Cousin Reunion #8: Zing. Thirds. Cooler than Dang Crap

The title of this post shouldn’t make sense to anyone who wasn't at the cousin reunion. Sorry about that, other readers. But if it's any consolation, it makes little sense to me either at this point. All I know is that those were the things we said over and over while intoxicated.

We're at the seventh of the eleven entries allotted for the cousin reunion weekend, and it's kind of bizarre that I've waited this long to talk about drinking. Sure, I mentioned in the last entry that we ate Wendy's one late night after having had a few, but the subject surely deserves its own post. I would guesstimate that we spent 3/7ths of our weekend eating, 3/7ths of our time drinking and 1/7ths of the time doing random stuff.

Whoa, I don't mean to get off topic here, but when I typed "guesstimate," I really expected this word processing program to mark it as a misspelled word. I didn't think it was real. But it totally is, apparently! According to the online version of Merriam Webster, it's been a word since 1923! I mean, this word processing program doesn't even recognize "amygdala" as a word, and Merriam Webster says that has been a word since 1845 in addition to being an important part of the brain. But it recognizes guesstimate? Life is weird.

Anyways. Time to talk about drinking. It's been kind of a hard post to figure out how to write. Sometimes reading about other people drinking can be boring, especially when I tell you how hilarious it was. Everyone thinks they're hilarious when they drink. But trust me when I tell you that we were SEVEN TIMES MORE HILARIOUS THAN OTHER DRINKING PEOPLE.

An interesting thing about this side of the family, though, is that we really don't need alcohol to have a good time. These cousins act slightly intoxicated most of the time anyways. These are the kind of people who are very loud and wet their pants even without any drinks in them. So what you have to understand is we are already starting at a pretty high level of fun-ness. And so that's why we have so much more fun than normal people when we do drink.

The ability to drink a massive amount is hereditary, I believe, or at least one would think so by watching the previous generations of this family drink. Man, I wish I could remember a time when I did not have an uncle or an aunt or a parent trying to get me drunk. I just can't remember that. My mom sent my brothers and me off to Kanuga with a tub full of jello shots. And she made them when she was hungover. And they were themed jello shots, by which I mean she picked the colors of leaves since we were there for "See the Leaves." I mean, that's the kind of commitment to drinking that this family has made. Also, we had a keg and who knows how many bottles of wine and sweet tea vodka and regular vodka and we reinstalled one of the sinks in the cabin so that it poured out tequila.

I won't go into all the details of what happened while we were drinking, mostly because one of us could possibly run for President one day and might not like all those personal details on the Internet. Suffice it to say, a lot of weird things were said. There is an awful valuable steno pad with drunken quotes out there somewhere. I heard siblings say strange things to one another and cousins share the types of things they have never shared before (and possibly shouldn't share). And I saw, as one cousin put it, an awful lot of ass. People just wanted to shake their asses when they were drunk. Unfortunately, that side of the family has rather flat asses, except for my brother William, which made his ass a subject of much fascination for all of the other cousins.

DO YOU SEE WHY THIS IS KIND OF A HARD ENTRY TO WRITE? I AM HAVING TO TYPE THINGS ABOUT MY BROTHER'S ASS!!!

Some drinking MVPs in my book include my cousin Sarah, who showed up to the event hungover like a champ. Also a shoutout to my brother George, the only person who threw up the entire weekend as far as I am aware. I don't think anyone realize that George was quite that drunk, even though he was saying weird things on Friday night and calling out for our future cousin-in-law Brad. He missed Brad. He loved Brad. He wanted to know where Brad was. Maybe he just wanted Brad to help him when he threw up. As it was, his own brother didn't get out of bed to help.

Hmm, I don't know why I'm trying to pick just a few drinking MVPs. Everyone did a great job drinking that weekend. But I have to give a special shout-out to my cousin CATHARINE. While drunk, Catharine revealed she wanted her name in the blog, which probably would have happened anyway. But I told her that her name would not be in the blog if she did not do a certain thing. That, along with some other cousin threats, convinced Catharine, at the age of 40, to do her first keg stand.

Now, let me stop here and say, that if any of Catharine's darling children are reading this, a keg stand is a miserable scary thing that you should never attempt to do with your peers. Wait for a family event and have the cousins show you how to do it.

So anyways, cheers to CATHARINE for her first keg stand and for this quote, the only one that I will, in fact, share: "Do you think if I start drinking vodka and playing beer pong right now my life will change?"