I’m going to admit this out loud: I actually miss my parents today. I saw them for five days in San Francisco and came back here, and well, they aren’t here. I go through a lot of complicated emotions when it comes to my parents. I love them dearly and know that they’ve done a lot for me to have the life I am so fortunate and privileged to have today. But I also grapple with the way they chose to treat Ed, in life and in death, and I struggle with the individuals that they are.

As loving and affectionate as my mother is, she can be extremely controlling and manipulative, much to the detriment of our relationship and the relationships she shares with everyone else, even including my dad. And as goofy and cute as my dad can be, he’s emotionally removed, childish and holds grudges like there’s no tomorrow, which drives me mad when I am with him for extended periods of time. I realized this past weekend that whenever I leave my dad now, I always hug him, and he actually hugs me back. And I realized that “now” means after Ed has passed. When Ed was still here, my dad never hugged me. The most he’d never do is pat me on the back when I tried to hug him. It’s a little different now, though, between us, I guess.

Sometimes, I wish I could see them more often, just in shorter bouts of time. I wish I could see them a little bit more than just two to four times a year when I fly home, usually for about a week and a half at a time. But then I remember how tense it can be when we’re together for too long, and I think that maybe we see each other just enough. I don’t know. Maybe I’m not sure what I want.

Today, I spent the majority of my day at the Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park for an all-day client meeting. Between endless meetings and presentations, I got to enjoy the perks that Facebook employees and guests get to relish during their visits to the Facebook campus: endless varied food options, from cold pressed, fresh squeezed juices to on-campus smoked BBQ, even crispy bacon vs. soft bacon as options (it’s *that* specific and catered to individual tastes here); a free for all ice cream and desserts shop; fully covered washed and folded laundry; even a poster printing workshop where you can create posters with images and messages to your heart’s content. The conference rooms have fun names like “Chips and Salsa,” and around every corner, there is a snack bar full of Mighty Leaf tea bags, an espresso maker, and at least 15 different types of energy and granola bars. The Facebook Fifteen is a true reality for most new employees.

If Ed were a ghost, he’d be a friendly one. I know this because whenever I come back to our house in San Francisco, although the air is cold and slightly damp, it never feels hostile the way you think it would if someone who once lived here committed suicide. The room we once shared growing up seems bright and warm. I know his energy still lingers all over this house, but especially in areas where he spent a lot of time, such as on the long couch in the living room, his desk in the dining room, and his bed in our bedroom, which we kept because my mom couldn’t bear to give it up. After all this time, it’s not like the energy of a dead person that lingers, but rather the energy of someone who is still alive and out there, somewhere.

Since he passed away, every time I’ve come home, one of the first things I do is dust and sponge clean his old dresser in our room. I clean his framed photo and dust the vases. I sponge off the top surface of the dresser as though it’s never been wiped before. It’s where my mom displays the large framed photograph of him that we had up during his funeral. It’s surrounded by two vases, two orchid plants that were given to us when he passed, and a koala stuffed animal I bought in Melbourne. I also leave his service program up there. I noticed that one of the orchids is actually budding right now and about to bloom. Maybe it senses that Ed’s two-year anniversary mark is coming, so it’s time to start flowering.

I’m not fully sure how I developed this routine. I think I became a little obsessive about doing it because in some way, it felt like a way that I was acknowledging him, like, “Hey, Ed! I’m home! I’m here! Can you see me now? I’m touching you! I’m cleaning after you like I did when you were alive!” I always want to see and communicate with him, so maybe this is my weird way of attempting to be more in-your-face with him, even though his face clearly isn’t here.

Two damn years. I still can’t believe it.

I just finished reading the last two Freakonomics books, Think Like a Freak and When to Rob a Bank. I’ve also been listening to their once a week podcasts during my walks and workouts. I’ve re-thought a lot of things since listening to their podcasts and stories, ideas that most people would be against. Some examples include not thinking big (who would have thought? But actually, this makes a lot of sense to me since I’m into the micro and the details, so I suppose I am biased), failure is not always a bad thing (seems to be a relatively new thought given tech startups and the new ways that we raise our children today to test different things out to find their passions and strengths), and that drunk walking is actually far more dangerous than drunk driving. I enjoyed their first two books a lot, but the third one just seemed like a recycling of their podcasts and blogs, so it was a bit disappointing.

One thing that they brought up that I’ve been pretty cognizant of since I was young thanks to my frugal parents is food waste. As much as 30 to 40 percent of food is wasted in this country — you know, the food that you scrape off your plate at the end of a meal, food that you tried at a buffet that you realized you didn’t like (then why did you take so much of it to begin with?), the vegetables that you left in your vegetable crisper in the fridge for a week too long. As much as 40 percent, I thought — holy crap, that’s a lot of food! Preserving food and trying to make use of all of it has been a slight obsession of mine since I started living on my own. I chop up and freeze leftover vegetables and chicken bones for stock. I freeze buttermilk from desserts I make to use for future pancakes. I even store the little bit of cornmeal I have left in the fridge in the little hope that I will use it in the future for something. The fridge and freezer are like my food waste helpers. Thank goodness for modern technology.

We live in a country of plenty here, so no one really thinks anything of it when they eat just half their plate at dinner at a restaurant and don’t want to doggie bag it. The restaurant just throws it away. When fruit rots in their fridge, it’s no big deal — into the garbage it goes, and then they can go to the market to buy more fruit that they may eat half of and then throw out the rest once it starts molding! It’s a frustrating thing to think about since I’ve been so aware of it from a young age. It’s one of those things that has stayed with me, my parents’ constant reminder that they barely had enough food to eat when they were growing up, that in their mother countries, there are thousands if not millions of starving children, so I try as hard as I can not to waste as much as possible.