mas, but that was one of the snowpocalypse days, so we had decided to save ourselves from getting stuck in New Jersey for another day when our chances of getting snowed in were much slimmer. And since there are a lot of us and we all have busy schedules, we ended up having Christmas dinner in the middle of January.
I had forgotten how loud and crazy this particular group could be. I was really glad I was in an extroverted kind of mood, though, so I didn't feel like I needed to run off to a corner by myself to read or something. In fact, the buzz from all the aunts talking about wedding plans for our newly engaged cousin Selina, the attempt of figuring out the mystery of why the now sixth grader cousin Corey still doesn't like us, and even the Chinese chatter of all the grandparents - actually gave me a lot of energy that I thoroughly enjoyed.
I spent some of my time doing the usual - playing games and having lots of fun with all the cousins/"kids," but I wanted to spend most of my time just observing and interacting with all of the parents. I don't know if they realize this, but I really like learning things from them and about them. They're absolutely riveting to me. I'm curious to hear about their old days and what they thought when they were younger and how those things have changed. I want to know what things they've learned and how they learned them. I appreciate their advice and what they tell me to do or not to do, but I want to know what brought them to those conclusions and what makes them so sure that that's the right answer. I want to see their process of thinking behind their actions and how everything unfolded for them.
It's also fun to watch them in action and see how they interact with one another. It always makes me wonder what it'll be like when we're all a lot older - when our family gets a lot older and bigger. I wonder what it'll be like for my kids to have grandparents that actually speak English and grew up in America.
Observing everyone also made me wonder how much of our social interactions with each other were influenced by certain aspects of our "Chinese-y" culture as well as our "Americanized" culture. I think I realized I'm even less capable at distinguishing Asian/Chinese-y traits in people than I thought I was. There are no rules to these things. It makes me wonder how Chinese-American I am in my habits, traditions, and lifestyle. How do you know if something is typically Chinese-American...or not?
In any case, my family is great. And really entertaining to watch.
On a very different note, I went to Barnes & Noble today because my dad had gotten a gift card from Christmas from someone for our family. After spending about an hour and a half walking back and forth through rows of books without coming to a conclusion as to what book I should actually pick, I had a semi-short-lived rant in my head about how I hate books (especially books in bookstores) because they're all so wonderful and have so much potential to be wonderful - which causes me to have a terrible time trying to figure out which books to actually purchase and own. I did, however, come across this book amongst the highly unorganized "Christian Inspiration" section (which also bothered me tremendously):
which reminded me of the "Stuff White People Like" book. If you ever come across this book, read it. It's pretty darn funny, I must say. I laughed out loud quite a bit and all I did was skim through some of the pages.
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