I say that as though everyone’s genetics are as screwed up as my family’s is).

I think my 40% probably needs to work harder that Chris’s does, and I’m sure lots of other people I know and do not know have their 40% working harder than mine has to. It’s very relative in terms of what you have been through in life. It feels in some ways that life is a constant battle to be happy and feel fulfilled, but I still believe it is worth it.

Last night, I had dinner with a former colleague who got… fired. She’s happy now at another company, and we’ve kept in touch since her departure. Over wine and salad, we chatted about what she’s been up to since leaving, and she told me that although there were people who had not reached out to her at my company who she was friends with, she was sure that they did care. I couldn’t hide my irritation at her naivete and flat out told her that she was deluded if she thought that they actually cared; if they were “friends,” wouldn’t they have already reached out to her even once during this whole time?!

She didn’t readily believe me until I told her without any details that my brother passed away last July, and there were a number of people who saw me afterwards (when I went back to my old company to drop off my security card and laptop) and said that they “had wanted” to reach out, but they weren’t sure what to say, so they didn’t say anything. Yes, because inaction proves that you care – it actually says more about how you don’t care. Well, to be fair, I have some friends who are so emotionally fucked up that their own emotional blocks prevented them from reaching out to me, and they are still my friends today. Either way, my point was that when your life really sucks – when someone significant in your life dies, you lose your job, your house burns down – those are the most revealing moments in your life when it comes to determining who really cares and who doesn’t. And when you’ve come to that realization, you become aware that the people who don’t care aren’t worth any of your time.

After that story, she believed me and said she wouldn’t reach out to those people.

After dinner ended and I took the train home, I got out at my subway stop and checked my phone. I received a text from my newly employed friend that said, “July is not far away. Can we do something on the anniversary, for your brother?” I could feel my eyes well up with tears when I read this. I realize that I haven’t actively thought about the “anniversary” much, except when during my last meeting with my therapist, she told me to be aware that I might get moody as the day approached, and I may not be conscious of it at all. She told me that I should think about what I might want to do, if anything, to remember him on that day.

I’m not sure what I want to do honestly. But I get a warm, hopeful feeling knowing that there are people who want to help me remember Ed.

I am in shock that we’ve reached the sixth month of the year already. I feel like there are a lot of things I need to do that I haven’t even started. I guess that’s the feeling in general when you have a long list of goals to accomplish – you can never feel like you’ve accomplished enough of them, otherwise it’s as though you are telling yourself that you’re not challenging yourself enough.

And when the weather gets warmer and the air more humid, I tend to get sleepier. This summer needs to be a productive summer – there are too many things to do and cook and eat and see, and a lot of things I promised I would do for Ed. Laziness is not allowed.