I don’t often win at anything. Although I’m totally kiasu, by nature that means I never lose, but I don’t ever really win either. Don’t get confused now, the situations I engage in often involve more than two people. So there’s a winner, there’s a loser and then there’s me. And except for that one time, when the universe had a momentary lapse in concentration, I never win at anything.
But you know what I would totally 100% kick butt at? If there was like, a competition on who has the most first cousins in the world. Please, somebody, run that competition.
To give you a bit of background, my dad is one of 14 children and my mum is one of 11. For us first-world-bred Generation X’er (Gen Y’ers probably aren’t even thinking about kids, they’re too busy conquering Angry Birds right now), we don’t even understand the concept of “more than two kids”. I mean, why? One girl one boy and we’re done, right? Why on earth would you have more than ten children? I don’t really know the answer to that question, but maybe you can go ask my fourth aunty on my dad’s side, who single-handedly birthed I think 15 children or something.
Loco. (but holy cow, impressive)
So given that there are a billion children in my dad’s family and another billion in my mum’s, and then they all had a billion offspring, you can only guess how many first cousins I have. Go on, give it a shot.
20? More.
50?? Pfft, way more, pardner.
What?! 80? Keep going.
Can’t be more than a 100, surely? Sure it can.
Done guessing? Ok sit down y’all. I have… 110 first cousins. For realz.
And no, I don’t know them all, are you insane? I have cousins who range in age from under-10 through to older-than-my-dad. Most of them I’ve never met, most of them I’ll never meet, some of them aren’t even around any more. And in reality, I only really know a fraction of my cousins, maybe about 20 of them… like a normal person would.
Anyway now that I’ve gone on and on and on (because come on, if you could win at something, you’d totally talk about it too), I should probably get to the point. So, some of my cousins are in Sydney and last Saturday night, one of them hosted a steam boat dinner which I looooove, especially in the depths of winter, even Sydney’s not-so-cold winter.
He got all the usual good stuff; fish balls…
seafood…
veg…
and there were even freshly made dumplings by a non-cousin but after having those dumplings? She can totally be my cousin.
We even had pulut hitam (black sticky rice) for dessert. In a cup. Because we were all out of bowls.
So although I often consider my friends as my family (because despite having so many cousins, I didn’t grow up with a lot of them – I’ve really grown up with my friends) I do appreciate having real family around, to know that they are there and irrevocably linked to me by blood, which means they’re probably all a little weird and crazy like me!