The family reunion is this weekend.
I don't wanna go.
I've been feeling more distance growing between the rest of the family and myself over the last few years.
Maybe that's more reason I should go.
But I don't wanna blow the weekend on it. It sounds really petty and self-centered, but there it is. This thing is always a hassle. Best case scenario maybe saturday (after the 3 hour drive to get there) I'll play a game of Risk with cousins I only ever see at the reunion, and the rest of the trip will be spent making smalltalk with octogenarians - mostly about other extremely elderly relatives who passed over the last 10 years. Then all of sunday will consist of cleaning the place up to leave, and then the 3 hour drive home.
Gah. I gotta go, though. My grandfather already asked if I was going last week and I said I was, so I can't bail.
The reunion last weekend was exactly what I predicted, except it was Skip-bo, and not Risk.
Also, we were subjected to the destructive flailing of a 3 year old cousin-something-removed who never uttered a single articulate word the entire weekend, but rather ran from misbehavior to misbehavior while yammering incoherently. My uncle brought a large amount of pecans from his orchard, the feral child grabbed the box and before anyone could react he flung them into the fireplace (not lit, but still dirty). Then, as his mother tried to salvage what she could, he wharrgarbled his way across the room to the piano to start banging on the keys as hard as he could with a wooden block. A great aunt tried to intercept him, but he was completely unreachable by any verbal means - the only thing that got any acknowledgement from him at all was spanking, and even then that only made him squall loudly until he was released and could go right back to finding something to destroy. This sort of thing persisted almost every waking moment. The only time he was ever quiet or still was when his mother put a Minions video on a tablet and put the tablet in his hand... and he'd just sit there watching it, over and over, for as long as he was left with the device. It was like an off-switch, like those videos you see of what cats do when you put a clip on the scruff of their neck.
I was close to asking if he had some kind of learning disability or if he acted and spoke (or rather, didn't speak) as he did because of constant exposure to Minions videos had convinced him language was simply random syllables from which context was extracted by way of inflection and body language.
I felt sorry for the mother of that solipsistic little godzilla.
