this is how we keep wu-tang money all up in the family

if you know my family at all, you probably know that the three other people in the picture from my previous post are married and/or have kids. those are my cousins chris, who has a son and got married this past summer, marissa, who just yesterday (january 5) had a son she calls jack, and branden, who is married and lives in maine. my brother also has a kid, and my cousin jen, branden's sister, is in a serious relationship, whatever that means. i'm more or less the loser in my family of this particular generation, seeing as how i haven't had a real relationship in ten years, and that one thankfully seems less and less real with every passing day. i have, however, had a few ridiculously drawn-out situations that didn't really lead anywhere, but might have worked out in a parallel universe, perhaps where the UFO that flew over O'Hare airport back in November live.

i stopped thinking of creative ways to off myself long enough to take a phone call from my grandmother. she's 72 years old, was born in brooklyn, grew up in guangzhou, china and moved back to the US in the 1940s. guangzhou, china circa-1940 was not the guangzhou, china of today. in 1940, guangzhou was occupied by japanese troops, largely rural (this will become important in a paragraph or two), and it wasn't until 1949 that it began to become urbanized with the arrival of communist influences. it's very close to Hong Kong, which also lead to rapid urban development. today, it has one of the top economies among chinese cities. but back to my grandmother's phone call: she was calling to hook me up with a girl. i'm guessing my history of floundering so badly on my own was out of the bag, and she had a lady for me. i have good news, she said. she had the phone number of a girl who, conveniently, lives across the williamsburg bridge from me, in nyc's chinatown. she's my age and chinese, which is good since all my cousins and brother totally blew it by marrying and/or had kids with a bunch of honkies. that's another post. i was a little tipsy when my grandmother called, so i was kind of going along with the hookup, even though i clearly remember the last time she tried to hook me up...

aside (and this warrants an aside): i was probably 20 the last time my grandmother tried to set me up with some ladies. they were two sisters, the daughters of the man who owned chopsticks restaurant on elkton road in newark. at first i was stoked on it, but after i met them i quickly realized they were among the dumbest people i'd ever met. i continually ignored them as they squawked about all the white boys they were into back and forth like a couple of now-extinct dodos with lazy eyes. i can't recall another couple of girls who sounded more like dumb shit valley girls straight from satire.

anyhow, i was drunk when my grandmother called me and halfway entertained the idea of actually calling this girl. she lives with her parents, which was a minus in my book. i can't really speak chinese, which is probably a minus in her book. i'm also a scumbag, which is probably a huge minus in her book. but then my grandmother said something that negated the whole visualization process anyway. "she's my sister's granddaughter," she said. uh... huh... i said. doesn't that make us kinda related? yes, she said, she's your cousin... second cousin. oh. ok. well, that's rather prescient of her to realize that i must be doing that bad that i need to be hooked up with my second cousin. like i wrote to bobby su, i guess there's some redneck in my family after all, and if not, there might be some in the future. i'm thinking of getting together with her, maybe just to spite the family. i haven't gotten drunk enough yet to do it, though; i keep fallling asleep before i am drunk enough.

in other news, i'm building up a new bike that i'm pretty excited about. it's my mom's schwinn suburban from 1977 or so, which she rode once. i'm stripping it and making it into a single-speed freewheel that will be amazing for cruising in the summertime. i already have some mavic cxp22 rims laced to formula hubs, i need to get some decent vintage-looking cranks and a few other cool things like cork grips and pedals, but should be pretty fun to fix up.