Gotta Love 'Em

I flew to LA this weekend for the aforementioned funeral. Instead of getting the standard Hallmark sympathy card, I painted one on the flight there using my old watercolor pencils and the melting ice from my ginger ale. Not bad for tray table art huh?


Love is Immortality

The funeral was at Rose Hill Cemetery, where my grandfather is also buried. It's a beautiful place in the hills, secluded from the hustle and bustle of the rest of LA. They have deer that occasionally wander around, and people actually picnic there on the weekends (which is a little bit unsettling). Thirteen years ago, my grandfather purchased a whole section for $600/plot. Now the plots are selling for $6000 each. I guess all real estate in LA really does skyrocket in value. Is it wrong to speculate on funeral plots?

Moving on from that lovely topic, I stayed with my aunt while I was there. She's all about being healthy. 75% of what she eats she grows in a 12-inch wide strip of dirt around her pool. There are bell peppers, tomatoes, green beans, yams, squash, guava fruit, dates, and wax apples (my all-time favorite fruit), just to name a few. No pesticides or chemical fertilizers, and she rarely uses oil or seasoning when she cooks. For breakfast, the menu consisted of yam leaves, bell pepper slices, and date soup. I can't say that I was thrilled, but I have to admit that you can definitely feel a difference when you eat healthy, especially coming off my post-hurricane diet of Dr. Pepper, pretzels, and leftovers.

The rest of my time can be summed up as family time/eating and more eating. I have way too many family friends and relatives living in LA, and being Chinese means you have to get together and eat crazy 15-dish seafood feasts. Sometimes I end up eating 5 meals a day. Consequently, I usually spend the rest of the night lying around in the fetal position mumbling, "no more food..."

Weekends like these, especially stemming from an event like a funeral, always make people approach life a little differently, even if it's just temporarily. We're all just a little more careful about what we say to each other and a little less practical with our decision making. In the case of my mom, who left with my dad for 2 weeks of vacation yesterday, it means saying weird things in emails. After a whole laundry list of emergency contact information and instructions on what errands I have to run for them, she ends the email with, "If anything happens (to us), divide the stuff with Brian."

Yes, if, god-forbid, a crazy tragedy occurs, my first instinct would be to throw all of the crap in my parents house into a huge pile and dance around it screaming, "It's all mine!"

Sigh.

I can't help but wonder exactly what kind of genes I inherited from these people...