Friday, February 08, 2008
Today's the second day of the Chinese New Year (if the blog date does not say "Fri, 8 Feb", that's because my computer's time settings are wonky).
As we do every year, my family went to my uncle's house where the whole of my mother's side of the family congregates for CNY. It's a tradition in our family for all the relatives to meet in one place to make visiting more convenient for everyone. It's a big event for my parents and relatives who like meeting their siblings and in-laws and updating everyone about their lives (and their multitude of physical ailments), but it's getting more and more of a drag for me every year. When I was a kid I used to like playing Monopoly and the like with my cousins, but now that I'm 23 and everyone's more or less grown up too, things are getting pretty boring.
Today the few of us who form the 16-25 age group simply sat around and stared at each other without knowing what to do, before finally deciding to play "grown-up" card games. I don't play cards and I wasn't in much of a mood for any sort of game, so I merely sat aside with my sister. Basically the game was just a way of getting around the problem of not having anything to say to each other at all. And out of the 6 of us, I'm pretty much the odd one out. I'm still a student, which excludes me from the conversations of the two older cousins who have been working for a few years, and I'm too old to have much in common with the younger cousins who are closer to my sister's age. Moreover, I've realized how right YH was when he said that we recede higher and higher up into the ivory tower of academia every year we extend our studies. I've been so used to intense conversations about lit, love and life with my Arts friends and lively, insane chats about all things related to anime with my Anime Club friends that I felt totally out-of-place in my uncle's house. So there I sat, not saying more than 5 short sentences in 3 hours.
But although visiting is a drag and like the characters in The Years, I don't have much affection for "the sense of the family" and its demand that I put on a stilted smile and a fake public persona, it is a duty that I still have to fulfil, and since it's only a few hours once a year, it's not really all that bad. And this year, I was lucky to have Johnny Depp to console me.
After the visit was over, my sister and I went to AMK Hub to catch the latest Tim Burton and Johnny Depp collaboration - Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. It was a really great film. It had Gothic make-up, frock coats and crinoline dresses, the dark houses and smoky chimneys of Victorian London, singing barbers swishing razors, and of course, lots of thick red oozing blood. And the film wasn't just a gleeful gore fest but a subtle, amoral tragedy of revenge. Absolutely wonderful Gothic, anti- "the world is so happy" CNY stuff =)
kaoru said at 2:05 AM
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