Annietown

Hopeless

Ever since my mother’s gotten her fancy car with BUILT IN SPEAKERPHONE she has been ambushing me with spontaneous phone calls to relatives and rando friends and forcing me to talk to them whenever I’m in the car with her, which happens to be all the time. Half the time I have no idea who I’m talking to. “Say hi, this is Jay’s mom, the one with the bakery. You remember him? He went to Stanford. For LAW SCHOOL.” Then I have to remind my mother that like all of her friends’ kids went to Stanford for whatever how can I possibly keep all these highly successful and wealthy Korean sons and daughters straight? You know who I’d remember? The kid who ran away to NYC to pursue a successful career in costume design for drag queens. Yeah I’d totally remember him.
Anyway this is our number one mother-daughter activity: sitting in traffic and getting phonebushed. So I’ll be at the wheel because there’s no way in hell that lady is driving when my life is on the line, I mean seriously she is the world’s shittiest driver, and all of the sudden her bony freakishly long fingers are pushing some buttons and then oh hey there my uncle’s voice is coming through the stereo totally interrupting my groove to Crystal Blue Persuasion. It is SUPER annoying. Because now here I am in traffic talking to my uncle about not being married. “Don’t worry, Annie, next year you’ll have a boyfriend.” OK THANKS I’M NOT WORRIED BUT YOU APPEAR TO BE. So then my mom dials my father and he says, “Take care of you self, Anne.” I thought this was sweet and then he says, “Because you don’t have husband. Who take care of you? You so alone. No one care for you.”

My mom laughs because to her it’s one of those funny-because-it’s-true situations. I laugh because you know what else is there to do? I am in traffic.

Happy New Year, Please Don’t Starve

It’s been exactly one year from this day last year. Weird, right guys?

So today I eat lunch with my mom and dad because we didn’t have the usual New Year’s get-together-thing with all 100 of my cousins. Note that I avoid using the word “party” in this case because it would be totally misleading since parties have 1) alcohol and 2) fun. So really, it’s considered a “get-together-thing.”

Anyway my dad sits down to the table in his pajamas. It is 3 pm on a Sunday. He is wearing pajamas. Like the whole matching set. Maroon paisley, in case you are wondering. I ask, hey, did you just wake up? And he says no, I went to work this morning and came back. I should note that my mother, father, and I do this thing where we change right when we come home. Like we return from work or whatever, and immediately change into something comfortable. Like house clothes. In my mom’s case it’s sweats and shirts. In my case it is “leisure pants” because skinny jeans look cute but dude they are so fucking skinny I cannot be wearing that shit all the time, I’ll lose feeling in my feet. In my father’s case it is pajamas. So he sits down to eat in his pajamas. He is no stranger to comfort, my father.

As we are eating, he just stares at me, hey, he asks, are you STILL vegetarian?!? And he makes this face. It is what my friend Doretta would call “kidney face”. The face you make when you learn people are stealing kidneys from other people. EVERY SINGLE TIME I eat with my father, he asks me this. I went vegetarian in high school. I’m like dude, roughly half my life has been spent as a vegetarian, so yes, Dad, I am still vegetarian. What is wrong with you?

He says, Anne, vegetarian look not so healthy. Maybe on inside they healthy, but on outside they not healthy. Vegetarian have face that look like this: And he proceeds to make a V shape with his hands. People who eat meat have face that look like this: And he then makes an O shape with his hands. So I say, are you telling me my face looks like a V? And he just sorta stares at me as if to say well duh, you have the American Apparel super deep V of faces. And then I look at my mother, as if to say, hey you care to weigh in on this issue because this guy is either insane or a total asshole. And she says, why do you even talk to your father? I stopped talking to him years ago. Then the woman proceeds to ditch us and go into the living room to watch the rest of the Korean version of the Oscars. And throughout the afternoon I hear her commenting on dresses. Oh that is a tacky color, or ohhh is that Versace? For some reason it is hard for my mom to say “Versace” and it ends up coming out like “vuh-thah-chee”.

So then my father says, Anne, you will never find husband if you vegetarian. Who wants to live with a vegetarian? Then he looks at what we just ate, which is like the most ridiculous amount of food. There’s so much food that the dishes barely fit on the table. And he says to me “you didn’t eat anything.” And I’m like what are you talking about, all I’m doing right now is eating, I’m on my second bowl of rice LIKE A BOSS, and he says, there’s no nutrition. I’m like dude, look at this food. This is Korean food. An entire country is eating this same shit, this tasty, tasty shit. And he’s like no nutrition! He says this to me as if I’m starving. Only in our house can you be eating yourself into some insane kim chee coma and someone implies that you are starving. I think you guys should start a non-profit to save me right now because clearly I’m wasting away.

Right, so happy new year, everyone! I hope none of you starve in 2012.