What it’s like

Posted on by
Reply

This morning, I read this Vice article written by a woman whose best friend is suicidal. It was interesting to see another person’s perspective of interacting with someone with a severe mental illness and how she was coping with it. If I had to write an article like this about Ed, I’m not even sure where I’d begin. Would I begin it with his first suicide attempt when I was 11? Would I isolate it to his downward spiral from 2012 to 2013 when he started exhibiting schizoaffective disorder, and how I knew he was nearing his end, so I kept telling him I loved him and cared about him and that I needed him to be strong and believe in himself because I believed in him in every single phone conversation and e-mail up until that dreaded day he went missing? I don’t know.

What’s it like to be friends with someone who is suicidal, or to have a sibling who is suicidal and then commits suicide? I know what that’s like. No one really cares about your experience as the friend or the sibling. They just tell you that everyone has to carry their own load, that he has to figure things out for himself and stop leaning on you. No one wants to help you. They think you are pathetic for wanting to help. And they certainly don’t want to help him. So you are powerless, and you feel even more powerless as the days go on because you can tell the end is near. They think he’s crazy or not worth the time or effort, or they criticize him and make him seem that all his failures are his own fault… That is, until they receive the news that he is no longer living, that he is dead, and that he is dead by his own choice, or hand, or jump. Then they come back to you and say senseless, moronic things like, “If only I had known it was this serious, then…” Then what? Then you wouldn’t have done shit. You wouldn’t have done a single thing differently. Go ahead and cry your stupid tears. I don’t care that you are crying. You will cry at the funeral, feel bad for the next few days, at most a few weeks, and then move on with your life. The past has then passed, and you have forgotten. It’s easy for an outsider.

It’s really hard to have faith in human beings when you know how stupid they can be in times like this. How do you teach empathy to people who are just not open to it?

Fish

Posted on by
Reply

This weekend, we went to Whole Foods so that I could pick out some wild fish to prepare for dinner tonight. We ended up picking out some bluefish fillets that were priced at $9.99/lb. At Whole Foods, this sounds fairly affordable, but after paying almost $19 for four fillets, it seemed like quite a lot of money to spend on just a handful of meals. And considering that bluefish was once considered the fish that fisherman tossed back into the sea and fed to other fish, it’s quite a markup. Once upon a time at a local grocery store in Cambridge, MA, you could get great and fresh bluefish fillets for less than $4/lb.

It’s a decent amount of money to spend, but I rather spend money on a fish that’s rich and fatty like this than a boring, bland white fish. I don’t understand people who want to eat fish but don’t like the actual taste or smell of a real fish. Fish like halibut and tilapia have no real, distinct flavor. There’s little way to tell one white fish from another in terms of flavor because they have none. Like articles I’ve read about bluefish have said, bluefish is for people who want to know they are eating fish, not people who want to eat fish but don’t want to taste fish.

Graduation

Posted on by
Reply

This weekend, people across the country will be graduating. I have a few friends who are graduating this weekend. One is finishing business school. Another is getting her long-awaited medical degree, which was delayed by a year because of her cancer diagnosis in 2013. I personally thought undergraduate was long enough. I had little doubt in my mind when I finished my undergraduate work that I would probably never set foot on a campus for additional study ever again.

I think learning is a lot fun when you do it at your own pace, when you don’t have to get graded on some dumb bell curve based on a test you spent weeks of sleepless nights studying for. Some of the best learning I’ve had is during my travels, re-learning all the U.S. history I glossed over through formal schooling, and through books I’ve voluntarily read myself since college. I’ve also learned a lot meeting different people and speaking to different people. I knew unless I was crazy passionate about a certain topic, I’d never do graduate school. So I didn’t.

If I had to turn the clock back, and if I really thought I could do anything this past week, I wondered what my life would have been like if I decided to pursue a social science like sociology or even political science. I’ve always been interested in how people interact in groups, how the dynamics change, and how our societies have been formed based on historical and personal life events. Being an academic isn’t all boring and theoretical as people think it is; many politicians such as Elizabeth Warren, whose book I am reading now, started in academia and are now influencing the entire country, if not the world. I would like to have a bigger influence on something, but what that something is — it’s still unknown. I still haven’t figured out what I’m going to be when I grow up.

Phone chat

Posted on by
Reply

A friend and I were catching up over the phone the other day, and we ended up spending over three hours on the phone. I really didn’t think the call would last that long, maybe half as long at most. She’s my friend who wants to be friends with everyone, who wants to give everyone a chance to “hang out” because of her mindset that the more, the merrier. There were brief times in my life when I have agreed with this sentiment, but for the most part, I disagree.

She told me that as she has gotten older, she’s realized that sometimes she really doesn’t want to do any small talk to get to know a new person as bad as that sounded, that sometimes, she just wants to eat and drink with people she knows and ignore the people she doesn’t. Does that sound bad? She asked me.

Not really, I said. It just means you are getting older and have realize that you can’t be friends with everyone, nor do you want to be. It won’t bring more happiness. If anything, it just provides a false sense of security. How many of these people are going to really care or cry if we died tomorrow?

I really am a disappointed optimist.

Upwardly Global gala

Posted on by
Reply

Tonight, Chris and I were invited by a good friend of mine to the annual Upwardly Global gala. My friend actively volunteers and was previously a board member of this organization, which is a nonprofit that helps work-authorized immigrants find jobs here in the U.S. My friend has been actively volunteering with Upwardly Global since 2008, so it’s a cause he’s very passionate about. Unfortunately, the goals of the organization do not jive very well with Chris, who is an immigrant in this country and thinks that the organization glosses over the hardest part about being an immigrant in this country — actually getting into this country and achieving legal work authorization, either via a work visa or the much coveted green card. I agree that the organization does gloss that over, but it’s not what its goal is. I can’t even imagine a nonprofit that actually helped with that process and the types of legal fees and overhead they would need to spend. It’s a separate struggle to get work in this country even with work authorization, and that’s what Upwardly Global strives to do.

What I am not a fan of in terms of nonprofits and donating to them is the perceived “black hole” that donations go into. If I am donating to an organization, I want to know that my dollars are actually going to something tangible that I can see having an effect. The saddest part about a lot of nonprofits is that so many of the donation dollars end up going towards hazy “administrative costs,” and not toward the actual work that the organization is striving to do. I asked my friend where the tickets costs ($500 each) were going, and he said he wasn’t sure and that it would be decided by the board. That’s not really a good sign. I was grateful to be invited and to attend, but I’m just not sure about this black hole. It also didn’t put a good taste in my mouth that all the servers at Guastavino’s barely spoke English and also couldn’t tell me what they were serving. They had no idea what type of fish they were giving me, and when they told me that dessert was pineapple upside down cake, it was actually a horrendous peach cobber with peaches that tasted canned. These are the people we should really be helping through this organization, right? Well, I guess we can’t because these people probably don’t have green cards.

At least I know that one nonprofit I fund raise for, AFSP, keeps its administrative costs below 25 percent.

Time famine

Posted on by
Reply

I was reading this article yesterday on advice that a number of successful people would give the 22-year-old versions of themselves. Arianna Huffington was interviewed for this, and she said that the concept of “time famine,” or not having enough time to accomplish all the things we want in life, can have a very dire impact on our happiness and stress levels. I’m reading what she has said, and I thought, wow, that really applies to me.

I’m always thinking about ways to be more efficient and to accomplish things in a smaller amount of time, whether that means multitasking or finding shortcuts for things. It’s part of the reason I started listening to audio books. I figured that while I am walking or taking the subway from point A to point B, I could get some learning done, whether it’s from a book or a podcast I can listen to along the way. Sometimes when I am catching up with a non-local friend, I will put her on speaker phone and work on my scrapbook as we chat, or prepare my lunch for the next day. And even at work with something as simple as preparing tea, I will steep my tea first while I cut my morning fruit so that once I’m done cutting, I can then add the milk to the tea and toss the tea bag. It’s gotten a little bit ridiculous, but I don’t even think about that process anymore. I just do it.

I’m not sure if being more efficient and accomplishing more is always a good thing, though. My mindset is so programmed in that way that sometimes, when I look back at everything I’ve completed in a day, I am mind boggled at myself for all those things, but then I want to one-up myself and accomplish even more. And then I tire myself out.

“Mother’s Day” celebrating

Posted on by
Reply

Since my mother is a Jehovah’s Witness, she doesn’t celebrate holidays since that’s against their religion. She officially converted when I was around 18, so since then, I haven’t been allowed to say things like “Happy Mother’s Day” or “Merry Christmas” or even “Happy birthday!” to her. However, we should note that just because she doesn’t celebrate these things on the day of, she still expects an acknowledgment of some sort, particularly in the form of a gift. My mother loves gifts. She just doesn’t want them on the day of Mother’s Day or the day of her birthday. Sometime around that date would suit her just fine. So this Mother’s Day, I did wish someone a Happy Mother’s Day, just not my mother. I also didn’t send a gift the week before Mother’s Day because I figured I would send one to her the week after. It just has to be around the day, right? Wrong. She was pissed. I called her yesterday after work, and she irritatingly asks me where I’ve been all weekend and why I never called. “Did you know that yesterday was Mother’s Day?” she said icily. “You never called!” Well, actually, I did call on Sunday, but no one answered the phone. They have caller ID, but she insists I never called and was lying. She’s always right, I guess.

You can’t be a part of a religion that refuses to celebrate holidays and then expect an acknowledgment of the holiday on another day and with a gift. That’s not really how religion works… or should work. Either be a part of your chosen religion and accept the things it forces you to do or live without, or be free and do what you want!

“The subway is so gross”

Posted on by
Reply

Today in the elevator going up to my office, I’m standing with two women, both of whom do not live in the city and made that very clear. They’re both grumbling about how warm it’s becoming (New Yorkers never seem to be happy with the weather). This is the conversation I overhear:

Woman 1: It’s getting really hot outside (makes a face). Did you take the subway here?

Woman 2: Eww, no! I walked. The train is disgusting!

Woman 1: I know. It’s so gross. I walked here from Grand Central, too.

Why do people work and live in the New York City area if they are going to complain about how “gross” and “disgusting” the subway is? The New York City subway is one of the most extensive subway systems in the world, and we’re really privileged to have it and not be forced to drive everywhere in massive congestion and road rage. Some people seem to love reveling in their ignorance and ivory towers. Stop complaining, everyone. Just take it for what it is, or leave.

Mother’s Day

Posted on by
Reply

Today, it is Mother’s Day. It doesn’t mean that much for my family or me given that my mom and closest aunt are Jehovah’s Witnesses, so I can’t really wish them a Happy Mother’s Day or send flowers or gifts. But it’s a reminder to me yet again about the hard life my mother has lived and all the pain she’s endured that I only know a fraction of.

She doesn’t celebrate Mother’s Day, but I know she thinks about it. She probably thinks about her life as a mother to Ed and me, and how Ed is no longer with us. I’m sure that hurts a lot to know that you gave birth to and were a mother to your son for over 33 years, and then he took his life by jumping off a bridge. That son is no longer here. He’s dead. I feel a lot of pain when I think about the sequence of events even on the day of and leading to my brother’s death. The more time passes, the less it’s really about pain for myself and my parents as it is for pain for Ed, to think about how he felt, his suffering, and how he just wanted all the pain and agony to end. He just wanted some quiet. When I think of this, I feel even worse and think I could have done more. I get angry at myself because I know I had only spoken to him briefly on the Friday before that Monday, and at length on the Wednesday before that Monday. I knew he was reaching his limit. It’s a terrible thing to feel powerless to help someone you really love. And it’s even worse to think that as a mother, you cannot help your child enough to save him and his life.

Being a mother – what a scary thing. I’m reading Elizabeth’s Warren’s A Fighting Chance now, and I just finished reading Wendy Davis’s memoir. Like they say, being a mother never “ends,” and it rarely gets easier, especially from a emotional level of attachment. Maybe when your child is a teen or a full grown adult, you won’t need to spoon feed him or change his diapers or rock him to sleep, but that doesn’t make him any less your baby. Ed will always be my mom’s baby, just like I am, even if he isn’t physically here anymore.

Recipe for love

Posted on by
Reply

Yesterday, I was reading one of my favorite food blogs, Smitten Kitchen, and Deb, the blogger, says in one of her posts that the sour cream coffee cake she makes could be the dish that made her now husband realize she was The One. She said that after she made this cake for him, shortly after, he asked her to marry him. And so began their journey cooking and photographing together in their tiny Manhattan kitchen. The coffee cake became the reason he married her, or so she wants to believe.

I thought about this in the context of me and Chris. Since we have moved in together about three years ago now, I’ve made so many different things that I can’t really keep track of what has been his favorite. I’ve made more use of this teeny tiny kitchen than probably anyone else in the history of this building even existing. This kitchen has seen some crazy three-day process dishes, as well as complex pastries like croissant. I asked him if he could name a dish I’ve made for him that he’d say was the one he’d name as the The Dish, and he said that I rarely make the same thing twice, so it was hard to name. Now that I think about it, the only real repeats this apartment has seen are banh xeo, appam, Kerala chicken stew, banana bread, pumpkin bread, pad thai, and different versions of oatmeal and chocolate chip cookies and fried rice. Nothing else has ever been a repeat.

It’s hard to repeat a dish when there are infinite recipes out there on the internet that I’ve bookmarked, as well as too many cookbooks here in the apartment that I neglect as a result. I guess Chris can’t name a favorite dish because they’re all his favorite dishes since I made them. 🙂