As Natural As Seafood in Minnesota

Is there anything better than ordering seafood at a restaurant in a completely landlocked state? The answer, of course, is Yes. There are lots of places where the mussels and oysters and calamari are better. However, I challenge you to have a better happy hour than the one I had tonight.

Prinna and her husband Chris were sans children tonight. A rare occurrence indeed. So I met up with them and Perek and his wife Leah at the rooftop of a seafood bar in Uptown. You guys? I ate an oyster. Like, a really slimy oyster. It was an experience that I shall not soon forget, and I had to follow it immediately with eating 100 French fries. But that’s neither here nor there. The point is, I hung out with my brother and sister, with their significant others, and had a blast.

In case you don’t know, I grew up in a big family. It was my parents, my two sisters, my two brothers and me. It was a constant struggle to stick out, to show off, to be noticed. But ever since I was in college, it’s come to my attention that this may not have been a bad thing.

As children, we were all annoying little attention-seekers. As adults, well, we are all just taller attention-seekers. But we’ve focused that energy, and now we share it with each other instead of shoving it each other’s faces. Enjoying some gnarly oysters and delicious beers together turns us into an unstoppable Idea Machine. Instead of fighting for the spotlight, we help each other get into it. We tell each other what’s a good idea and what’s, well, basically garbage.

I don’t know how my parents did it, but we’ve got like a 100% success rate of being pretty cool people in my family. All my brothers and sisters are fun. They’re all smart. They’re all well-balanced. I just feel lucky that they let riff-raff like me tag along.

But the point is, tonight I decided that I want to have a million kids. I want them all to be miserable together and hate each other as children, but then they’ll harness all that and grow into mature adults who somehow prefer to hang out with each other. They’ll be all angry and resentful as confused teenagers, but then BOOM. They’ll fit together like the puzzle pieces that fall on the floor and then you find them a week later and think “Ah! There it is!”

So, yeah. Big family, good friends, fun happy hour times, oysters are disgusting.