19 Feb 2005

Okay. So it’s Chinese New Year and my great-uncle’s throwing his annual family dinner party function thing where anyone within third cousin relations is invited (I don’t even want to know about the bill he’s footing). I’d just spent the whole day with my grandma in the city at the Bazaar; we went home, got changed into more presentable things and then went straight to dinner. The thing is, I’d just spent the whole day eating random food whenever I felt like it and I already felt full before I even got there. So yeah, you have the standard… oh, I don’t know, EIGHT COURSE meal – soup, more soup, Peking duck in pastry, seconds of Peking duck in pastry, lobster and noodles and then comes the main course (yeah, that was just the appetizers, honey) of rice with six different stir-fries. Then comes even more soup, the fruit platter, the red bean syrup and the red bean pancakes. AND this is after they’ve eliminated the cold platter that used to come with it and the symbolic prosperity dish that no one eats because it’s so gross.

What’s really sad is that Great-uncle and the semi-extended family go there so often that the wait-staff know them all by name and also know the dining preferences and allergies of everyone on the guest list.

I’m already completely stuffed after the lobster but my automatic reaction is just to keep eating everything that’s put in front of me so by the end of the night I have to discreetly unbutton the top clasp of the corduroy pants that were hanging loose on me at five o’ clock. But alas, I don’t really have much to complain about – when else do you get paid a hundred and twenty-five bucks to eat an eight-course meal? (Uh huh. One twenty-five in cold, hard cash. God bless Chinese New Year and still being considered a child.)

So usually whenever I go to these extended-family-we-only-talk-to-once-a-year functions I spend the whole night rocking back and forth in a glazed state of boredom, compulsively downing water and tea (I shudder to think what would happen if they gave me alcohol) and making strained polite conversation with uncles twice removed every twenty minutes or whenever someone feels sorry enough for me to come over for a chat. But you know what? This year was different – my second cousins actually decided to talk to me instead of ignoring me all night. And I actually managed to almost enjoy myself there… (Nothing compares with solid girlie bonding over the highs and lows of The O.C.)

And oh my god, The Gregarious Dentist’s sons…

There are these three of them, right, randomly related from somewhere, who are always at these gatherings but whom I never talk to because a) we never get seated together and b) there’s three of them and they’re guys, and can I say those two factors are REALLY intimidating?? And you know how you never talk to random could-be-related guys at family gatherings.

Their mother’s the Asian one with the family ties, and their father is the aforementioned Gregarious Dentist who owns a winery. The thing is, they look completely non-Asian but also look completely unlike their father as well. I’ve always remembered them as a scrawny, skinny, standoffish bunch and never really noticed them much. But oh. My god.

I don’t know when, I’ve never really noticed much, but sometime in the last year they have all grown up and filled out and now all three of them are REALLY, REALLY RIDICULOUSLY GOOD-LOOKING. Ka-ching! Genetic jackpot every time! Great features, nice deep voices and starving-poet lean without being skinny. (Bear with me; I have recently discovered I have a thing for scrawny guys.) I guess they’ve probably been getting to be very good-looking over the last few years but this year it’s particularly striking. I didn’t want to acknowledge the fact that I thought they were hot, even though it’s a fact that they look good, because you can think someone looks good without them being attractive to you, because if in fact we WERE related, even if many times removed, that would be slightly incestuous and very, very wrong. As I later ascertained, their grandmother is the older sister of my great-uncle’s wife, which means they are fourth cousins by marriage and not related by blood at all THANK GOD. Because if they had been family I would have had to shoot myself and my incestuous thoughts.

Anyway, the oldest one’s like already early-twenties so they put him at the table with the rest of the adults. But J and M, second year uni and last year of high school respectively, got the dubious pleasure of being seated with the rest of us. So I’m sitting there going oh my god, I’m going to actually have to talk to these (very attractive) guys I’ve seen many times before but have never spoken a word to, and it’s getting really awkward with M and I both politely avoiding eye contact and me doing my glazed rocking duck compulsively drinking impression. So finally, he turns around and asks me what year I’m in at school and we start talking. Turns out he’s actually a very nice guy, reasonably easy to talk to, and goes to Trinity. Which just further reinforces my theory that many, many hot guys go to Trinity. God, I wish I went to Ruyton. Anyway, this year he’s taking Bio, Chem, Physics and Spesh and not MM2 like everyone else because like me he did acceleration maths, which means the Year 10 course in Year 9 and so forth. And he’s doing Physics, which is really hard. Which is like, wow. Dude, this is messing with my equilibrium here! Why are all the hot guys I meet lately really hot AND über-smart?

So then the food arrived and we stopped talking and started eating and I began to talk to R and H, second cousins on my father’s side, and the conversation gets really interesting. Talking with the girls is infinitely easier than talking with the guys and I run out of things to say to M and also I tend to go quiet around guys I think are hot so I ended up spending the rest of the evening engrossed in conversation with R and H and totally ignoring him. Poor M had to resort to chatting with his brother and eating lots and lots of food (oh my god, you should have seen the amount of food he consumed, although I suspect that’s probably just a guy thing and not an awkward dinner party thing). He probably thinks I’m a callous bitch now, as the first chance he got he left the table to talk to his other brother. Whoops. Oh well, I probably won’t see him again until next year and hopefully by then he’ll have forgotten all about it.

So besides for the whole avoiding the hot guy thing, that was, unexpectedly, pretty much the best extended family get-together I’ve ever had. Strange how much things change the older we get, eh?

5 Feb 2005

Question: Do I give off creepy stalker vibes?

Hit me again: Am I delusional?

So I’m on the ferry back to the mainland after spending the day on an island off the coast (acquiring along the way a most hideous skirt tan that I must try to remedy once back home). Gorgeous weather, lovely beaches and a great ice-cream place in the town centre. The waters were calm, but just as I settled down to gaze out the window, the voice of the captain (a man lacking in skill of the PA system), blared into life from the speaker placed directly over my head. And it must have been loud too, I had my music plugged in at a volume level of about twenty, and I could still hear him. “Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard the blah blah blah… a member of the crew will show you how to use the lifejacket so if we could have your attention for the next few minutes.”

As the loudspeaker crackled back into obscurity a harried looking guy strode to the centre of the deck with said lifejacket in hand. The first thing I noticed about him was that he looked far too young to be one of the cabin crew. As in could I really trust this guy with my life in the very unlikely but also very possible instance of the boat crashing into an unsuspected iceberg, plunging us all to our watery deaths among the fish and coral. And if he was the representation of the rest of the cabin crew, so help me god but we’re all going to die. Just when my seafaring paranoia kicked into full-fledged mental hysteria, I kind of… stepped back from my imagination and noticed his more physical attributes. (Not to mention the fact that the worst of my fears were allayed by the reassuring sight of a capable-looking, much more mature man, also wearing the uniform of the ferry company.) Well, let’s not keep you in suspense here – brown hair, great cheekbones, average looking but my!, what a smile – the last of which I got the full dazzling extent of when I approached the refreshments counter for my complimentary cup of coffee.

It just so happened that the refreshments counter was in my direct line of sight and the certain young cabin crewmember had been stationed at the post for the duration of my ferry ride. (What? I’d picked my window seat before I even knew he was there…) As I swirled my coffee, waiting for it to cool, surreptitiously eavesdropping on the conversation of the two Billabonged girls sitting next to me (“And then I was like, NO WAY…”), my eyes kept wandering back to Young Crew Guy. (I can’t possibly imagine why.) What was really strange was that every so often his eyes seemed to dart in my direction too… (Well, either at me or at one or the other of our two Miss Billabongs. But I’m pretty sure it was me. Several times he seemed to have seen me seeing him and looked away.)

Thus we continued this strange charade of “Are you looking at me? Yes, but are YOU looking at me?” until I finally decided to put everyone out of their miseries and go indulge in a Kit-Kat, using that as an excuse to strike up a conversation with him. Just as I had begun to get out of my seat the infallible ferry captain once again activated the PA and informed us all at 25 decibels that we were approaching the shore and would dock in approximately two minutes. Lovely. Regrettably bowing out of my Kit-Kat purchase, I sat back down in my seat. Purely unintentionally, I happened to catch the eye of Young Crew Guy, again, and he seemed just about to acknowledge me as he smiled and opened his mouth as if to say something… and my eyes kept moving to fix on some unnamed spot outside my right-hand window. (Hey, so I don’t usually make conversation across a room with random hot guys I’ll never see again. Can you blame me for panicking?)

When I sneaked a peek back at Young Crew Guy the smile had disappeared off his face and he was wiping down the bench with a look of abject misery. So at least I could confirm that he HAD indeed been looking at me unless he had just been simultaneously snubbed in exactly the same way by Miss Billabong 1 sitting next to me (who at the time was still engaged in passionate conversation with Miss Billabong 2.) Just for the hell of it I started smiling really slowly, looking all the way around the room, making sure I caught his eye and just kept smiling and looking out the window until I felt the smile edge past Subtly Intriguing to Deranged Lunatic. Then I decided to stop. And yes, poor Young Crew Guy looked utterly confused.

Odd. Maybe I should have bought that Kit-Kat after all.


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