Since high school I’ve only seen my parents once a year — in college maybe once every two years. Despite the fact that I shamelessly love Most Eligible Dallas (watching it as we speak obviously), I actually hate Dallas and refuse to go back unless a best friend gets married there and forces me to come back to the city I loathe. My family doesn’t celebrate Thanksgiving (I mean… we’re Japanese — my mom’s version of “Thanksgiving” is serving ham over a huge bowl of rice), and I hate religion and my mom is too lazy now to care about religion so we don’t really celebrate Christmas anymore either (funny… considering my mom used to send me to Vacation Bible School when I was little — times have changed). Point being, I don’t go home for the holidays and haven’t for about a decade now, so I pretty much never see my parents.
Living in NYC has brought us closer together, though, because they actually come to visit every year. Oh, but do they come to visit me? No. They come for the US Open. Why? Because they are completely obsessed with tennis and live and breathe tennis even though they’re not even that good at playing. They travel around the world for tennis — French Open, Australian Open, US Open… they love tennis. They don’t even go for the good games though — I feel like if you’re paying for tickets, you might as well go for the semifinals/finals. But no, my parents always go for the first 3 rounds of the tournament because they want to watch the Japanese players play, and all the Japanese players are out by like round 1 (sports not our strong suit). This year apparently all the Japanese players retired or something (???) so you can imagine how disappointed my parents were.
Regardless, when my parents come to visit NYC every year for the US Open, they barely make time for me. I’m just being a needy daughter trying to get a good meal out of my parents once a year, and it is nearly impossible with their schedules packed full of tennis watching during the day and getting blackout with their Japanese tennis friends at night. Like mother, like daughter. I do respect my parents for that.
The good thing is that the US Open falls around my birthday every year, so that gives me a legit excuse to pick a nice dinner spot for some “nice family time” but more importantly for some “great poverexia time.” This year I made my parents take me to Wolfgang’s. My dad joked that it was about time I started picking up the tabs for these family get-togethers, and I laughed in his face. Clearly he’s in the dark about poverexia. Here’s what I ordered knowing I would not be paying for any of this:
Canadian Bacon and Clams
Steak 1
Steak 2
Steak 3
I was shitting for like 48 hours straight. It was exhausting. I hadn’t had that much meat in a really long time (that’s what she…). It was really incred, and it made me forgive my parents for completely forgetting my birthday one week later. Go Djokovic.
Poverexic in NYC 