random musing #2: Bingo! It's family time

family is a funny thing. i feel like it's been this complex, slow process of learning to understand them as i would any of my friends. i feel like for a really long time, i never really appreciated having family around the way i do today. growing up, i was just barely able to figure out what the heck i was doing let alone ruminate about the role my family had in that. college was the first time i missed my parents. and started to really appreciate them for their love and thoughtfulness. but home was like freeze tag. when i went home, my personal life in SF felt like it was just put on hold. i disappeared into this vortex of my parents house, good food, watching tv with my sis, wearing the clothes around the house that i would never ever wear in the company of anyone else. then, i would return to my apartment in SF and things resumed again with my friends, social events, job and everything else in this separate life.

it took a while for me to learn how to make those two worlds intersect. over the last several years, i have started to talk to my parents more about my love life, my friends, my issues with work. asking their opinions, hearing their opinions even when i don't ask. but they surprise me at every phase. they have actually been really cool (for the most part). in a capacity i never would have guessed - i certainly didn't give them the credit they deserved for what i thought they could and couldn't take knowing about.

and now in this past year, marked by this past holiday especially, i have also come to realize and truly appreciate the quirkiness and uniqueness that my family offers to me regularly. for the same reason i love my friends - who share my love for the quirky details of life that to most would seem unremarkable - i have found in my family the same sort of appreciation and for things that i know only my family would find enjoyable.

though other people may or may not find this AWESOME, here is an example from xmas:
we played family bingo co-constructed by yours truly and my sister and cheesy as it sounds, it was so much fun. now, as context, my family is NOT the game-playing type. there is no presence of charades, pictionary or cards of any sort at any family gathering - at least not with the "adults". thus, the decision to try and infiltrate with a game of low barriers - bingo. i mean, who wouldn't/couldn't play that?

we cut up little square pictures of each of our relatives and had them all glue them on a grid in different sequences. my dad, the designated bingo master (who btw, surprisingly totally got into it) would then pull picks out of a hat and yell things like, "uncle paul!" to get crossed out - with background mutterings of things like "i just need a diana or a jason and i'm done!" my mom was the true instigator in this whole thing when she first mentioned, "i want to make some fun this year - let's do a raffle or something and i will find things for a gift basket." "things" would later be defined as random things like dried shrimp, a potholder set and green tea. but hey, fun we did and perhaps it has even set a new tradition. go family bingo, go.

i think we've found a new tradition.