Family Politics

I never liked the idea of family politics because there shouldn’t be politics in family.

So here’s the story: My uncle (my mom’s cousin) is getting married tomorrow. He, being mixed, has two receptions: one of them is for the western side, and one is for the Asian side of his family. In all honesty he only needs one reception since 99% of the people he’s inviting speak English and aren’t really that Asian to begin with, but for the sake of his dad (my great-uncle) and his aunt (my grandma) he’s putting on another reception, complete with lobster, crab, bird’s nest and all those other fancy Chinese dishes that we love to eat at the weddings.

Now my family isn’t invited to either of these receptions. That’s cool. My mom’s cousins aren’t people we get along well with because they all seem to be snobby. In fact, the only people on my mom’s side of the family that we do seem to get along with are my aunt and my uncle (well that’s a pretty loose definition I should say that these are the only people we keep in contact with). My aunt seems to be the only one that’s level-headed in my opinion, everyone else is a different shade of crazy.

Not getting invited is not a big deal. We never get invited. We used to get called over to their Christmas dinners every year but then after a while we stopped going. It was very difficult to get along with the people. What is a big deal is that my great-uncle thought it was complete horse shit that we didn’t get invited to the reception. I guess he thought it was too big of a slight to not get invited, because the Christmas dinners are pretty trivial, but when his son is getting married we’re supposed to get an invitation. Even if we don’t end up going, at least he sent out an invitation, right? Well, his wife told him that we were too busy and couldn’t come, but he’s not buying that. So we got a call this morning from my aunt and she said:

“You have to call uncle and let him know that I invited you but you can’t make it.”

What? She didn’t call to invite us, but rather, to reiterate that we’re not going and we have to call uncle to let him know? Well, that’s silly. I’m not here to lie for you. You messed up, you fix it. But such is the audacity of this woman that she expects us to call and let him know that we’re not going on our accord.

Fuck family politics.

Hmmm

You ever just run out of things to say? I’ll be back when I have something.

Dad

Phil likes to refer to my dad as The Godfather

I wonder if looking badass is hereditary...

...nope!

You Gotta Be Loco to Drive

I just got back from my trip to the Dominican Republic. The drivers there are insane! It’s probably still better than India, but it’s still worse than what I’m used to. Our tour guide summed it up like this:

“You have to be crazy to drive here man. Loco. We have one speed limit: go as fast as you go. And we don’t have signs, we just beep each other man. Beep once and you’re saying ‘hola’ to the guy; beep twice and you’re saying ‘get out of the way!’; beep three times? Well, now you just being an asshole. You don’t even need a license here man, you could get it, or you can just pay someone $80 and they’ll make you one.”

I saw so many cars drive against the traffic to make illegal turns. I saw cars passing each other on two-lane roads. That’s not that big of a deal, you could do that over here if the coast is clear, but I’ve never seen a car trying to overtake a car in the opposite lane, while another car was already attempting the same maneuver! There were three cars going in one direction on a two-lane road that had two-way traffic. Insane.

Well, I’m still alive! I just gotta get some sleep because I’ve got work for the next two days.