The Finite

This has been a long time coming.

In two ways:

1. My sister told me about this event 5 months ago and told me to take off work for it.
2. Eventually, at some point, someone in my family is going to marry a white guy. *collective gasp*

My sister is the first and won’t be the last (if her personal evaluation of the romantic futures of our younger female cousins is to be trusted at all). So this is a big moment for the aunts and uncles. And there was some concern about them doing something stupid. Now, I’ve had plenty of cross-cultural exchange moments. But my family. Not so much. Not a lot of multiculturalism there. At least not consciously so. I mean, they live in the suburbs, their kids play Call of Duty and watch One Tree Hill, and go to water polo practice. *coughwhitecough*

But they are pretty ignorant and ethnocentric and stubborn and not too open-minded. And a lot of the traditional wedding customs are flying over their heads. For example, no one RSVP’d. I’m not sure they know the translation.

Then there was the post-ceremony rehearsal dinner treated by the groom’s father, seated directly across from me at the other end of the table. It was a midranged steak house in the middle of nowhere. So not like candle-lit or anything, but it wasn’t any old Red Lobster. Silverware was wrapped in napkins

Now my family hasn’t eaten in a non-Chinese restaurant for years as far as I remember. So when my cousin immediately assumed that all white families eat like that (where food is served on individual plates as opposed to “family style” with communal plates in the center of the table), I could not stop face-palming. the 18-year-old then picked up her half of a Cornish game hen with her fingers and start gnawing on it as the gravy ran off and onto her plate.

There were others. Like the reaction my 16-year-old cousin had to the scoops of whipped butter: (“Eww, what is that?!”) I think her assumption was that butter always comes in sticks or tubs. I had to explain the concept of butter whipping to her, then wipe the burger juice off my hands, and facepalm again. I gave up on the facepalming when my cousin asked my other cousin for all the marinara sauce left on her plate so she could scoop it up and eat it with a spoon.

And poor mom. There wasn’t anything on the menu that looked good to her (because we were in a steakhouse). So she ended up with an Italian beef sandwich with no sauce. And she was too shy to ask the waitress for sauce. So she just gave my cousin the apparently inedible sandwich.

I made sure to profusely thank the groom’s father afterwards and he seemed pretty cool with the whole “my family being totally weird”. Because I hope by now he knows what he’s getting into with us.

Note to Tommy: Edit this post later to be less bad.

I’m told I do a terrible Bostonian. Too cartoony and brash. I’ve never been to Boston so I don’t know what the appropriate levels of cartoony and brash are. So I’ve been working it from the other angle. To use my normal voice as a baseline and slowly incorporate the accent onto the ends of words. (“CVS Phahmahcy”). I’ve confused at least one technician so far. Gotta branch out into Canadian/Minnesotan and Georgian.

I gotta get my fun in when I can, right?

Lately I’ve been entertaining the idea of being a voice actor. Like amateur stuff. Like motion comics for amateur artists or audiobooks. I’m told I have a good “radio voice” based on how I page patients to the pharmacy. And with two octaves, I can maybe do two or three different characters without leaving my usual range. This would be so much easier if I were more worldly or at least had a more diverse group of friends to chat with. Then I could pick up more voices. It’s harder than I thought it would be. 8 weeks in “Ohio” and I still can’t do that accent. But few can.

I also recently concluded that I’m a baritone. At least when I sing. Or a low tenor. Someone with expertise on this, please correct me if I’m wrong, but since I’ve recently committed my singing to silicon for the first time, I was considering picking up the piano again. Step 1: Piano Man by Billy Joel. (Step 0: pick up a keyboard from someone). Then practice.