“Honor your father and your mother”

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I think it could go without saying that every world religion has some sort of written mandate on how one is supposed to treat one’s parents. In the Bible, Exodus 20:12 says, “Honor your father and your mother.” In other words, respect them, treat them well, and (arguably) obey what they say.

But what are you supposed to do when you are grown adult child, yet your parent acts like a child? Or, even worse, they barely even acknowledge you and act like you aren’t even there?

I came home after a long bus ride back from Napa today and arrived at the house. My dad was home, on his computer as per usual, and I came in and said hi. He said nothing. He continued watching his YouTube video. I thought maybe I didn’t speak loud enough. I said hi again a second time. Still no response. I said, “Hey! Are you okay?” And he finally looked up for a moment, still failing to make eye contact with me, and said, “Oh, I was just watching something on the YouTube.”

Yeah, no kidding. He was so busy watching YouTube, which he does all day anyway unless he has errands to run, yet his daughter is only in town for a few days, and he cannot even look up to say a proper “hello.” I was trying to keep my voice level and not say anything too passive aggressive, but I could feel my blood pressure going up.

Being antisocial is what my dad is — he doesn’t have any social skills at all to the point where it is painful to observe, but not being able to say hello is just downright ridiculous and not excusable. I always wonder how it is that a person could turn out this way, and if we really could blame their “upbringing” as so many people always resort to. Or, is it that at a certain point, it’s really on the individual to take the responsibility for what they lack. I try to accept it for what it is because I know I will never be able to change him, my mom, or anyone really, but it is vexing beyond comprehension in some moments. I feel like I want to shake him sometimes and say, “WHY IS IT SO HARD FOR YOU TO DO SOMETHING SO BASIC AND HUMAN?”

I am powerless and cannot do anything to change the situation.

President’s Club again

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After qualifying for president’s club last year, when I found out what the criteria would be for this year, I immediately started crunching the numbers to see if I might get in again (I didn’t really realize I’d become that person, but I started getting addicted to the bragging rights, the prestige, and the free luxury trips). And based on the numbers I did calculate, I would qualify again, but I wasn’t really sure if I’d make it… I always feel like there’s some force out there going against me that is going to randomly make objective qualifications based on the actual data suddenly subjective and based on their own personal opinions. So when they announced my name on stage tonight, my first thought was “wait, those numbers were actually lower than what I calculated.” Then, my next thought was, “fuck them all,” as I walked on stage, to everyone who either doesn’t think my contributions have mattered or is against my success not only here, but overall.

I’ve known this since my middle school years when I was known for being super friendly and kind to everyone that it doesn’t matter what you do or how kind or selfless you are, but there will always be someone out there who not only does not like you, but wants everything bad for you and is even out to sabotage you. There will be people out there who will try to twist your words and actions into something that was never truly your intent. I was recently reminded of this with an unfortunate situation at work, and as I was told by someone close to me in the organization, “You are going to rise above it.” I have, and I’ve done it quietly and without much fuss. But that does not mean that when I succeed and can speak to my successes that I won’t be thinking about them in the back of my mind in glee, knowing that I’ve proven all of them wrong. Screw the haters.

Stopping to look up at the stars

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This is the third year I’ve come with my current company to the Silverado Resort in Napa for our annual go-to-market kickoff. Each year, it’s been a lot of socializing, learning, overstimulation, and I’ve left drained and exhausted. I can’t remember once when I actually was on my own and did much thinking or meditation on anything. You’d think that if I were in such a peaceful and beautiful place that I would have made time for myself, but year after year, I’ve forgotten.

This year, I have a comfortable one-bedroom suite that is about a ten-minute walk to the mansion and ballroom area where all the events happen. While walking back from a team dinner and some socializing at the bar, I stopped to look up at the night sky and realized that the moon was extremely brilliant and clear, plus the entire sky was like a huge canopy of twinkling white lights. It was a clear night, and all the stars were vivid, bright, and extremely visible. I could even see Orion’s Belt clearly — I do not know constellations at all, but this is the only one I know (it’s pretty simple to keep track of since it’s just three perfectly aligned stars).

It’s crazy to think how sucked into our day to days we get that we rarely stop to look up at the stars. In New York, we aren’t this privileged to have an unpolluted night sky; being able to see a single star is virtually impossible there. But in Napa and even San Francisco, the stars are so clear and vivid unless it’s a cloudy night. I was probably looking up for only about five minutes, but it felt really good nonetheless to finally take this view in and really appreciate it for the first time in these trips.

Not the same anymore

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The last two go-to-market kickoffs have been really exciting: the first is always the most exciting because everything is new: the people, the process, the place, the schedule. The second one was fun because I felt like there was a massive buzz and people were really engaged and ready to go out there and do some great things. This year, I feel like the tone has changed. For those who are new, they are always excited because this is their year one, which for me, was two years ago. For those who have been here a while, the feeling was quite muted. For sales people who haven’t been hitting their individual or regional numbers, it was clear that they were all business and had no desire to mingle with anyone who they either didn’t know or could personally benefit from. That was sad to me today to observe. I had a lot fewer people greet, hug, or say hi to me than I normally do. Most of the people who have advocated for me who I was a fan of have left. And as I walked through the halls and desks of our company yesterday, I realized… I don’t totally feel like I really belong here anymore. That sense of belonging was once really strong. And now it’s not.

Over stimulation

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It’s the first of five days of being in San Francisco and Napa for work: two days of our team offsite, plus three days of go-to-market kickoff for the new fiscal year. Although it’s fun to meet new colleagues and catch up with colleagues I’ve known for a while since I don’t normally see them, after the first day has ended today, I am already ready to crawl into bed and sit in silence. I feel like I’ve been overloaded with information, over-stimulated, and that my introvert self is ready to go into hiding. Most of my colleagues consider me an extrovert, someone who keeps the stories and jokes going, is loud and laughs a lot, and is part of what gives the room energy when I am there. But once I leave that room, I am definitely done and not coming back — no FOMO (fear of missing out), no feeling of being the “party pooper” who left, and definitely not able to be peer-pressured to stay, ever. I might have felt that way in my early 20s, but now in my mid-30s, that is definitely over and done with. It’s like my Insights scale and evaluation (like Myers-Briggs, but to me, more understandable): I project an extroverted “yellow”, but in my truly natural state, I’m an introverted “green.”

Home for a day and then gone

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For the last three years, I’ve felt lucky that whenever I come back home to San Francisco that I can spend most of the time away at a hotel in the city and only spend at most 2-3 consecutive nights at my parents’ house. “Home” is always a loaded place for me. Most of my colleagues who don’t know me that well always say that it must be so nice to spend extra time with family and friends while on work trips out here. Yes, while that is nice, I can only have it in small doses, and three nights is usually the max number of nights I can spend at my parents’ house before I just completely go crazy and need to get away and decompress.

It was great to be able to spend the entire day with three friends today, having an elegant birthday lunch, relaxing at a spa and having a facial, and then roaming around Japantown eating Korean food, mochi donuts, and just catching up about life and what we’ve been doing with our respective lives in the last few months since we last saw each other. I actually felt fully relaxed today with my friends, and I had a really enjoyable time with them discussing everything from sexism and racism in the workplace, movies, travel, my YouTube channel, and the medical field. It was a nice, welcome, and animated break from the weird tension and lack of talking about virtually anything other than my ovaries in the presence of my parents yesterday.

My parents have pretty much stopped talking to Chris at all, other than to say hi, ask if he wants more food, and to say goodbye. My mom has said she doesn’t want to talk to me about anything when Chris is around, so if he’s in the house, she doesn’t want to sit with me. No conversation happens with him at all when he’s around. They really have nothing to say to him, and well, Chris doesn’t have anything other than small talk to discuss with them, either. But the more I think about it, the more I get frustrated that they just aren’t doing anything meaningful with their lives. My mom is misguided, following a religion she only joined because they swooped in on her in her weakest moments. She doesn’t really believe in everything they believe in; why else would she expect things like birthday gifts “around” the time of her birthday or Christmas gifts “around” the time of Christmas? She hasn’t converted a single person to becoming a Jehovah’s Witness.

Then, there’s my dad, who spends most of his day on YouTube, watching videos to supposedly inform himself (and uses those videos as an excuse to not go to places “but you can see that on YouTube,” is his response when I tell him about things I’ve seen and done in real places in real life). He does the bare minimum on his self-employed work on his rentals, and has left many of them vacant now for five-plus years. I tried asking him about what needed to be done on a specific rental and how much time it would take, and he said, “if you have money, maybe a month.” How much time is it really taking him? It’s been over five years, he said. When I asked him why he didn’t just pay to get it done, he just shrugged. It was clearly a tense conversation, and my mom pat me on my leg and told me to stop asking questions. It’s like he’s just passing time, wasting his life away doing things that don’t mean anything, and well, allowing places that could potentially house others and earn him money do absolutely nothing for anyone other than waste space. Why do people not do things that actually give them pleasure or meaning? Why?

And finally, there’s what really angers me and turns my face red. In my bedroom, I found my dad’s AA battery digital camera. It was completely deconstructed with the screws taken out in at least a dozen pieces. Plus, the inside of where the battery would be placed looked like it was corroded. I asked my dad what the hell happened to his camera, and he said that the AA battery corroded because he left it in the camera, and that you’re actually supposed to remove it from the camera when not using it.

This jogged the memory from 2004 when Ed got me a digital camera for my high school graduation gift. He spent so much money on it at the time because he knew I really wanted one, and it was the most thoughtful gift he had ever given me (and the most expensive). My dad criticized him and his choice and said that lithium ion batteries were the worst, that he should have chosen a digital camera that had AA batteries. Well, the majority of desirable cameras then and now are all lithium ion batteries, and corroding is never, ever an issue. I even pointed this out to him on multiple trips we’ve taken where his AA battery would die on him and my digital camera was going strong. Him being him, he was defensive over and over. This time, when he told me this, it reminded me of this stupid and baseless critique of Ed, and I told him that no one uses AA batteries for cameras now, that all of them are lithium ion. He said he realized this now and left it at that.

He will never admit he was wrong, and he probably never even remembered how much he criticized Ed, about this as well as countless other things. And that will always make my blood boil.

“How long has it been since you got married?”

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My aunt started our short family dinner tonight by asking that question. And I knew it wasn’t going to go well. Chris and I were overlapping for one day for our San Francisco travels, and since we never really have any real conversation, we both knew this meal was just out of obligation so that he could see my parents for a short time.. because well, that’s all the time he can really tolerate being around them. To this day, they won’t really talk openly with him. My dad has stopped trying to engage. In fact, when we arrived this afternoon, he half-heartedly greeted us and said he had to go “pick something up” and would be back in 20 minutes.

My aunt said she thought it had only been two years. We corrected her and told her it was four. And then my aunt marveled at how quickly time passes.

To which my mom interjects loudly, “Well then, what are you waiting for!”

It’s always fun when your family feels like they have to either directly or indirectly imply that you need to be doing things on the timeline they want for you vs. the timeline that you want to live your life. And it’s even more fun when your family members collude in this and gang up on you all at once.

So Chris, thinking he would be cute and cheeky, said, “Yeah, what are we waiting for, Yvonne?”

My mom doesn’t really understand most jokes, and she especially did not understand this. She later pulled me aside to confront me about this comment Chris made.

“It sounds like Chris wants to have kids and you do not,” she said to me gravely. “What is wrong with you?”

I told her she knew nothing about what we were trying or not trying to do, and that he was joking.

When is she going to learn that her nagging and meddling is never going to help any situation? Never?

Manicures as “self care”

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Anyone who really knows me well knows that I have the most disgusting nail and cuticle picking habit. And I found out that there’s actually a name for this: Onychophagia – it’s body-focused repetitive behavior and is considered a disorder. The picking habit supposedly stems from anxiety, whether it’s conscious or subconscious. For me, I know I tend to pick my cuticles and nails when I am either bored, irritated, or just idle. Ed actually had a nail picking habit, too, when he was around, and when I think about it, I realize we both got this terrible habit from our dad. My dad picks at his cuticles and his dry skin on his hands, and as someone who worked in construction, his hands were alway dry, flaky, scaly, and pretty scary to look at. My mom always used to lament that when she first met my dad, he had such smooth, beautiful hands… then, after years of working in the glazing industry to install glass, his hands became her worst nightmare.

However, there is one time when I will definitely not pick at my nails or cuticles at all, and that is when they are polished. It doesn’t matter if it’s regular nail polish, gel, Calgel, whatever — if I can see that they look beautiful and presentable, the picking just does NOT happen. And when I was spoiled with manicures every few months while working at a agency, when Google used to take my small team for mani/pedis on the regular, I realized how nice it could be to be treated to something that I once thought was so superfluous and superficial.

I tried painting my own nails on and off. I really just don’t have a very steady hand, especially painting with my left hand. I also don’t have the patience to let it dry completely. I resorted to just painting my nails clear since that was enough to prevent my picking habit, plus clear dries so much more quickly. But when I met up with a friend in Boston last summer and noticed how nice her nails looked, she told me that she made time to do it every week, once a week on the same day. “It’s my self care,” she said. “This is the time I get to myself to focus on my nails, and then I am rewarded with this for the rest of the week!”

“Self care.” It seems to be a term everyone is talking about now. I even get Instagram ads targeted to me in regards to self care — this pertains to everything from manicures, spa treatments, bath salts, scented soy candles… all of that. I’m not sure how I feel about this because as a marketing ploy, anything could be labeled self care as a justification for purchasing whatever it is, whether it’s an object or an experience.

If I get my nails done professionally, I might get them done once or twice a year, and I realized that last year, I didn’t get them done a single time. So I decided to splurge today on a gel design at a trendy Japanese nail salon near my office. My nail technician spent an hour and a half on me — longer than I anticipated, but I appreciated the level of detail she gave me (and even the Harry Potter movie I got to watch while she worked on my nails).

After I left the salon, I kept staring at my nails and admiring them. It wasn’t cheap to get a design with a gel, but I justified it in my head because a) I didn’t get my nails done at all in 2019, and b) they told me this would last for 3-4 weeks. Well, maybe this really is self care. And maybe these little splurges are worth it, if not just to express creativity in a different way, but also to prevent myself from skin and nail picking.

The Oculus in New York

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As a tribute to the 9/11 victims and what was formerly the World Trade Center, the city’s architects constructed the World Trade Center subway station, in addition to a brand new shopping center and what is being called the Oculus, a massive glass and steel structure that is intended to resemble “a bird flying from the hands of a child.” In its meaning, the structure is intended to symbolize and bring hope to the site of tragedy.

But because this is New York, there’s going to be shops and money-making businesses to flank these beautiful memorial structures. And so there is a massive retail space that’s part of the Oculus, where not only are there actual luxury brick and mortar shops, but also spaces in the middle of the Oculus that pop-up retailers can rent by the month. One of these vendors who will be at the Oculus until late spring will be No Chewing Allowed, a seasonal French truffle store that can usually be found temporarily at the holiday markets across the city around the Thanksgiving to New Year’s period. I have likely seen them at the Union Square Holiday Market every single year since I’ve moved to New York, no fail, and their samples are always a free treat at this market. You always know them because the person handling them out continuously repeats, “no chewing allowed!” The idea is that you’re supposed to let it melt in your mouth, otherwise you ruin the entire chocolate enjoyment experience. I already do this regardless when eating any chocolate unless it’s a cookie, so I wouldn’t do anything differently.

My cousin who lives in the Bay Area requested that I pick up a box for him because he’d tried these as a gift from his brother, and he and his wife were completely obsessed with them. While they are good, there’s nothing particularly amazing to them for me. They’re just like any other truffle, maybe a little softer. And it also bothers me that their second ingredient listed is palm oil. Am I mostly paying $22 per box for a bunch of palm oil? The label doesn’t even tell you the chocolate percentage!

Oppressively quiet due to a reduction-in-force (RIF)

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The day after a layoff happens, an office usually has an unusual level of trepidation and silence.. the kind that is slightly oppressive, ominous, where you are uncertain of who wants to say what, who knows what, and who is sharing what and with whom.

Then there is the question of: what now? And what are we doing and why?

One of the most awkward things about RIFs is that you don’t really know who was let go and affected unless you work directly with them, or you get a bounce back from their email. It’s frustrating and upsetting, but there’s really no nice way to handle it otherwise.

And what is worse is when your customers find out about it and start asking you questions.. before you are even supposed to know it happened and before your own company even makes the official announcement!