Home Flies

I've been doing a lot of flying lately.

Anyway.

I don't blog much about my family. I'm not sure if there's a specific reason for this, beyond the simple reality that I write mostly about days of my life and I happen to spend most of my days interacting with people who aren't family members (except for Roy, of course). For whatever reason, I typically like to keep my family life off the Internet, as if it's something that I need to keep guarded. Maybe it's because I grew up used to seeing my extended family only under certain contexts -- for holidays, at restaurants, at my grandparents' house, etc. -- that I never transitioned into incorporating them into my online existence. Maybe I even worked actively to avoid it in an attempt to keep my relationships with them somehow unsullied by the complex vagaries (Facebook friends I'm not really friends with, close friends I'm not Facebook friends with, etc.) of the rest of my life in the Cloud. Maybe it's because many of them aren't burdened with as sadly thorough an online presence as I have. Maybe it's because many of them were born and raised in Taiwan, and that cultural and linguistic difference is unable to hurdle the uncannily complicated cocktail of slang and shortened keystrokes that is Internet lingo (what is, after all, the Chinese equivalent of "lol"?). I guess it could be any of a number of things. Which isn't to say we aren't close or that we don't share an intrinsic affection for one another, but it does illustrate a certain distance between all of us, I suppose. Our lives are our own, and -- except for a couple of exceptions -- family time, for many of us, is its own separate realm.

I got a lot of quality family time last week. It's always good catching up with the cousins, and seeing how you've all somehow grown better able to relate to one another since the last time you were together. And at the end of it, how much closer you've become, no matter how short a time you got to spend with them. Despite the different experiences and completely different lives we all lead, there really does seem to be something shared flowing within each of us. And that's a very warming thought.

Some pictures from last week:

Sky above L.A. (if you squint, you can see it).

It apparently takes my entire family to figure out how to take a group picture. We're discussing chair orientation here.

Figuring out where to put the little ones.

My cousin Chia-Ying seems to be pointing out something that has everyone enthralled. Except my dad.

Chung familia.