dave & buster's: chuck e. cheese for adults

Spent a couple of hours with the 21 and over cousins at Dave & Busters to well wish our cousin who is getting married this weekend. It was cool. Played pool, then won tickets at skee ball and basketball shooting. We're a competitive lot. Nowadays, we're too old for the toys, but now have enough nieces and nephews to pass them to.

Once we were in Vegas and all hung out at Circus Circus (even though half of us could gamble) and took over the horse racing thingy, combined all our winnings and scored 3 large prizes for the littlest cousin, who at the time was still 7.

There's a picture we have during our trip to the Philippines in 1995, the family's first trip back for 15 years. A picture of all the cousins. Each day we were pop quizzed on learning everyone's names and who their parents were. I was turning 21, most of the cousins were teenagers in their first years of college. Another picture shows a smaller group of us at Lingayen beach, our family name scrawled in the sand in large letters in front of us. They would immigrate here 2 years later. 8 years later, there's a dozen new in-laws and just as many babies and toddlers. I'm just now getting to know their new last names.

There's a slightly younger set who are just getting out of high school. They're about to find their way soon too. Life goes by fast. Questions to the up and coming newlyweds in the bunch include, "are you going to wait to have kids or have them right away?" The ones that do have kids commiserate with each other's discipline issues.

I used to do a lot of community work in college, all sorts of organizations and rallies. I stepped back from most of it to spend time with the family. As much as I wanted to make a difference in the world, I decided I would make my stand here with them. I sometimes feel guilty about having stepped back from those organizations and not attending so many rallies and political activities, but I feel that in the end it was worthwhile, to get to know them now when we're all relatively still young, to create the bonds that will serve us for a lifetime, to the next generation.