This is how I would describe the old days:

Back when I was growing up, people actually had to call each other. I hated it, of course, as the next person, but we had to use our words. Our real fighting words and use all the strength that we had to articulate what we wanted or not want. We had nothing with bright screens in our pockets, no mini computers that we could tuck into our bags. We had to use our minds and our faces to communicate. When we are the movies, it was often blissfully silent, minus the crying baby and talking people.

And then things changed. It started first with flip phones—people forgot to turn them off. Then it was the smart phone. It wasn’t the text messages or the phone calls that became disruptive, but rather the addiction to the apps on these phones. The message, the email, the snap…that had to be read. We had to know what was going on. Because our fear then was the fear of missing out.

That’s how it is now.

Case 1: Yesterday, at a show, I suddenly couldn’t help myself but look at a nearby neighbor’s phone screen. It wasn’t a text message, but her browsing Linkedin. Then it was looking at long email. Then it was looking at a website. Then it was her fidgeting with the phone. Turning it on and off. What was she looking at, I had wondered, that was so much more engaging than what was on stage? What was that interesting? So I peered over. So I followed her eye movements with her phone. Minutes passed as she went from app to app until she noticed that I was watching. Then she put it back into her clutch out of my sight. But she couldn’t help pulling it out 30 seconds later and I whipped my head again toward her direction, the bright light distracting me again. It must be important. So I must know.

Case 2: The show was ending, and the performances were becoming lackluster, whether due to the performers indulging in too much alcohol and weed. I couldn’t tell, but they weren’t on top of their game. But then I heard chatter. “Oh my god,” one girl said. I whipped my head around to hear what they were saying. “sssshh,” someone said. The two girls were laughing and looking at their phone, their voices carrying over the audience and hopefully not into the performers ear. Their conversations must be important, I thought, so after several minutes, I got up and marched over to them, standing right in their space. “So I came over here, because I wanted to know what was so interesting about your conversation.” I said. “Because I can hear you about 25 feet away.” One girl walked away immediately and the other continued talking loudly, her voice now clearly slurring. “You know, I am with my best friends and they really want me to be here. I don’t know, I don’t really want to be here. But I am, so you know. Like are you even understanding? Do you know what I am? I am obnoxious, I know….” I didn’t understand her words and said something to the effect, “Did you know that everyone can hear you? Your volume is so loud that it’s rude to the people on stage. I care about the people on the stage and want to be respectful. Do you want to be respectful?”

As the New Year approached, I thought of a great resolution: Arrive on time. Eliminate all ideas of lateness.

When I am late, I feel horrible. One of my personal values is following through and keeping to my mind. The idea that I didn’t arrive when I said that I would arrive or when I would deliver something shakes me to my core. The fact that guilt settles into my bloodstream for hours on end that I profusely give apologies (or in some cases, avoidance due to fear) is unsettling.

What if I never was late? Wouldn’t that be crazy?

What if I could always arrive on time so that other people would soon start doing the same?

Because after all, many reasons leading to lateness were usually procrastination, misestimation of the time to travel or to produce, not valuing someone’s time, enjoying my sleeptime. Ridiculous shallow stuff.

But then I thought about the repercussions. Sure, that meant that I would have reduce the time I spend on other activities in order to make sure I arrive on time. Or that I would have to spend more time thoughtfully planning my days and minutes, which isn’t a horrible bad thing.

But the worst part, the one reason why I couldn’t do this as a resolution, was the dependence on factors beyond my control. Whether it was public transit or unforeseen traffic. Or a passenger or a driver that didn’t prioritize the same way I do and made me late. Or even worse, team members that were responsible for delivering something that I couldn’t personally provide due to my lack of skill (or time).

And so as a result that resolution was crushed. The fact that many things that I do rely on others—companies, devices, colleagues—meant that punctuality couldn’t be guaranteed 100% of the time. That I couldn’t predict that someone was “tired” or “just couldn’t get to it”. Or that they overslept. Those images rile me up and there’s so little I could do.

In college, when I was interviewing for a job, I arrived one hour early, partly because I didn’t want to arrive late (and didn’t have anything else planned). The interviewer spotted me in the hallway as I was patiently waiting. “You’re early,” he said.

“Yes,” I smiled. “I’ll wait here.”

“Um…okay,” he said uncomfortably and returned to the conference room.

I always took that as a cue that early was not a good thing. A sign of desperation? A sign that I was not a busy person? I was rejected that year and reapplied the following year, arriving only 10 minutes early. Less than a week later, I got the job.

In the early 2000s, I told the world about what I thought about my roommate and boys. No filter. No censorship. I just wrote what was on mind, even if it was blatantly insulting or self-centered. (Back then, I didn’t quite embody the consideration that I would value in life.) Sure, there were times that it backfired—like my supervisor asking me to take down a post or a former roommate getting angry about my complaints about her demands. But overall, I was allowed to speak freely.

And today is quite a different world.

I have specific goals in mind. Some days, it’s to be a design thought leader. Perhaps some kind of TED speaker. Other days it’s to be a writer. A writer of a beloved novel. Whatever the case, the best path to success involves being spotlit in the public eye. The word matters and the intention behind that word matters.

Today, I read about the terror of J.K. Rowling’s twitter feed. She didn’t want to participate initially, but eventually pulled by its instant congratulations and ego rubbing, she couldn’t resist. In doing so, she alienated fans and disgraced her work.

All because of speaking freely.

How can I be the perfect person all the time? Especially when I am representing myself. And how I certainly don’t want a PR person representing me. I want to show the real me, all the time. And yet. I know how I should portray myself, but is that who I want to be? To create an identity, almost like a brand where there are specific principles and structure to every decision, to every spoken word, and every action.

That’s not what I am. And no rules can capture every aspect of my personality or even its dark side.

When I talk about my recent trip abroad, I hesitate to speak badly of anyone or anything. Because I think, it’s not that I hated it, it’s that only I hated it. The person who is me in that particular sense, so I feel almost constrained in what I say. I didn’t like it, but that doesn’t mean that you won’t like it. That preface floats nearly in front of every sentence that drips from my lips.

But then when I say what I love? It’s easy to spill the beans. People love hearing that. Positivity is the essence of being human. But how can we be like that all the time? Without the darkness penetrating?

to be me is to be me. Whole, imperfect, and real.

In this trip, I experienced near misses of travel mishaps. Mostly around being late for a flight, poor planning for a train, etc. Like packing too much? But did we learn a lesson? I turned to Chris each time after we resolved those stressful points and mimicked his mother when she admonished him as a child, “Did you learn your lesson?”

We smirked and replied, “Nope!”

It should be said that better planning in terms of time and navigation could helped. Setting expectations would have helped. But of course, our priorities in seeing as much as possible, acquiring the goods and foods superseded everything else.

But here are random things that we learned (and potentially observed):

…to keep trying again and again all for love.

That’s what I thought when I saw this. And after all, I just bought a PS4…

In reality, I would never have the energy to finish this game. But to save a life, to keep going in spite of it all? To know that if I “die”, then I would have to return to the very beginning? All in hopes that my skill will allow me to finish the entire game?

All for love?

As I walked from the embarcadero, I heard squawking. A plethora of people? Children?

No, it was the parrots of Telegraph Hill, roosting around the Financial District.

A video posted by Jenn Ng (@jennism) on Feb 16, 2016 at 10:39pm PST

I paused for a second, in my rush to an event. I stared at the birds. An item on my bucket list, because I never was quite sure where to find them.

And there I was, drawn to the squawks. What struck me at the moment was not that I finally found the birds. But what if I had been like my fellow commuters on the BART, plugging our earphones in, listening to the same track over and over again on Spotify. What if I had submitted myself to simply blocking the outside world for my own “sanity”? And had completely missed this all?

On the way back from BART, I looked up 24th Street and spotted an unusual sight—a guy crawling on the side of a building, making his way to a partially open window. If he slipped, he would have fallen more than 15 feet past the awning of a restaurant onto the concrete sidewalk. I stopped and gawked. But people passed me by without a single turn of the head, absorbed into their phone. Maybe one or two followed my gaze. But so many, their voice shouting into their phone or their gaze locked into the bright screen at 8:30 PM. I watched the guy made it in successfully.

And one woman said to me, “What an idiot. He’s going to break his neck. Was he trying going out or coming back in?”

“Coming back in,” I said.

In late 2001, a boy invited me to dinner. I obliged, always looking for adventure. We walked to his red two seater. As I got into the front seat, he pulled a box from the backseat and handed it to me. I gasped in happiness. “Donuts,” I said and put the Krispy Kreme box back down in the backseat. “You know exactly what I like! But better not to spoil our appetite.”

“Open it!” he said.

I lifted the box and peered inside. Puzzled at first as it was not round and sweet and tasty. A bouquet of my favorite flowers laid in the white box. Calla lily. A thought flew across my mind that he must have remembered that I mentioned it once. What I didn’t know at that moment was that I was going to dislike. I knew what the gesture meant, so I turned to him and laid a hand on his shoulder. Hiding my disappointment, I forced a smile and said, “Wow, thank you! You got my favorite flower!”

“I knew that you would love it!” he said and turned the key.

The car roared to life, and the entire evening, I wanted the glazed donuts.

What I didn’t know was that less than 2 weeks later, I would break up with him, not just because of the donuts, but because of so many things. What I also didn’t know was that I would establish a lifelong rule of “no flowers”. “They die,” I say.

But I would bite my lip when they did arrive, knowing the thoughtfulness intended.

“Calla lilies were my last favorite flower,” I said to a friend as we took a loop around the park.

We idly glanced at the hipster stores along 18th street and the crowd forming along the major food stops. It was the day before Valentine’s Day. I related the story of the boy. “I suppose that I was more upset that he didn’t know me,” I said.

“Well, that was traumatic for you,” my friend said. “You were only 19.”

“I was.”

Pulled apart by my choice
I stood alone
Anything to grasp
To feel unbroken
And there you were, and you said
Open palms for friends
But my heart desired more
More of what I had before
And so I said okay

Letting the mud drip
And dry on my shoulders
Weighing every step
But I never noticed
Because I thought
That’s how to feel normal again

I asked you to help me through
But you said no
And we reversed to the age of four
Crying, going low
Swing fists, hurting hard
Apologies given and forgotten
Stingers unremoved

Then in an email sent
I wrote “Thank you and I am sorry”
And the words stopped
And then the pain stopped

If you stood above the swirling dark waters
And you let the colored rain wash away
All the dirt collected
From the words unleashed
From the dreams trampled
From the hearts pricked
Dripping down to the cliffs below

Would it feel better now?
Would you feel clean?
Would your fingers feel the breeze?
Or insist that the wind does not care?

I’ll hold my palms up
And gather those anxieties
Cupping them here
Bury them into a box
Deep into the unseen cave

Forget those worries
Forget those concerns
Remember this moment

An oxymoron, for sure.

Last night, I dreamed of a digital device. I was responsible for it and needed to use it for something important—a presentation, a demo, or similar. But somehow in the exchange of hands or perhaps a lack of awareness on my part, it fell into the hands of someone that constantly wanted the best for me (in his twisted way), but I distrusted his results.

And so, perhaps moments before the showcase of my device, I discovered that it had been tampered. “I was trying to make it better,” he said in a obnoxious tone.

“You did?” I said and could feel anger flare throughout my body.

I glared at him, and he did notice. “This is better,” he said.

I woke up, finding myself pushed down in the bed, clutching the pillow. To me, it’s somewhat interesting that I have landed in a responsible position, to present and demonstrate to others. I remember this person—someone who I had rebuffed, but insisted that he felt that he connected with me. In those moments, my irritation melted away, and I would agree to catsit while he traveled. But my displeasure would return when I found that he used my accounts with my knowledge or demanded that I change my ways. He called his behavior “brutal honesty.”

There was once when he gave me the sunglasses and scarf his subtenant left behind. “This is a present for you,” he said. “For catsitting.”

“Don’t,” I said and pushed it back into his arms.

One time, because I ran out of cash, I wrote a check to pay him back for a concert ticket. “I don’t take checks,” he said.

He took the check and tore it into little pieces, dropping it like confetti in front of me. I must have laughed then, amused at his ridiculousness. But inside, I was seething. I never paid him back him back.

It has been more than three years since we last spoke. In our initial silence, he unfriended me on Facebook. But several months passed by and he sent a friend request. I did not offer any “accept” in return. And the silence continues to this day.

Back then, he lived less than 100 steps from my building. Occasionally, when I walk down Valencia Street, I glance up to the third story window. Almost by habit, I wonder if the light is still on and whether the cat is cold from the open window. Then I continue walking, happy to jog up my steps back into my apartment.