Oh my GOD.
So my dad and his yuppie brother, after years of not speaking to each other after some conflict a few years ago which I don’t know the details of, supposedly “buried the hatchet” and we decided to go visit them (and my grandparents) in Evanston, IL. My dad’s brother (my uncle, obviously,) is a lawyer with a very prestigious law firm in Chicago. He is as different from my dad as night is from day. He looks like James Spader but with balding gray hair (he’s YOUNGER than my dad, but already has gray hair and is going bald.) My dad is ruggedly handsome, looks kind of like a cross between Al Pacino and Pierce Brosnan, and is (in my opinion) the coolest guy in the world – a player, a ladies’ man, a musician, an intellectual, but unpretentious, down-to-earth and hip. My uncle is like the least cool guy in the world – he’s very rich but everything about him is soulless and boring.
So we get to their house in Evanston after a day of driving from Bloomington, IN. My uncle is wearing one of those yuppie golf caps and a vest, and is playing his usual cheesy soulless pre-packaged music compilations on the stereo in his kitchen while we talk and eat crackers and cheese that probably cost 90 dollars at whatever overpriced yuppie organic market they get all their food at. The conversation seems to be going okay and my dad and my uncle are getting along pretty well. I exchange some polite conversation with my uncle and aunt and a lot of very pleasant conversation with my grandparents, who I love dearly.
According to my aunt and uncle, we’re supposed to eat dinner at six. First we go to a play at a local community theater that they talked up like it was the best thing in the world. The play totally sucked, the acting was high-school level, the plot of it was heavy-handed, preachy, and totally retarded. When we get back, it’s like 7. Instead of serving us dinner, my aunt and uncle then slip out the door, saying they’re going to “get coffee.” Me, my dad, my sister, and my grandparents and cousins wait around for TWO FUCKING HOURS before they come back. I suggest ordering a pizza, but my grandparents insist that we go along with my aunt and uncle’s dinner plans and wait for them.
They finally arrive at 9 –o-clock and we have “dinner.” “Dinner” consists of PEA SOUP. Fucking PEA SOUP, with some BREAD on the side. That’s it. It’s not even good pea soup, it’s watery and tasteless and shitty. This is from a guy who could probably take us to the nicest restaurant in Chicago every day for a year if he wanted to. Later, my dad tells me he is utterly convinced that it was a passive-aggressive gesture and they deliberately served us this ridiculous “dinner” as a way of being a jerk to my dad, who my uncle is jealous of. Supposedly. I’d believe it. Over dinner, instead of having a real conversation, my aunt pulled out these cards with questions on them like “what do you admire most about your siblings” and other trite, uninteresting shit, and everyone at the table had to answer. Yes, instead of actually talking about original ideas, we did this while we ate our PEA SOUP. I was absolutely stunned at how ridiculous it was.
The next day, we go to the Water Tower mall, where I flirt with a few cute girls, look at about a thousand cute girls, buy a remote control helicopter, and talk to a guy wearing red plaid pants, a tweed jacket and a red plaid vest and tie. (He told me he dresses like that every day, to honor his Scottish heritage. He claimed to have 12 different plaid and tweed outfits.) After this we’re supposed to meet my aunt and uncle for dinner. The night before, I had suggested we go to the Parthenon, a Greek restaurant which we used to go to when we visit this particular branch of the family (which is half-Greek) in Chicago. But this was shot down by my Greek grandpa who said he was sick of Greek food. So the next day, my aunt and uncle decided to go to this Mexican restaurant which they said was really amazing.
We follow them to the restaurant. 10 minutes pass. Then 20. Then 30. Then 40. Snow begins to fall. Wind begins to blow. It’s a fucking blizzard, basically. We’re driving totally out-of-the-way to get to this restaurant, my dad says, so it had damn well better be good. We get to the restaurant. My dad claims that the roads are going to be iced over by the time dinner is done, and that his brother is a jerk for making us go all the way to this place instead of just going to the Parthenon in Greek-town like I suggested. We sit down, and I order a shot of tequila and a Corona. It takes them about 20 minutes to bring it out. We all order. My dad orders salmon and I order fish tacos. The food takes forever to come. When it does, it tastes like absolute shit. The fish tacos are smothered with this disgusting, watery mayonnaise-like sauce that reminds me of sperm. I have no idea what kind of sauce it is, but it tastes awful and there’s WAY too much of it. I try some of my dad’s salmon. It tastes like tuna fish – the least-fresh, most shitty piece of salmon I’ve ever eaten, and to make things worse, it’s covered in another disgusting kind of sauce. It’s the worst Mexican restaurant I’ve ever eaten at, and on the drive home, my dad is absolutely furious with my uncle.
“He always does this. He makes us go to these shitty restaurants in the suburbs instead of going somewhere NICE in the city, because he’s being passive-aggressive and he has no respect for me,” said my dad. I fully agreed with him. I found the whole experience to be absolutely frustrating, disgusting, and horrifying. My dad and I discussed the past two days at length, and we both agreed that my uncle is a soulless dork who is jealous of my dad and has been since they were kids, deliberately is a bad host to us when we come over, and that my grandparents always take the side of my aunt and uncle and their kids even though they’re totally disrespectful to them. (Their spoiled kids, by the way, bitched that the jewelry given to them by my [and their] grandparents was “too cheap.”) Unbelievable.
My grandpa is a great man. He is a salt-of-the earth guy, a blue collar worker and a war veteran, and the patriarch of this family. His two sons both had tremendous success in their careers – the first people in their family to go to college, and they both graduated Yale and went on to great things. Yet my dad became this great guy, and my uncle became an unbelievably boring, pretentious and vindictive man. I swear to God, they should make a movie about this family.