I actually really like these people

I intended to be productive this weekend, until the weather decided to KILL ME. You could find me lounging about the living room in various states of undress, getting up only to reposition the artillery of fans and occasionally whining to updating Phillip on how much of me had melted thus far. We went to the grocery store at 11 o'clock Saturday night just to stand in the freezer aisle.

So I was not really looking forward to the Gigando Family Reunion on Sunday at a park in Tacoma. Tacoma is south of here and south means "more hot". I brought my swimsuit, because the park is on a lake, but I figured everyone in Tacoma would be there as well and there's nothing like a strip of grungy lakewater filled with screaming kids to ruin the memories of your recent Hawaiian vacation. But we mostly ate hot dogs and played volleyball. (I don't know if you know this, but my sisters and I are Professional Volleyballers and if you don't play right we will let our merciless tongues go unfiltered until you start crying and have to go find your mommy, even if you are twenty-four years old. We are super fun.)

When we weren't stuffing our faces and making the five-year-old chase all the balls that went out of bounds, we were small talking with the Grown Ups. The Grown Ups consist of:

• The Ancient Italian People, including my grandmother, her brother, her sisters-in-law and the cousin who drives the red Alfa Romeo with the gold interior. Or, at least he drove it that one time when I was in junior high and we made up Mafia stories about him.
• The children of the Ancient Italian People, who are my mother's cousins. On one side are the sassy girl cousins with the jewelry and the manicured nails and the entertaining snarky commentary. On the other side are the boy cousins with the tiny blond wives and the pretty lakeside houses and the frightfully earnest questions about What Are You Doing With Yourself These Days, Maggie!? Then there are my mother's brothers and sisters who are, in my incredibly biased opinion, heaps more fun than the rest.
• The Third Generation. While I can name every single person in this category (a feat unmatched by most of the grown ups, which is sort of desperate and embarrassing), I don't really know any of them. Most of my second cousins (second cousins once removed?) sort of intimidate me, as they are terribly good looking and successful and their parents enjoy informing me about their business trips and mission trips and babies on the way and one of them bought a house in Seattle with a view? The kinds of things where you can't exactly square off and say, "OH YEAH? Well I have a BLOG!" (Unfortunately for me, all of these people, without exception, happen to be disgustingly and annoyingly NICE. So nice that I can't think of anything bad to say about them. Nothing! Gah!) I'm more comfortable around my own cousins, who are the kinds of people who drive VW vans and dyed their hair blue in college and play serious guitar and dress their babies in shirts from honest baby.

There's a fourth generation, but they don't really contribute much except "I WANNA GO SWIMMING TAKE ME SWIMMING" and "WAAAHHH" so I'm leaving them out.

Family reunions are weird. You feel like you should know these people, but you don't. I have friends who know all their cousins and are super close to them, but my cousins are mostly older than me, they're mostly boys (ew) and we were living on the other side of the world. It makes getting to know each other difficult.

But I was super best fast friends with one of my second cousins (second cousin once removed?) for about two weeks the summer I was eleven. He and his family (plus an indiscriminate number of other assorted crazy family members) descended on our house when we lived in Sicily. The plan was to drive up to the Old Family Farm in southern Italy and visit an ancient aunt, but the kids didn't really care about this part. We were solely concerned with tormenting each other. My second cousin's older brother teamed up with my brother Alex and my second cousin teamed up with me. I think his brother tolerated him at about the same level my brother and I tolerated each other, which was: very very horribly low. But what I mostly remember was introducing my second cousin to the wonderful world of Yahtzee. Who has not played this game? It was shocking, truly! and was instantly remedied. But then he wanted to play all the time, so much so that one morning when I was still sleeping, he was outside knocking on my bedroom door all, "Wanna play Yahtzee?"

I bumped into him at the food table yesterday. He is balding and has three children and is one of the business trippy uber-successful cousins. But he instantly knew who I was, even though I think we've shared about five sentences since we were eleven and thirteen and stuck in the back of a van on the autostrada.

So that was kind of cool.