This whole year, I’ve managed to make one new friend, and he just happens to live in New Jersey, which clearly is not that convenient. Our hangouts have usually been during lunch since we work fairly close to each other, yet given his 1.5 hour commute each way between home and the office, after work doesn’t work, and on weekends, he usually stays in Jersey. I’ve become like the Chris in our friendship — he has shared quite a bit with me, but I haven’t shared much with him that is below the surface.

We were chatting over Google Chat today, and I was telling him about my weekend plans for theater, making dosa, watching the Australian Grand Final (or really, sitting next to Chris while he watches it and I pretend to watch), among other things. He said to me, you have such a happy life. Things seem so good for you. I smiled when I read this. There’s a lot you have no idea about, I responded.

It’s not that I don’t agree with him. I know that overall, I do have a happy life. I live in a city that I love, I work in a buzzing industry with pretty attractive remuneration, I have a life partner who is fully here for me in every possible way, I travel a lot and pursue many different interests and hobbies, and I have friends I love who care about me.

But like the majority of us in the developed world, I have what is known as the deficit attention disorder — I pay attention to what is missing or not good. I think about my unstable mother, my emotionally void father, their dysfunctional marriage and dilapidated and cluttered accident-prone home, and our overall dysfunctional and contentious wider family. I think about Ed and how and why he died. I think about how I don’t have a living brother anymore and how that will plague me the rest of my life, and how no one really can understand that unless they’ve experienced the same thing. I actually said that to my friend the other day over the phone — “I think his death is going to plague me until I die.” The response was total silence. What kind of response am I expecting when I say something like that, anyway?

My mom called tonight to voice her concern at the potential thought that we may decide to have a church wedding. It took some time to calm her down and confirm with her that no, we would not be having a church wedding. She launched into a repeated, angry rant (I’ve heard this rant at least 50 times in the last seven years) regarding my second oldest cousin, who married a woman who was born Catholic, barely practiced it, yet insisted that my cousin convert to Catholicism so that she could have her dream Catholic church wedding. What this ultimately meant for my cousin’s mom and my own mom was that neither of them could watch my cousin get married since they are Jehovah’s Witnesses, and apparently JWs cannot enter another religion’s house of worship. They sat in a car outside the church for the entire three-hour ceremony in the summer of 2007.

At the time, I wasn’t that happy about the situation. No where in the JW version of the Bible does it explicitly state that you cannot enter another religion’s church, yet the “elders” at the congregation advised both my aunt and my mom not to do it. But what annoyed me even more than this was that my cousin’s now wife completely disregarded her future mother-in-law. She didn’t care that her husband’s mother wouldn’t see them get married. It was her wedding, so she wanted it the way she wanted it (my cousin has no balls or opinion, so clearly he did not speak at all during this). At the time I thought, wow, this is just going to pave the way for a very unpleasant future relationship between my aunt and her first daughter-in-law. In the end, I predicted correctly — it’s been terrible ever since.

I can see both sides to the situation, but at the end of the day, I would never do something explicitly against what my future in-laws wanted, especially if it were something as significant as our wedding. It wouldn’t speak well to how I feel about them and “consider” their feelings, and it also doesn’t set a good precedent for future relations. Yet at the same time in this situation, I don’t have a strong feeling about a church wedding; in fact, I am more opposed to it than for it. Neither of us is particularly religious. He was baptized Christian and does nothing Christian anymore, and I believe in God and practice nothing. Having a church wedding in our case would just seem like we were being phony or trying to please his parents or grandmothers. It would certainly not please anyone on my side.

Tonight, I went to see a play with a friend called I Like to Be Here: Jackson Heights Revisited, Or, This is a Mango. It was probably one of the best shows I’ve seen in a while, and my friend and I were laughing almost the entire time because of the ethnic interpretations and the very not politically correct statements made.

Jackson Heights is a neighborhood in Queens that I frequented several times a month when I lived in Queens, as it was just two stops away (or about a 25-minute walk) from my old Elmhurst apartment, and even now that I’ve moved into Manhattan, I go there about every couple of months. I’ve always looked at it as a fun, boisterous area full of immigrants, primarily from South Asia and Latin America, but with a good sprinkling of pretty much every ethnicity known to humans. It was portrayed as such in this play, but then I suppose my “yuppie” status was made obvious.

There’s a scene where an assumed to be middle-class white man bumps into a poorer Latina woman (who is a prostitute trying to earn more money to support her child and 10 other relatives in a one-bedroom apartment in Jackson Heights). The white man says to the Latina that Jackson Heights is a “historic neighborhood” in New York City and starts talking about the neighborhood’s rich cultural history. The Latina immediately feels and looks annoyed, and she makes it clear to him that this neighborhood is hardly a “historic” neighborhood — it’s a place where poor immigrants just try their best to survive, hence her tiny apartment housing 12 family members. That type of living situation is the norm for her and her neighbors there.

I don’t think I’ve ever thought of Jackson Heights as a “historic neighborhood” — I’ve always looked at it as the spot to get great Indian, Filipino, South American, Mexican, or many other ethnic foods for a really cheap price. It’s the place I can go for great ethnic markets where I can find all the spices and vegetables I could only dream of getting at Fairway or Whole Foods, or God forbid Gristedes. I guess I am closer to that white man in my experiences of Jackson Heights than the Latina woman.

Ever since we got engaged, I’ve been randomly reading different wedding blogs here and there, from standard ones like theknot.com and lover.ly to more practical ones like, well, apracticalwedding.com. Today, I read an article about a marriage that ended because the couple decided from the get-go that they did not want children… until three years later, he changed his mind. And then they divorced.

It was a very simple story; there was nothing incredibly deep or pointed about it. It was really just a story of how people evolve and change, and sometimes, they cannot evolve and change with each other and have to allow the other to change without themselves in the picture in that respect. You might be able to compromise on things like your ideal place to live vs. his because of life circumstances or better career prospects, but you can’t really compromise on something like having children or not. A real person’s life is at stake. If you are the one who didn’t want children, you are giving in to a life that you did not want and responsibilities you never cared to have, and it could end in resentment for your partner and your innocent child.

It made me feel sad to read this. All this talk about vows and spending the rest of our lives together and “’til death do us part” made me think about all the “unknowns” out there that could face us as our life continues, the positives and the negatives. It scares me a little to think of the challenges in our future and how much of what makes up our lives is completely out of my own control, of our own control even.

I recently read a book about friendships that talks about how all of your friends that you choose in your life fall into one of eight important friend categories. I’d say that of all the friend categories, I’m probably the worst connector. It’s not that I choose to not introduce my friends to each other. The problem is that my friends generally do not like each other or “click” much. And when trying to get connected, I don’t always get along that well with my friends’ friends. Or maybe I should stop saying that because I recently was introduced to a guy friends’ friends, and we got along quite well last week. So maybe the problem is my female friends’ friends?!

I was at my friend’s house last night for dinner with Chris, and she and her boyfriend decided to take us to her friend’s house party that wasn’t too far away. I was a little bit out of it since I’d had a bit to drink, but I realized that not a single person even tried to talk to me. I tried talking to one person, but it fell a bit flat. Was I dressed differently? Did I have a death stare (I highly doubt this)? The entire ambiance felt like a high school party, and somehow, I just felt so old the entire time I was there and wanted to leave. I didn’t want to be rude about it, so I stayed for some time to try to give it a chance, and we eventually left. i noticed that Chris didn’t talk to anyone, either, and I saw no one approach him. The last thing I heard someone say to us as we waited for our Uber was that we “don’t need to wait behind the gate; it’s safe to stand on the sidewalk.” Yes, because apparently we give off the vibe that we never hang out in Bushwick.

My friend and I will never be each others’ connectors, sadly, even if we did try.