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.

We’re spending the weekend in Detroit, and we started the day at the Ford Rouge Factory and ended it with a walk around the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor campus and drinks in the area. As we walked around the campus, I thought about the way I looked at the world before leaving San Francisco to go to school in the Boston area and thought about how narrow-minded I was before.

The truth is that I think that in general, all of us see ourselves as being “open-minded” people, even when perhaps none of us really are. I’m not saying that we’re each individually to blame for our narrow-mindedness because a lot of it is based on lack of experience, which is only gained with time, and also exposure (or lack thereof) to things that are outside of our comfort zone and familiar haunts. Before 18, that’s mostly controlled by your parents and where you live. By default, your exposure is limited. But post-18, and especially post-college, we do have to accept responsibility for our actions and the way we think (to a degree with the latter… I suppose).

These are just some embarrassing examples of things I was not aware of or thought pre-Wellesley. Some seem like they are trivial or not deal breakers in terms of judging “level of intelligence,” but when I look back on these things, I can feel my face grow hot:

1. Cantonese food is not the only Chinese food there is. That applies to one province, which in the grand scheme of China, though it’s taken seriously as a top Chinese cuisine, is not the center of China.

2. Vietnamese refugees ended up all over the United States after the Vietnam War, not just California. Minority populations started popping up in places I never would have guessed before, like Texas, Minnesota, Louisiana, and Arkansas. I made friends with Vietnamese women from all of these states.

3. A Boston accent exists, as does a Bronx, Staten Island, Queens, and Long Island accent. Not just people in the South and Midwest have “accents.” I have an accent, too, apparently.

4. Burritos are not really Mexican. They are a Mexican/American/fusion-type dish. No burritos exist in Mexico unless for some reason, someone thought they’d bring it from the U.S. into Mexico.

5. The world does not revolve around San Francisco or any other place I might choose to live in. San Francisco is not representative of the rest of the country and sure as hell not the world. The Chinese population is not as big, the Korean population is not as small, and almost no other place I will ever go to will be as politically correct 24/7. There’s are great benefits to living in a city as diverse as San Francisco, but the danger behind that is that we may end up thinking it’s like that everywhere else. I’ve had colleagues in LA who did not believe me when I told them how few Asians there were in cities like St. Louis.

6. I’m going to wait until marriage to have sex, and I think most other people should, too (yes, really).

If I never left San Francisco (or California for that matter) and met people from around the country and world at the college I went to, I may not have realized a lot of these things. Yes, it’s great to have a place to call home, but it’s not great or healthy to live in my old glass menagerie thinking that what is immediately around me is the same as what everyone else has or experiences.

My mom called me at 9:45 this morning, and I immediately got a dreaded feeling when I saw her caller ID pop up on my phone. Why would she call so early – was it an emergency?

Apparently, one of her Bible study students has to give up her cute little dog for contentious reasons. It’s a dog that my mom has been in love with since she met the little guy about a year ago. My mom called because she’s eager to take this dog home as her own, but she’s not sure she’s making the best decision. What do you think? she asked me worriedly.

Well, my dad loves dogs but hates the idea of animals in the house, and of course, the other things to think about are the costs, both in terms of time *and* money, that owning a dog would mean. My parents already rarely take trips, but now if they got this dog, they’d have to either find a dog sitter or a doggie hotel, which would be a huge inconvenience. Their schedules would need to revolve around this dog, and I could imagine arguments happening over it.

As much as I’d love for my mom to have an animal companion, especially given how much joy she gets playing with this friend’s dog… and her despondency over losing Ed last year, I had to tell her to pass on it. I think it’s in the best interests of each of their sanities, as well as their marriage. We’re all dealing with losing Ed, but I am fully sure nothing, dog or human, could ever replace what he meant to us.