Family Reunions

My family has 2 family reunions every year. One is Christmas themed and is taking place in a few days (missing it) and one takes place in the summer in Kite, Georgia. That summertime one hits the nail on the head with every, single, white-family-from-the-south family reunion stereotype.

Competition

I wish we were the cool family that had “organized sports” with t-shirts at our family reunions, and that would be our healthy outlet for the bitter sibling rivalries that have gone on for the better part of 6 decades. We have nothing of the sort. So instead we have our own decathlon-esque style of being competitive.

  

Round 1: All the moms sit around and compete-brag on their kids. “Oh your son got a full scholarship to college? My daughter did too AND she’s going to be joining the swim team”. The instrumentals for the song “Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better” plays subtlety in the background during this round.

Round 2: The displays of talent. Naturally every child is a snowflake in my family, and super special. This must be paraded around. Musical performances were always a must, and the cousins would bring their instruments to play – we had flutes, I played the piano, my cousin brought his bassoon one year. A bassoon. Like some weird twist between the von Trapp family and the movie Deliverance.

Round 3: “Games”. For some reason there is always a ping pong table and a pool table at these events. Even as children, these games got fiery. One time when we were playing pool my cousin must have done something really awful, I don’t recall, but I do know that the only legitimate move for me was to hit him upside the head with my pool stick. And to this day I stand by that move.

The Setting

The only proper way to have a family reunion is to A. Have it in a town that no one in the entire state has ever heard of and B. Have it when it is eleventy banillion degrees outside. You know how you get to Kite, Georgia? You go to Swainsboro, and you look at which direction from Swainsboro looks like it has the highest amount of nothing happening, and head in that direction for 30 minutes.

Also please act like the house has air conditioning. Instead, there are just several industrial sized box fans scattered about the lawn for people to catch a breeze. How we managed to procure a dozen 4-foot tall box fans but we couldn’t just maybe get a window AC unit is beside the point. If you need me at these events, I will be standing within 2 millimeters of the front of one of these fans.

There is also a plastic baby pool that has been inexplicably filled up and the kids can just stew in the lukewarm cess pool that is a forgotten baby pool in Kite, Georgia. One year when I was 12 I had brought my swimsuit for this exact purpose in hopes it could cure the pain that is a South Georgia summer. A child at this event (unknown who he is. Are we related? WHO ARE YOU!?) actually serenaded me with the song “My Girl” when he saw me in my swimsuit.

The Food

If anything is going to happen at a family reunion it’s that everyone is going to play real fast and real loose with the word “salad”. The buffet table is just a smorgasbord of all the different ways you can combine mayonnaise with other condiments, add a starch, and call it a day. Rules of the salads are as follows:

1  1.      You must use mayonnaise
    2.      You may not use an actual vegetable

    3.      Russian-roulette style, one of the salads needs to have been left out of refrigeration too long. You will not know which it is. You will get food poisoning from this salad.

And everyone knows that the table is not complete without 4 bags of Sunbeam Yeast Rolls, just sitting in the bag, and everyone reaches their hands in and rips off 3-4 squares of bread to sop up the “salad” with. Hearty.

Men vs Women

It’s basically a widely known fact that there is a perpetual battle going on for which gender is more difficult to deal with. Well, I’m here to tell you that the battle is over. Men and Women are both the absolute worst.

Men Can’t Find Anything

You know that scene in Star Wars when Obi Wan uses his Jedi powers and says “These are not the droids you are looking for”? Turns out that whole scene was completely worthless because he was saying it to a group of men. There was already a zero percent chance they were going to find the droids either way, because men are legitimately incapable of locating anything. 

You might be like “Yea but the droids were, like, right in front of them”. That is inconsequential when it comes to a man locating an object. In fact, the more right-in-front-of-them an object is, the less likely they are to find it. Obi Wan’s move was about as Jedi as when I walk into Target and waive my hands in front of the automatic doors and pretend I did that with my mind.

Women Can’t Fill Anything

I know that I am not the only woman who can say that I will always be on the last drop of gasoline and the last percent of a cell phone battery. At all times. My gas light coming on in my car functions exclusively to tell me that I have 33 more miles that I can drive without thinking about gas. You know what I don’t have? 34 miles. You know how I know that? The hard way. Twice. 

Doesn’t stop me. This doesn’t happen to men. Men are like “I have a quarter tank, better fill up”. That concept is lost on me. Getting gas is such an absurd grind. I keep making my boyfriend switch cars with me for no reason every few days because I know he’ll have whatever car he’s driving filled up. Problem solved.

The level to which I’m interested in charging my phone is the exact amount it is charged: 2%. I am so sorry that I don’t want to be tethered to the wall like a leashed pit bull at a mobile home park, with a 2 foot radius that I can move about while my phone takes a decade to install the trillionth iphone update. The only outlet in our den is directly in front of the gate-to-hell heat vent. So I have to either sit over there next to the heat vent and actually smell my own skin burning, or I have to leave my phone there and go without it for 30 minutes like a Neanderthal. Both options suck. So my phone is never charged beyond 11%. Deal with it.

Men Don’t Get Anything and Women are Vaults

Unfortunately women have a higher mental complexity than a houseplant. A tick more multidimensional. This therefore exceeds the natural ability of a man to even slightly comprehend what is happening. Ever. I would argue that at minimum once a day a guy has absolutely no idea what is going on. As if 26 pages in a book about his life all got stuck together and when he turned the page he’s like “Wait a minute, we’re in Kansas now? Who is this character? It’s Christmas?!” Every. Day.

This pairs really well with the woman’s irrational need to be in a relationship with a mind reader. And everything to a woman can be blown to an infinite proportion at a whim. “Yellow flowers? You’re giving me yellow flowers? I thought I made myself clear that I feel personally victimized by yellow flowers when I told you ‘yellow flowers are tacky’ twelve years ago. It’s as if you’ve COMPLETELY FORGOTTEN that my boyfriend in 4^th grade gave Holly Finks a yellow flower on Valentine’s Day and I cried about it. Do you even know me?!?!” That basically is something I’ve said to the letter with the specifics change to protect the innocent.

How does this even work? I’ve had MULTIPLE conversations with my best friend Allison about how if I could just learn to like women my life would be so much easier. But would it? Because if I had to be in a relationship with someone like me we would both be showcased on an I.D. channel special about how two women simultaneously plotted each other’s death and would have flawlessly gotten away with it. And how about men. How do 2 men have a relationship without starving to death both trying to find the milk INSIDE THE FRIDGE WHERE THE MILK LITERALLY ALWAYS HAS BEEN. Every single match up iteration is a full blown catastrophe- but hey, we’re all in this together (High School Musical 10 year reunion BTW!!!!!!)

Apparently We Were All Poor

As a child there were just certain things you didn’t question. Your parents would tell you the situation and you would be like “Who am I to assess the validity of that statement? I’m a child with apparently incredible vocabulary in this instance”. Well now that we are not children I am here to tell you one thing – apparently we were all poor. And blithely unaware of this fact.

Toys

Do you know how much a Barbie is these days? Five doll-hairs. Do you know how much a bike is? Like 60 bucks if you get the cool beads that come on the spokes and the basket. I was under the impression that these items were made entirely out of conflict diamonds. My sister got my dad’s old road bike and he spray painted it sparkle purple to make it girly. 

I got my mom’s old Ken doll who definitely had real human hair I’m pretty sure. What was happening here? Also thank God my dad was MacGyver because the only kite I ever flew was made out of sticks and wrapping paper. And worked like a charm.

School Projects

Every school project was the same. First of all, you were going to need a trifold board. Because how in the actual world could you possibly present something in any other format. Am I the only one who had to re-use these things? 

I always felt like the integrity of my “Which Denture Adhesive is the Strongest” was compromised because not only did I have to display this on a used trifold it was, naturally, on a used trifold that my dad had made. It had hinges. It was covered in layer upon layer of previous projects, and it was a hand-me-down from my sister who was 7 years older than I was. If that’s not going green, I don’t know what is.

Printing

The only way you could possibly make your trifold even come close to winning an award was to use Word Art. The risk here for me was that colored ink was harvested from the tears of the dodo bird, apparently, and we can’t be just willy-nilly printing our faces off. 

Was I allowed to print my word art titles? Sure. In black and white. Also, good luck with your typo. That’s not a reprint, that’s a job for white out.

That’s the Same thing….

When I was growing up, Adidas all stars were the coolest. I wanted a pair sooooo badly, but they were way too expensive at a WHOPPING $30 a pair. Especially for shoes that now, quite frankly, look like something a podiatrist would prescribe for plantar fasciitis. You know who made the “same thing”? Payless. Did they? Or did theirs have 4 stripes instead of 3. At least let’s just agree that it’s not the same thing. 

You know what also isn’t a pair of JNCO jeans? Lee pipes.

At the end of it all you know what actually happened? No, we weren’t poor. We were kids, and kids are money sponges. And our parents were not interested in spending $80 on a pair of jeans to make us look like Gumby, or buying our stupid “projects” a $7 piece of cardboard every time. I one time made a tri fold about why I should be allowed to be called “Liza” instead of “Ainsley”. The Wild Thornberries was one of my explanations. That’s stupid. I don’t blame my parents at all.