Big Happy Family

Actually, my family's not that big. Just the four of us. My parents, my brother and me. 
My parents and I went to buy a printer/scanner. My brother hates going out, so he stayed at home to play games.


My father and I were waiting in the car while my mother was in La Madaleine to get coffee. He said to me that he hated arguing with her, so whenever it dragged on for a while, he'd just say "Yeah, whatever, whatever you want." 


I told him that sounded insensitive, and he didn't respond. 


"I really want to live in a house," he said.


"You're going to buy one once Jonny and I are gone, aren't you?" 


"But that'll be too big... I guess we could buy a small house in Canada. That'd be nice.
      "Or we could rent out the room to someone. It's a good investment, buying a house with several rooms near a college and renting them out. And I could hire a property manager, so I wouldn't have to deal with them." 


I chuckle at his last sentence. 


And then I kind of realized.
I'm not sure if we're all really happy. 
I can't say we're miserable.
We're not happy, but we're not miserable either. We don't take no news as good news and go on with our lives. We dwell on things. We don't act much like a family, either. We act more like four people, perhaps a bit like-minded, perhaps a bit too similar, perhaps enough for patterns to emerge to the casual viewer. We don't act like much of a family. We act more like four people put into the same house, who agreed to cooperate and stay together until better arrangements could be met. Until my brother and I go off to college, we all decide to just get along, be affectionate enough, be detached enough. 


We never really did the whole "one big happy family" thing. We're pretty detached from our relatives. We talk to my grandparents on my father's side once a week, my mother talks to hers often, etc, etc. We do have those connections, but I don't feel like we're all very much involved. We don't even act very Korean. We don't act very Canadian or very American, either. It'd be enough to throw me into an identity crisis if I gave a damn. 


Kinda like that "what are friends, anyway?" phase I went through at the beginning of ninth grade, now that it's the beginning of 10th grade, I wonder, what is family? Really. Yeah, we're all related, and we're alike. We're really just people who happen to be of the same blood. I think all four of us realize that. I wonder if we're closer because of that. I'll talk about whatever in front of my parents. I'll be completely honest and fool around and just lay myself bare. Not literally, of course. 


I feel so close to my family, and yet so detached. 
But don't most people feel pretty detached from their family, anyway? From what I hear from my friends, "family bond" don't seem to be very strong here. 


I don't know, I'm just feeling very sentimental today.


__________________________


I want to know how my parents looked when they were kids. I look very much like my mother. I bet she was pretty cute when she was a kid. She was really small, so she looked like she was 8 when she was 12. My dad told me he was cute when he was a kid, too. He said that he'd been told by many people that he looked like a girl. I wanna see!!! 


And my mother's brother was very pretty, too. You wouldn't be able to tell nowadays, though. He's already balding. He's been balding. And he's only in his mid-40s. My brother's probably prettier than I am. I'm cute, he's pretty. That's how it is. My mother went through that as well. HIstory repeats itself, right? 


I asked my dad how his siblings looked (he has an older sister and older brother. Both my parents were the youngest in their families, so I get little sympathy for my pains from being the elder.) and he said he doesn't remember. He doesn't even remember how he looked, he only remembers being told he was pretty.


That's so like him.
I wonder if I'll be like that. I have a kid, he/she asks me what I looked like.
"Hmm... I dunno..."
"What do you mean, you don't know?!"
"I remember being told I was cute a lot... I hated it, but they kept saying it, so I was probably cute."
"Probably? Mom!"
"Whatever. Quit wasting time and do your homework." 


Or something. 
***************************************


My dad's a bit odd.
He's a physicist. A scientist. Yet he's also very philosophical. He thought about taking a philosophy major, but since a philosopher isn't considered a real job anymore, he decided to take physics. 


I thought that one must be a bit of a romantic to be a philosopher nowadays. My dad asked why I thought so. I told him that philosophers always seem to say such pretty words.


He said they don't. "They're not artists."


And then I realized that it was really just me. I just saw beauty in those words. Philosophy was very tightly-knit with science back when it was considered a real job. Who knows, maybe philosophers themselves didn't even find beauty in their own words. Many of them said life has no meaning, nothing exists, there's no point to anything. 


You'd have to be a bit... a lot of a romantic to find beauty in those kinds of words. And a certain type of romantic. Not very many people hear "life has no meaning" and think the concept particularly pretty. 


I guess the real oddity is me.
My dad admitted that he and my mother are strange. And then he called me a different kind of strange.


I kind of understand that, but I wonder what kind of strange that is. 


&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&




Yesterday, at the end of Business Information Management, otherwise known as BIM or, as on my schedule, BUS INFO (what, does that say... bus... info? Yes. My life's dream is to become a bus driver for a stupid school district like HISD.), since we weren't doing anything (this was also my 7th period, the period in which all that photographer (or lack of) crap happened), I decided to play a game. So I went to tetris. 


I heard the girls beside me say "so asian..."
I can hear you, morons.
I really, really, really wanted to say that, but that would be rude, so I just thought it, and continued playing. 
Yes, I'm Asian, but what does that have to do with playing tetris? I mean, yeah, Tetris was invented in Russia, which is in the Eurasian continent, but isn't Russia culturally more like Europe than Asia? My playing tetris has nothing to do with my "Asian-ness", right? 


I like to think I'm good at tetris. I've gotten to level 14 about twice, and once, I got to level 15. It was very surprising, and perhaps the shock played a role in my losing... Of course, my mother's gotten to level 20-something, which I didn't even think existed. But my mother's always like that. My brother doesn't like games like tetris. I like Tetris because it's simple. Yeah, you need to think a little, but gameplay is very simple. My brother refuses to accept a game unless in involves killing or blowing things up. My father never really liked computer games, even as a boy. What kind of boy doesn't like computer games?


I also find this a bit ironic because my dad studied a lot of computer science. He likes computer, but not computer games? Whatever.
And he said he's never gotten to a level with double digits, and it made me feel a bit happy. Not happy, per se, but kinda proud of myself. Then again, my dad likes more strategy games. Thinking games. Who needs flashy lights and beeping sounds and buttons? I'm thinking. 


We're all a bit odd, I think.


____________________________________


The apartments I live in offer brunch every couple weeks. It's either Chick-fil-A or French Corner, I think it's called. 
My parents still call it "chick-fill-ah." 


Anyway, today, they had tacos. It was lunch this time, not brunch.
But since we left to buy the printer/scanner at about lunch time, my bro got to eat tacos, and I DIDN'T!! 


I wanted a taco.
No fair.


Of course, this is Texas.
I can go eat a taco whenever I want. 
But it was free.
Free tacos.
*sigh*


Ah well.


I was so depressed yesterday, but I feel a bit better. 


And my post actually kind of has a point! 
Family, right? All...most... Almost all of what I said had to do with family! Bwahahaha!!!


I am probably a bit crazy right now, so let's leave it at that.  :D