Last night, I had dinner with a former colleague who got… fired. She’s happy now at another company, and we’ve kept in touch since her departure. Over wine and salad, we chatted about what she’s been up to since leaving, and she told me that although there were people who had not reached out to her at my company who she was friends with, she was sure that they did care. I couldn’t hide my irritation at her naivete and flat out told her that she was deluded if she thought that they actually cared; if they were “friends,” wouldn’t they have already reached out to her even once during this whole time?!

She didn’t readily believe me until I told her without any details that my brother passed away last July, and there were a number of people who saw me afterwards (when I went back to my old company to drop off my security card and laptop) and said that they “had wanted” to reach out, but they weren’t sure what to say, so they didn’t say anything. Yes, because inaction proves that you care – it actually says more about how you don’t care. Well, to be fair, I have some friends who are so emotionally fucked up that their own emotional blocks prevented them from reaching out to me, and they are still my friends today. Either way, my point was that when your life really sucks – when someone significant in your life dies, you lose your job, your house burns down – those are the most revealing moments in your life when it comes to determining who really cares and who doesn’t. And when you’ve come to that realization, you become aware that the people who don’t care aren’t worth any of your time.

After that story, she believed me and said she wouldn’t reach out to those people.

After dinner ended and I took the train home, I got out at my subway stop and checked my phone. I received a text from my newly employed friend that said, “July is not far away. Can we do something on the anniversary, for your brother?” I could feel my eyes well up with tears when I read this. I realize that I haven’t actively thought about the “anniversary” much, except when during my last meeting with my therapist, she told me to be aware that I might get moody as the day approached, and I may not be conscious of it at all. She told me that I should think about what I might want to do, if anything, to remember him on that day.

I’m not sure what I want to do honestly. But I get a warm, hopeful feeling knowing that there are people who want to help me remember Ed.

I am in shock that we’ve reached the sixth month of the year already. I feel like there are a lot of things I need to do that I haven’t even started. I guess that’s the feeling in general when you have a long list of goals to accomplish – you can never feel like you’ve accomplished enough of them, otherwise it’s as though you are telling yourself that you’re not challenging yourself enough.

And when the weather gets warmer and the air more humid, I tend to get sleepier. This summer needs to be a productive summer – there are too many things to do and cook and eat and see, and a lot of things I promised I would do for Ed. Laziness is not allowed.

We’re spending the weekend in Detroit, and we started the day at the Ford Rouge Factory and ended it with a walk around the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor campus and drinks in the area. As we walked around the campus, I thought about the way I looked at the world before leaving San Francisco to go to school in the Boston area and thought about how narrow-minded I was before.

The truth is that I think that in general, all of us see ourselves as being “open-minded” people, even when perhaps none of us really are. I’m not saying that we’re each individually to blame for our narrow-mindedness because a lot of it is based on lack of experience, which is only gained with time, and also exposure (or lack thereof) to things that are outside of our comfort zone and familiar haunts. Before 18, that’s mostly controlled by your parents and where you live. By default, your exposure is limited. But post-18, and especially post-college, we do have to accept responsibility for our actions and the way we think (to a degree with the latter… I suppose).

These are just some embarrassing examples of things I was not aware of or thought pre-Wellesley. Some seem like they are trivial or not deal breakers in terms of judging “level of intelligence,” but when I look back on these things, I can feel my face grow hot:

1. Cantonese food is not the only Chinese food there is. That applies to one province, which in the grand scheme of China, though it’s taken seriously as a top Chinese cuisine, is not the center of China.

2. Vietnamese refugees ended up all over the United States after the Vietnam War, not just California. Minority populations started popping up in places I never would have guessed before, like Texas, Minnesota, Louisiana, and Arkansas. I made friends with Vietnamese women from all of these states.

3. A Boston accent exists, as does a Bronx, Staten Island, Queens, and Long Island accent. Not just people in the South and Midwest have “accents.” I have an accent, too, apparently.

4. Burritos are not really Mexican. They are a Mexican/American/fusion-type dish. No burritos exist in Mexico unless for some reason, someone thought they’d bring it from the U.S. into Mexico.

5. The world does not revolve around San Francisco or any other place I might choose to live in. San Francisco is not representative of the rest of the country and sure as hell not the world. The Chinese population is not as big, the Korean population is not as small, and almost no other place I will ever go to will be as politically correct 24/7. There’s are great benefits to living in a city as diverse as San Francisco, but the danger behind that is that we may end up thinking it’s like that everywhere else. I’ve had colleagues in LA who did not believe me when I told them how few Asians there were in cities like St. Louis.

6. I’m going to wait until marriage to have sex, and I think most other people should, too (yes, really).

If I never left San Francisco (or California for that matter) and met people from around the country and world at the college I went to, I may not have realized a lot of these things. Yes, it’s great to have a place to call home, but it’s not great or healthy to live in my old glass menagerie thinking that what is immediately around me is the same as what everyone else has or experiences.