Thread by @kane

1/ This Father’s Day, I compiled the most on-brand anecdotes of my dad, who is basically an Asian Ron Swanson. Thread:

2/ My dad was trained as a military scout; growing up, we asked if we could get GPS for our cars. He insisted we learn to use paper maps and memorize routes without making marks.

Why? If you’re ever captured, you don’t want evidence of your plans.

3/ When we visited aquariums, my dad liked to visit the fish he had eaten or aspired to eat.

4/ We grew up in a very cold part of New York state. During winters, he would turn the garage into a meat locker and hang up meat. We had to make sure not to hit them with the cars.

5/ Related to meat and cooking, my dad thinks different kinds of kitchen knives are a scam by Big Cutlery.

He uses one huge cleaver, which he keeps honed to a razor edge, to do all his cooking.

6/ On the rare occasions we would eat out, my dad really liked dim sum. He had little patience for the carts and would stand by the door to the kitchen to intercept food as it came out.

7/ My dad really likes light beer. When my sister was graduating from BU, my dad heard that frat parties served free beer. So he wandered into one and helped himself to beer. I hear that the brothers were too bemused to kick him out so he had a few beers and left.

8/ One of my dad’s favorite summer time activities is squatting on the deck, smoking, drinking light beer, eating peanuts, and feeding peanuts to blue jays.

9/ The neighborhood blue jays started frequenting our house, which my dad liked.

Blue jays are known to be assholes. When my dad was on biz trips, his entourage of blue jays would attack our house and caw at 6 AM until someone went out to feed them peanuts.

10/ My dad is an engineer for the fed gov and was an emergency responder at Ground Zero and Hurrican Sandy.

But he chose to work in gov after years of private sector because “it’s basically like retirement, you don’t really do anything” (see? Ron Swanson)

11/ When my dad had to plan a family trip he took us to… the Robert Moses Niagara Hydroelectric Power Station.

Standing on the shore, he turned to me unprompted and said “if you ever have to work for the government, work for a utility - they generate their own revenue"

12/ My dad’s other favorite family trip was taking me and my little sister to the Niagara Falls Air Reserve Station and explaining military vehicles to us.

13/ My dad bought a Rolex decades ago for work when it was on a list of certified chronometers for his engineering work.

I told him it was hip now and had appreciated, and he was flabbergasted. “Why should this appreciate when it is an obsolete technology now? That’s silly."

14/ My dad is a US citizen but has an accent. Sometimes border patrol at the US/Canada border is an asshole to him.

He will troll them by half-answering their questions until they ask for secondary ID - then he’ll show his US Federal Government ID.

15/ My dad’s favorite activity when we go on family trips is napping. He’ll nap in the galleries of museums, in his seat during musicals, on a bench in parks.

16/ My dad drove the same car for 18 years (totaled twice, not his fault) until it literally spontaneously caught fire.

The fire department (which my dad is friends with somehow) agreed to tow it for free if they could keep it as a case study.

17/ My dad grows a bunch of stuff: tomatoes, cucumbers, beans, peppers, zucchini, etc.

When we were little, my dad asked me and my sister to relieve ourselves into a bucket in the back yard since it was good fertilizer and free.

My mom quickly put an end to that.

18/ My dad works on construction sites a lot. Sometimes he’ll have a pack of Taiwanese sausage w him.

There are now groups of burly construction workers in my hometown who like Taiwanese sausage bc my dad will hand them out (w raw garlic ofc).

My dad is a sausage dealer.

19/ Like most 90s kids, I *love* Pokemon.

When I explained to my dad what Pokemon was, he nodded in understanding and told me he and his friends would catch and fight scorpions when he was stationed in Kuwait, and Pokemon was kind of like that.

20/ My dad randomly knows a lot of contemporary Native American history.

Why? He goes to the reservations to buy cigarettes and gasoline (no tax), and then hangs for a bit and smokes with the locals.

21/ My dad votes for whichever party is not in power. “I don’t trust any of them."

22/ Like many dads, my dad tracked how tall I was on a wall. This seemed uncharacteristically sentimental.

I learned that he would bet w the local Chinese restaurant proprietor on my future height. If my dad was right, we wouldn’t have to pay for the next meal.

23/ My dad has this skill where he can put a steamed spare rib in his mouth, and while reading a newspaper, spit out a completely clean bone (kind of like eating a cherry). He does this at dim sum all the time.

24/ When I was in college, my dad found a great deal on some whiskey and tried to have some mailed to me.

I almost got in a LOT of trouble with the resident dean.

End/ Anyways there are an endless number of these anecdotes, but point being, thanks for everything dad. I think. ❤️

This ones for you @kevinakwok

Epilogue/ one more anecdote which I just remembered:

The saddest I’ve seen my dad is when he lost a bet and had to be vegetarian for three days.