Stuff only your family can tell you...

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_f98opUNuVXc/SwPOeuIJMAI/AAAAAAAALeY/yERTTIfAvLs/s1600/Toothy+grin.jpg

At one point or another my usual "Now you've really said something funny, and I must laugh" smile morphed.

It went from being a regular, broad grin with the usual smiley eyes and mighty teeth, to being a little bit more crinkly: crinkle my nose, mild overbite, and bunch up my cheeks- the type of smile you do when someone does/says something endearing and you think "Aww, now that's endearing".

I have nothing against the "Aww now that's endearing" face. When the time calls for it, it's apt.

But unfortunately when you start doing it all the time, which is what I started to do (including in those instances when something wasn't even endearing, but actually incredibly funny and completely deserving of my best "Now I must laugh, or I will fly into the clouds and combust" face), it becomes a little problematic because your face isn't being accurate.

Until today, I was only vaguely aware of it. I knew I was crinkling my nose often and I also knew that I was tilting my head to the side a whole lot more than I used to. But you know, so you crinkle a bit, and head tilt some more- no biggie.

No, you've totally changed how you smile! declared Mum in Korean, with her typical Korean zeal. She followed this up with a completely exaggerated and borderline offensively unattractive smile full of squinting, overbiting and nose flaring. My dad looked at her "imitation" of my morphed smile, and laughed hysterically. He adjusted his green towel (that he wears as his default outfit before retiring to bed) and tried to be more gentle:

No, you don't look like that, but I like how you used to smile before! He then pointed to a photo on my bookshelf where I'm offering a completely fake and wooden smile, and nodded emphatically.

I'm only smiling like that 'cos I'm posing! I snapped. I so do not flare my nostrils and squint like that! and with that, I swivelled around in my chair and valiantly ignored them.

They retreated back into their chess game and weekend golf analysis and I secretly checked out my morphed smile using the shiny black surface of my phone.

I practically recoiled- Holy Mackerel, my mum was right! I really was flaring my nostrils harder than a puffing billy goat. As the realisation set in, I slipped my phone back into my pocket, started furiously typing this post while pretending to still be annoyed at them, and concluded that okay fine-- I am actually pretty glad they told me. Even if my mum did have to resort to imitating a blowfish to get her point across.