Today, Mr. W and I went to have lunch with my parents and grandma to celebrate my dad’s and grandmother’s birthdays. My dad had always gone by his Chinese birthdate (on the lunar calendar), which falls on a different day every year on our regular calendar, and this year my mom decided she was tired of looking up what day it’d fall on and emailing me as she’d done the years prior. So she researched all the way back to my dad’s birthyear in the 1940s to figure out exactly what regular calendar day it was that he was born on. Turned out it was January 30, so she announced that we are all gonna base our celebrations of his birthday on that date from now on. He protested, and she waved him off. He accused her of having too many birthdates of her own to remember (her lunar birthdate, her regular calendar birthdate, the erroneous birthdate someone in immigration had put on her information that she’d just lived with rather than correct, and some other date that falls on a leap year so that she actually only gets that date once every 4 years), but she said that’s different and refused to budge. I also found out that my dad’s office coworkers celebrate his birthday every year on December 20. Why? I got no explanation, but I think I did receive a shrug and a “they just do.” I complained that I only have one birthday, and that I feel unspecial. They offered to look up my lunar calendar birthdate for me, and thinking about how my dad’s birthday celebrations had ranged from December to February, I passed.

My grandmother’s birthday was a few days ago, and she turned 80. My mother had wanted to do a dinner banquet for her, inviting family and friends to a Chinese restaurant, but grandma passed on the idea. I had wondered whether she refused it to be polite while in secret hoping for a big to-do, but my mom answered that her mother really wanted to pass. Apparently grandma was afraid that if a big celebration in honor of her birthday occurred, that it would draw the gods’ attention to the fact that she’s still here and aging, and they’d go, “Oh! We’d forgotten about you! Thanks for the reminder, old lady!” and take her away from this mortal coil. For obvious reasons, then, she’d KILL me if she found out I just broadcasted her birthday on the internet. Gotta love Chinese superstition.

Grandma got me back, though. Throughout lunch, she kept staring at me from across the table and saying to my mom in Mandarin as if I weren’t there or as if I didn’t understand the language (which is a very Asian parent thing to do, cuz kids don’t “count”), “Eh? I think maybe Cindy’s gotten pretty. How did that happen? That’s so strange.” I did what I’d always done; pretended not to hear the grownups talking, because that’s how they treated us and expected us to behave in return.
But she kept going on and on about it that my mom got offended and snapped, “What are you TALKING about? What’s so weird about that?!”
Later in the privacy of Mr. W’s car (where I was sole passenger), I translated that for him. He laughed about it, thinking it absurd. “You were already pretty when I met you,” he claimed.
“I think I got pretty after I met you,” I said thoughtfully.
“No, if you weren’t already pretty, I wouldn’t have asked you out,” he said in typical tactless guy fashion.
I pretended to balk. “YOU’d told me that what attracted you to me was my ASS!” I said accusingly (which was true, he did say that). Now, he backpedaled a bit.
“It’s the PACKAGE,” he said. “Your ass is a PART of the PACKAGE.” Right.

After lunch we all went to my grandma’s so Mr. W could set up my gift for her, a large digital photo frame in which I’d already preloaded photos and Mr. W had programmed to play slideshows with Jim Brickman’s “Angel Eyes” as background music. My dad also got to play with his presents: 3 nice Cubavera style shirts and a wooden 3-D puzzle (which he solved in like 10 minutes). Then Mr. W and I regrouped my parents’ house and caught some movies. We watched “Management,” which is a Jennifer Aniston movie that I’d never heard of. (I give it **1/2 out of ****) We also saw “The Blind Side,” the Michael Oher movie starring Sandra Bullock. (****!) It was SO good that I want to watch it again right now! The acting was superb, and comedy was conveyed impeccably by things such as simple timing and a look. I didn’t think I’d like a football movie as much as I’d enjoyed “The Longest Yard” (remake), but this movie is so much more. Maybe I should give “Rudy” a shot next.