Running into familiar faces

Posted on by
Reply

In the last two days, I’ve run into two of Chris’s friends, one of whom is a former colleague of mine. New York is a big place with millions of people, and yet we managed to bump into each other and catch up briefly.

I don’t know how observant people are when they run into me by chance, but one of the first things I always think of when I run into someone I know is, when was the last time I saw this person? How different or the same does this person look? I don’t think I’d seen the friend I ran into today in over two years, yet she looked exactly as I remembered her; it’s like she hadn’t aged a single day. She told me that I looked even younger than the last time she saw me, which I found really hard to believe because I feel like I’ve aged ten years since then. We really are more critical about ourselves than we should be.

An even smaller world

Posted on by
Reply

Tonight, Chris and I went to meet a friend of mine who is dating someone new that he met online, and as soon as I made eye contact with her, I knew immediately she was someone I’d seen before. I soon found out that yes, she was originally from San Francisco, and yes, she went to my high school and was three years ahead of me. The reason she was familiar to me was that she was actually the student body president when I was a freshman at Lowell. What a small world. Of course, she had no idea who I was since then, I was just a lowly freshman while she was a senior, but it was interesting getting to know someone who I kind of already knew, and who was dating a good friend of mine here in New York.

She was pretty spooked that I already knew who she was and that we went to the same high school. She said that she never really talked much about high school or being in student government, or even about San Francisco. Why? I asked her. She said she’s just a different person now and is so different than what she was in high school. “But every interesting person has a past,” I said to her, smiling. Our experiences are what make us. Sure, I don’t think it’s necessary for her to share with everyone she meets that she used to be student body president when she was in high school, but I do think it’s important that people know where she’s lived and been to see how she has evolved. I don’t think I’m the same person as I was in high school, but I do think it’s a part of my life that was important that’s helped me get to where I am today. Now, I know a world outside of San Francisco, as she clearly does, but I still have San Francisco as a part of me as she also does. We should never forget the past.

Laundry and cleaning

Posted on by
Reply

I don’t know what it is about New Yorkers, or maybe it’s just my colleagues in my office, but I don’t seem to know anyone who does their own laundry. A number of my colleagues have laundry in their buildings, yet they don’t do laundry themselves. They have their laundry dropped off at a neighborhood cleaners’ and then come back a few days later to pick it up. A few others are using tech startup companies’ apps to have their laundry picked up from their apartments and sent back, all neatly folded and pressed. It’s like hearing about people doing their own laundry is a rarity. We do our laundry in our basement, but we had to get a few jackets of Chris’s dry-cleaned, so I was lucky enough to find a reasonably priced cleaner just two blocks from our apartment. I noticed they had a sign posted for cleaning leather bags, so I asked the worker how much it would cost to clean my small Kate Spade bag. “For your bag? Eight-five dollars,” she said. “It’s expensive because we outsource it!”

Eighty-five dollars to clean a bag that cost less than four times that same amount? No, thanks. People are way too high maintenance in this neighborhood if that is really a considered a “reasonable” price.

Donation from a stranger

Posted on by
Reply

Yesterday, I got an e-mail notification that someone I did not know donated $100 to my AFSP donor drive. When I logged into my account and read the message from this person, I realized it was a friend of my cousin’s. She said she found my work admirable to help others in light of this tragedy, and that my cousin spoke often about my brother, considering him like a little brother. He told her that he thought about my brother often.

While that sounds very touching, the sad part about that is that it’s easy for an outsider to think that my cousin cared a lot. My cousin rarely paid my brother any attention. He hadn’t spoken with him in over three months before he died. Sure, he sent him birthday and Christmas gifts, but part of love is actually being there and giving attention.

I’m grateful for the generous donation, but I’m just sad that this friend has no clue what the real story behind my cousin is.

Degrees of shared experience

Posted on by
Reply

I was in my office kitchen cutting fruit yesterday when a colleague walked up to me to express her condolences about my brother. She was on the limited e-mail list I sent out to colleagues, letting them know I was participating in the Queens AFSP Out of the Darkness walk this year, and requesting a donation if they wanted to contribute. She told me that she admired my courage in sharing and discussing something so hard so openly, and she found my story very well written and heart felt.

She also told me that her best friend from college had a brother who also committed suicide. It happened when they were in college. She’s in her thirties now, and she said that to this day, her friend won’t admit to anyone that the cause of her brother’s death was suicide, and she refuses to discuss it openly with anyone — even her, and they are best friends. How did you know it was suicide? I asked her. Apparently, they found her brother and were there when the EMT came and pronounced it self-inflicted. She said it was obvious from the scene that it was suicide.

“That’s why I think it’s great what you are doing,” my colleague said to me. “It’s amazing that you can be so open about it because I really think it will help other people be more open to talking about something so sensitive.”

That’s easier said than done. Every time I get another donation notification, I feel all at once this overwhelming sensation of gratitude, and simultaneously a sense of misery that my own brother is dead as a result of his own doing.

Flight changes

Posted on by
Reply

I spent a good chunk of my day today booking airline travel and hotel accommodation to then have it all rescheduled by a client, which led me needing to call both the airline and hotel and change the reservations on non-exchangeable, non-refundable rates. That was a lot of fun. It was even more fun when I was told by a sour American Airlines agent that I would be charged a $200 change fee despite the fact that it was within the 24-hour window to get the amount credited to a different flight. The agent was not polite at all and insisted that 24-hour hold policy replaced the 24-hour cancellation window.

That’s the thing about boring day jobs where all you do are repetitive actions. There’s no real excitement to the day, so you feel a need to be a little mean to your innocent customers when they just have simple requests. It adds some element of fun to your day, right, to be a little mean and fierce to people you don’t know and will never meet eyes with? I don’t really believe in karma, so I won’t make a comment about karma. But I will say that if you hate your job, you should either quit or at least search for a new job and not take it out on innocent strangers.

Oh, America

Posted on by
Reply

Last year, Chris’s younger brother quit his job and left Toronto to move back to Australia. But before he did that, he spent about two months traveling around Southeast and South Asia, exploring areas that I haven’t been to yet, including Nepal, India, and the country side of Malaysia.

Is it sad that the first thing I think of when someone quits their job to go travel for an extended period of time is health insurance? What will they do for health insurance? What will they do if something happens to them, God forbid? Oh, wait. Ben is an Australian citizen. Australia has universal healthcare. He doesn’t have to worry about what happens to him because job or no job, he has health insurance fully covered.

Even with Obamacare now, it’s scary to think about not having a job and relying on the broken system that we have now. I just can’t understand people who don’t think that the right to life also means the right to healthcare, because without health, what do we have? We don’t really have a life, do we? The concerns that plague us as young Americans aren’t even thoughts at all in the minds of people in Canada and Australia, who don’t have to worry about these same senseless things. I thought about this when a client told me her colleague left the company to travel Thailand for a third of the year. Maybe she didn’t get health insurance and just winged it. Let life take its course!

I’m too much of a thinker to be that spontaneous, though.

Question from God

Posted on by
Reply

Last night, I dreamt that Ed and I were in line to go into a small room one by one, and he went into the room first. He stayed in there for about ten minutes and came out. What’s going on in there? Well, I found out that we’re all in line to meet with God. God is sitting in that room waiting for each of us to come inside, and he asks each of us the exact same question. The question is: What day do you think you will die?

Ed explains this all to me when he exited the room. “So what did you respond with when he asked that?” I ask him. He looks at me plainly. “July 22, 2013,” he replies. I felt sick immediately, and I ask him why he said that date. Why that date in particular? “Take it back,” I say to him sternly. “Tell him it won’t be that date!” He continues to look at me without much expression on his face, and he doesn’t respond. I get frustrated. “I don’t want to go in there,” I said, beginning to feel angry. “I don’t want to hear that question, and I don’t want to answer it.” He still says nothing.

Honestly, I wasn’t even thinking about what day I would die. I was fixated on the fact that Ed decided that he would die on July 22, 2013. I didn’t want it to be true, even if that date is already over two years ago. Even in my dreams, I don’t want to believe it.

Sometimes, I really hate reality. I hate the fact that he is gone. I’m not saying life would be perfect for him or for me if he were still here. In fact, his life probably would still be miserable if he were still with us. But I hate thinking about the fact that my brother is dead. Today is just one of those difficult days.

A book of feelings

Posted on by
Reply

Tonight, before the show we were planning to see in the theater district, Chris and I spent some time browsing at Kinokuniya bookstore right across the street from Bryant Park. I hadn’t browsed in a bookstore in what felt like ages, so it was nice to skim a bunch of different books, from topics on business, travel, fiction, memoir, tidying, and even the kids’ section. I jotted down a number of titles that piqued my interest to read reviews about and consider reading, but funny enough, one book that really caught my attention was a children’s book called In My Heart: A Book of Feelings. The book has a big heart cut out from the center of it, and as you flip the pages, the heart becomes smaller and smaller. Each page describes a different emotion and why one would feel this way. I was so struck by the descriptions and the general heart depiction and how creative it was that I immediately noted it down as a potential gift for young parents.

As adults today, a large chunk of society struggles with showing their feelings, whether it’s physically or emotionally or mentally. It’s really sad. I realized that a large majority of my friends struggle to be really open with me about their feelings, whether it’s about things they think about on their own, or even if it’s around my brother’s death. When I messaged a friend earlier today that I was really touched by her generous donation to my AFSP donor drive, instead of making a personalized comment about my feelings or Ed’s life, she simply responded, “It’s a great cause.” Why are we so removed from feeling as adults — aren’t we supposed to be mature enough now to just feel? Is it because we were never taught these things growing up? Was it because it needed to be taught, to allow our feelings to be expressed and to be expressive in general?

It’s so frustrating. How do I meet and befriend people who can just be real with me and say it as they feel it?

Fundraising continued

Posted on by
Reply

How do people continue to fund raise for the same cause year after year? How do they sustain donor attention and donor support from the same people in their circles?

I’ve realized that a lot of the donations I’ve gotten for the AFSP donor drive are from people who are new to me, mainly colleagues that have started within the last year, after I did my first Out of the Darkness walk, who would not otherwise know my story about my brother. Three of my colleagues were incredibly generous and donated $100 each; I was so shocked and touched at the same time. But would they still donate next year, or the year after that, and the year after that? My story will evolve every year, but how do I keep people understanding that this is not just a one-time effort to get attention, that I really believe in what I am fund raising for, and that I believe we as human beings have a bigger purpose in this life other than just earning money and earning a living and simply existing?

I don’t know how to answer that. I just have to ignore the people who ignore my cause, otherwise my cynicism will grow, which is exactly what I don’t want. My level of cynicism should either stay the same or go down. Otherwise, Ed will probably be pissed at me.