Musings Over Coffee: Cousin Explainer and Books

Extended families. You can’t live with them. You can’t live without them, at least in my culture. And I used to be so confused as to what degree of cousinhood someone was whenever I attended our extended family holiday gatherings.

A few months ago, one of my aunts announced that one of our cousins has his own show on cable. He’s a celebrity chef and he’s bringing Filipino cuisine to the masses, which is a good thing. I asked my aunt what degree of cousin-ness he was with me and she didn’t know. He was just my cousin, she said.

And then I found this.

Now I can say that celebrity chef Jordan Andino is my Third Cousin Once Removed, not my Third Cousin as I always thought. His mother is my Third Cousin.

Now I feel so old.

In other news, I blew through my annual book-buying budget in the last week. First, it was that Barnes & Noble trip and then yesterday, it was a trip to Sandpiper Books where I found a paperback copy of New American Review #3 (they were published as paperbacks, not magazines) that features fiction, essays, and poetry by writers like Philip Roth, Leonard Michaels, and John Berryman.

I don’t know why this brings me back to my childhood but maybe I had relatives who read them. Who knows?

Then I found this one:

I had to snag myself a copy even though I already have the ebook version. Sometimes you just don’t want to deal with charging issues with your Kindle or phone and just grab the book and read.

I bought a few more books and would have bought more but had to pace myself. I have to read the hundreds of books I have in my house first and the 4k ebooks I have in my Kindle. Or at least, that’s what I told myself yesterday. I don’t need new books.

Well, maybe one more…