The last time Ed gave me a gift that wasn’t a gift card was for my 26th birthday. He bought me a set of Lenox cups and dessert plates in their Butterfly Meadow design because he remembered I liked butterflies. Tonight, I used the butterfly cups for the first time. Chris washed two of them so that we could have homemade hot chocolate together since it was another cold winter’s day, and the heating wasn’t working properly in the apartment earlier.

Maybe I didn’t appreciate them enough when I received them in 2012. They’re a really beautiful design, one that I’m sure he picked out with a lot of love in his heart. Ed always preferred real gifts rather than money – to give and to receive. As I snapped a picture of the cups filled with hot chocolate and topped with whipped cream tonight, I thought about what he was thinking when he purchased them and had them shipped off to me. I wish I could tell him now how much I love these cups and how great they look in this photo I took with my phone.

Last year, I started a goal of reading at least one book per month just to increase my reading and my general knowledge and awareness of the world. These books can be fiction or nonfiction. Sometimes, I’ve given myself leeway to count a single book as more than “one” (Nelson Mandela’s autobiography Long Walk to Freedom last year was a long book, and not always the easiest to follow since I’m largely unfamiliar with the culture of South Africa and its political history apart from the Apartheid).

This year during goal setting, I realized I really want to learn more about Chinese and Vietnamese history. I’m sadly pretty ignorant to most of it. At first glance from an outsider’s perspective, it seems ridiculous to want to learn more about myself and “my people and roots” because isn’t that just learning more of what I grew up with? Well, not really. In school, we never learned anything outside of U.S. history and Western European history. Even in art history, we used a massive book that half was filled with just Asian art history. My instructor at Lowell glossed over it completely because “that section is not covered on the Advanced Placement exam.” Outside of U.S. history and Western European history, the American education system really don’t care at all about history, and we’ve brainwashed children into thinking this. My mom never had the opportunity to learn history, my dad never cared much about it, and I wasn’t with my grandmother long enough before she passed to ever ask her (or even think to ask her, by the age of 8) what her life was like in China before immigrating. What was that experience even like?

So I’m trying to fill the void now by doing my own research. A subset of my list that I am building out is books that cover Chinese history from 1900 onward. I still have to create the Vietnamese part of it. And for American history, as I was never a huge fan of it, I suppose I need to add more to that, too, apart of American History Revised. I wish history was taught in a fun way in school. Maybe then I would have retained more of it rather than just memorizing them as facts for an exam and then immediately forgetting it all.

I’ve been spending some time filling out applications for youth mentoring opportunities in New York City. Last Thursday, I had an interview with an organization that provides mentors specifically for young girls. I’ve always enjoyed volunteering, but I realized what I did not like about the things I was doing was that none of them were continuous – all were just one-off projects that, while fun and helpful, didn’t really do much for me personally.

As I am going through the many pages of questions that these applications are asking me, and discussing what I want out of life through mentoring on these phone interviews, I’ve realized that all I really have in the back of my mind is Ed. I think about how I wish he had someone he trusted who he could look up to. I wish he had someone he could call a mentor. Maybe he would still be with us today if he had one. I guess in many ways, he looked to me for advice and help, but I don’t think it helped his self-esteem to know he was asking for advice from his little sister who is seven years younger than he was.

I’m going to try to preserve him by helping others. It’s one tiny thing I can do to keep his memory living on.

After three years of not really communicating (unless you count random Facebook wall posts), a friend from college and I have reconnected and are now exchanging e-mails. We haven’t seen each other since graduation day, which I guess is somewhat understandable since most of the time after college, she was living all over China while I was here in New York. I realized how many times I would reference her during conversations, reminiscing on studying abroad together in the same program in Shanghai and food-adventuring through the Boston area together, and I realized that we needed to connect again. When you remember someone so fondly and think about them that often, why the heck would you not still want that person in your life?

So that’s one of my many goals for this year and for the rest of my life – to do whatever I can to maintain the important and fulfilling relationships I have. If that means re-connecting randomly over e-mail or spending a little more time on the phone, then that’s what it will take. People are what make our lives so great, so it will be worth it in the end to invest more time in them – as long as it’s reciprocated.

And I am going to see her when I visit Phoenix in April!!

Today marks 28 years since my mother’s water suddenly broke at her office, and she was rushed to the hospital to give birth to little me. Sometimes, I look at myself in the mirror and think I am incredibly immature, and other times, I think, how have I only been around for the small number of years that have passed?

The last year has been different for me in a lot of ways. I’ve noticed shadows on my face that I’ve never seen before, and even traces of tiny lines on my forehead that mark that I’m no longer “so young.” I’ve noticed wrinkles on my best friends’ faces. I realized I gained weight, then worked rigorously to lose it, and now am maintaining a more active life. For the first time when discussing marriage and children, I’ve actually had people say to me, “yeah, you still have a few more years.” Just a few more years, huh? Just two years ago, these same people were saying I had a “lot” of time!

It’s strange what a difference just a year can make in your life when it comes to how people perceive you. Maybe that’s why a lot of people don’t like to share their age. I never thought I’d be the type of person who would refuse to share her age no matter how old I got, but for the first time, I can actually empathize with them. I still won’t do it, though. I don’t want to be full of crap and pretend to be something I’m not. I am who I am. Everyone else can deal with it.

Here’s to hoping that in my 28th year, even if the shadows on my face persist and gradually become fine lines, that this is a better year than this last year was, and that it is free of pain and needless negativity.

About a year ago, for the very first time, my brother did not acknowledge my birthday. Ed was always very loving and generous, the kind of person who gave too much to people who didn’t always care for him as much. So it was surprising when my 27th birthday passed, and he didn’t even give me a call to wish me a happy birthday. It’s not so much the gift that I really cared about; it’s the fact that he didn’t even reach out to me that day.

So on the 18th of January last year, I called him and asked him why he didn’t call me the day before. He sounded sheepish and said that he knew it was my birthday, but since he wasn’t making much money anymore, he didn’t send a gift. I told him I didn’t ask him about why there was no gift; I was asking why he didn’t call me. I guess that should have been the first sign to me that something was seriously not right with him at that point. I just didn’t think about it that deeply then.

Now, he’s never going to wish me a happy birthday in any way ever again. It’s not even when holidays like Thanksgiving or Christmas pass, or even his date of birth or date of passing; even on days like my birthday, I will think of him and feel a little guilty that the last birthday of mine that he was around to see, I gave him a hard time. I think about all the pointless “what ifs” regarding things I may have been able to do to have helped him more and how I failed. I think about his 34th birthday that I was trying to plan that never happened, and how he won’t be here for my 28th, 38th, or 78th birthday.

I wonder if he is in heaven looking down, wondering what kind of birthday cake I am going to eat tomorrow. He probably wants a piece of it if it’s chocolate or mocha. Maybe he actually is wishing me a happy birthday in his own way now. I guess I will never really know for sure, but I do miss him.

Today, I went to see my therapist for the third time after a long period of not seeing her at all due to travel, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. We talked about the trips I’ve taken and spoke in detail about my feelings around Christmas time with Chris’s family. We also discussed why the idea of marriage does not seem to excite me the way it used to.

We came to the conclusion that in the same way that being around Chris’s happy, functional family is a reminder of how dysfunctional and miserable my own family is, perhaps the idea of planning my future wedding would also be a reminder of how happy his family would be for me, whereas my extended family probably wouldn’t care much and would be too cheap to go to whatever location we decided on. It’s kind of twisted since I should be happy that this family I am being welcomed into is so loving and accepting of me, but I can’t just be “normal” and just accept how easy this all is so quickly, right? Sometimes when you might want something, when you get it, you may not have your arms as wide open as you originally thought. But it takes another level of self-understanding to accept it. It will take some time, but I think I deserve to be happy.

I had a long chat with one of my best friends tonight, and she was telling me the story of one of her friends, who is our age and hasn’t dated anyone past the first (and usually blind) date and has had no one she could call a “boyfriend” this whole time. As a Christian, she’s been surrounded by people her age who have been getting married year after year since we’ve graduated from college, and she’s gone to countless weddings and been a bridesmaid more times than she can probably remember by now. She says that she’s come to terms with the fact that she may be single the rest of her life.

The funny thing about hearing this is that while she has no idea what it is like to be in a relationship and think and discuss marriage, I can’t really remember much time in the last ten years when I wasn’t in a relationship. I’ve discussed marriage so many times, yet given the previous failed relationships, it never happened. In some ways, we are on opposite sides of the spectrum, yet I can completely relate to her feeling pressure about marriage when she’s surrounded by married people and babies. It doesn’t really matter whether you are in a relationship or not – the pressure is still there whether it’s overt or not.

I’ve either experienced or heard of quite a number of deaths this year. Ed left me. Two colleague’s parents passed away. Another colleague’s grandmother passed away. And because of the circumstances around Ed’s passing, I am just that more cognizant of suicides and everything suicide-related. Our lives have to go on, though, and we don’t have that much time to feel sorry for ourselves when death happens.

I asked my colleague how he and his family were doing in light of his mother’s passing. Although we aren’t close, it was good to hear him be open about how he felt and all the emotions that he’s been feeling over the last couple of weeks. As he was telling me about the moments leading up to her finally leaving their family, I could feel myself sensing my own inner pain at just hearing another person’s experience of losing someone special in their life. I’m not sure if he felt that I understood, but sadly, I understood exactly what he was talking about.

Volunteering gets a bad wrap when you are from an Asian immigrant family. When you volunteer, especially when you still live at home during your high school years (or during college summers), you will most likely get asked, “Why are you volunteering for [insert X organization] when you could be [insert some mundane household chore] at home for your parents?” They cannot understand for a second why on earth you would do unpaid labor for anyone outside of your family.

Volunteering is one of those things that helps everyone, though. It will usually help other people, whether it’s a child in need, a homeless person, someone with a lesser skill set than you, or just a lazy office worker who can dump some of their load on unpaid you. However, it also can help you, too, because it makes you feel like a) you are doing something with your life, and b) you are doing a good deed, which selfishly (ironically) usually feels pretty good. “It makes me feel good” is even a check box on the list of questions I looked at that asked, “Why are you volunteering?”

I thought about volunteering last year, particularly with either mentoring children or helping less fortunate adults, but with Ed dramatically leaving me (thanks, Ed), I figured 2013 wasn’t the best year to start it. 2014 is a new year, though, and this year, I actually do want to do something for others. I attended a Wellesley alum-hosted volunteer event tonight that gave me some ideas. Let’s see what I find.