As some of you probably know, I have cousins. Lots of them, in fact. Among other things, this means that some of my ancestors apparently fucked like bunny rabbits. (OK, that statement's not technically accurate for numerous reasons, but I think it's funny, so it's staying.)
Occasionally, I even see my cousins---like tonight, when we got together for dinner at Island's in West LA. Islands is another of the restaurants I really like that I miss now that I am in the UK, so I was pleased when that was the suggested location. The group of cousins that met today were those on my father's side. This was the third of our "annual" dinners that has taken place during the last roughly 7 years.
On this occasion, only two cousins were missing: Brooke Porter, who is at home in New York at the moment (though we did talk to her briefly on the phone and passed the phone around the table); and Debbie Porter (the eldest), who has been AWOL for O(20) years. I'm pretty sure I actually met Debbie once. As far as I can tell, nobody even knows where or how to find her anymore. The youngest, Andrew Porter, is now in college at University of Arizona. His comment about USC was the best line of the night. ("USC is not a real school. It has a condom as a mascot!") Jeffrey Porter is the brother of Brooke, Andrew, and Debbie. Their father is Jack Porter, the youngest of the three original Porter brothers. (And, yes, they were "original" in some sense, because the family name was changed to Porter upon their entry into the U.S. for reasons for prejudice---that is, to try to avoid it---and pronounceability.)
The middle of the original Porter brothers is Abe, whose hair currently resembles that of Shirley Temple (except for its gray color). His kids are Scott Porter (the second oldest member of the family present tonight) and Leslie Porter.
My father, Samuel, is the oldest of the three original Porter brothers. My brother Adam was today's elder statesman. My sister Tamara (Tammy) was also present.
Among the Porter cousins, Adam, Tammy, Jeffrey, and Leslie live in Los Angeles. Andrew's official home is still here at some level, though he only comes back during college breaks at this point. Note that 7 of us came to dinner, and we used 6 cars to do it. I was the only one sensible enough to mooch a ride.
I'm tempted to make comments about the baldness rank-ordering among the males, but maybe I'll just get ahold of recent pictures at some point and post them.
Now let's see how long it takes for snarky comments to show up...
O(20) is interesting, it could be only one year or any other arbitrary constant that you've not seen her for! :) I was expecting actually O(n), where n is your age, as I expect the number of years you haven't seen her for is n-c, where n is variable and c is a constant.
ReplyDeleteOh, and looking forward to the baldness rank ordering. Can I place bets on you being at the bottom of the rank (ie, least bald) for the males?
The 7 people and 6 cars is awesome. Did they all grow up in LA? :) I take it also that this was a good event?
I'm definitely abusing the O(n) notation here. (I recall discussing this particular abuse, which I've done before, with Lemming a while ago.) I want to say the number of years is actually 25, because I'm pretty sure that the event in question was my brother's Bar Mitzvah in 1982. Of course, I don't remember meeting her. I just assume that I did so that day.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I'm at the bottom of the ranking, at least as things currently stand. We'll see how this changes as a function of time.
The event was good, though I don't have much in common with any of them. They don't seem to have any interest in my attempts to describe anything analytically (though I never got farther than talking about social networks a bit).