Upon going to college I realized a lot of habits I had taken for granted as being normal was actually only true for the bizarre family environment I grew up in. Apparently normal people do take showers and that the showerhead isn’t just for decoration and poor urban households that couldn’t afford a bathtub. Apparently normal people don’t eat the unfortunate animals that decide to winter on your front lawn. Apparently normal people don’t go eeling on the weekends. And apparently normal mothers don’t drink an average of 4 teapots of green tea a day. I didn’t drink tea or coffee growing up, so I always shrugged it off as an adult thing. But after one of our first family vacations, I realized that normal families usually lugged around a camera instead of a portable tea container complete with shoulder strap and tea leaf filter.

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Happy lunar new year! Xin nian kuai le, gong xi fa cai, etc, etc. I have to confess — I am pretty terrible at being chinese (unless I’m awesome at being chinese, like… when getting food freebies in Costco). I decided I wanted a small little Chinese new year get-together chez moi and I ended up having to call my mother…

Me: “Mommy? What do chinese people eat on chinese new year?”
*Mother audibly signs* (some things you can only ask mothers)

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I have a terrible impulsive of buying tea everywhere I go, even when I haven’t had good experiences with the particular merchant in question. This weekend, I found myself gaping at a whole wall of tea at the Edgewater Trader Joe’s and perhaps it was just the luxury of standing in a TJ’s without being shoved into walls by Manhattanite yuppies that pushed me over the edge of rational decision-making, but I ended up buying 2 packs of Trader Joe’s tea, even though my two previous TJ tea experiences have been bad, bordering on terrible. Ahh, why do I not learn from history @_@;;.

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