some things never change

LINK: some things never change

Share what you’ve learned about yourself in the last 30 days.

Prompt created by yours truly. 
Feel free to use any prompts for October that I post and/or tag me.
I’d love to read your responses

I’ve learned that my cousin and I are more alike than we are different. He’s older than me, but somehow, we’re still the black sheep of the family. Maybe that’s why we seem to vibe well.

He recently invited me to go drinking, which kinda caught me by surprise. I don’t normally drink unless there’s a special occasion, like once or twice a year, if that? But the fact that he sought me out and asked me to go out, something he hasn’t done in years, made me feel obliged. I rearranged my schedule for our family bonding time.

We had Korean street food at a local Korean bar. We nearly finished a whole fried chicken and picked at 떡볶이 (tteokbokki – rice cakes cooked in spicy yet savory sweet red chili paste with fish cakes, cabbage, scallions, and a hardboiled egg).

We talked for almost four hours. We laughed about our questionable life decisions, wondering how we survived: the time I ran away from home when I was a teenager and flew to California all by myself to meet a dude I’d met online. Obviously, this was very poor judgment, reckless, and very dangerous… but I was a teen and I was impulsive, stubborn, and thought that I was invincible. Yeah. Pure delulu, if you ask me.

Then there was the time he got completely shitfaced after my dad’s funeral. We went to meet my Chicago friends at a restaurant, and he drank until he blacked out. I’m pretty certain the funeral triggered him, like his own father’s death and the grief he must have felt. At any rate, he became dead weight and my girl cousin, his brother, and I couldn’t get him out of my car.

We rehashed our family lore: the shenanigans we used to pull, our geeky cousins, our overly opinionated mothers, and our family dynamics now that our fathers and two other siblings have passed.

I learned that time doesn’t heal all wounds. It just forms scar tissue around the wound. The pain lessens but it never goes away.

I learned that my cousin and I haven’t lost our drinking capabilities despite significantly scaling back over the years. He managed to put away a bottle of 막걸리 (makgeoli – alcoholic drink made with fermented rice and water, amongst other things) and a bottle of sake by himself. I, on the other hand, downed my mango sojurita. Yup, a bottle of soju and margarita.

I learned that fall would not be complete without an opossum scarf. I bought it at Hot Topics. Did I need it? Probably not, but let me live. I’m inclined to wear it on Thanksgiving and to remind my brother of what happened this summer.

I also learned that I’ll never get over whimsical, quirky, and ridiculous things. Where am I going to wear this Hello Kitty Lolita lace fingerless arm warmer? I don’t know but I’ll figure it out.

I am a bit unconventional, a little unpredictable, and forever XXI.