I love my family, but when you get too many of us in a room, it's never good. Yesterday we got together for a dinner in celebration of my great aunt's birthday (Auntie Barbara - she's fabulous, I'll talk about her in another post) and for Hanukkay. Why not kill two birds with one stone (oh yes, and did I mention my family loves cliches)? At any rate, many lovely people came, and I had a horrible time.

First of all, I still got placed at the kid's table, which as a matter of principle I have no problem with, but it gets a little tedious when the conversation revolves around driving four-wheelers in mud, on trails, and sometimes with only three wheels (don't ask). Meanwhile, I am by far the ugliest cousin, so that adds a little bitterness to each bite of food.

In exchange for being the ugliest, god saw to it that I was the only one granted with even the least bit of interest in academics. Some consolation! At family gatherings the only thing this means is that academics is off the list of possible conversation topics. "No, no, please tell me that story of how you flipped the four-wheeler over the tree again." My mother, of course, loves to bring up Harvard at every chance she gets, just in case the conversation wasn't already awkward enough.

The redeeming factor, of course, is all the old women. Have I mentioned that I love old women? Well I do; they're my favorite demographic. If only Harvard had a joint degree in geriatric studies and women, gender, and sexuality studies - my academic path would be laid out before me. Alas! My grandmother, her sister, her son's mother-in-law...the fun never ends. In any case, they're all fabulous. If you ever thought being Jewish was about god, you're wrong - it's about grandmothers, hands down - and food, but the two are related.

The highlight of the evening was a discussion that centered around a flax seed drink that my cousin Marty's Costa Rican wife, Virginia, makes. Evidently you boil flax seeds in water with sugar and vanilla until the whole thing congeals into a gelatinous mush. Then you drink it! Among the amazing properties of boiled flax mush are that it looks rancid the moment it's finished, but (according to Virginia), it keeps for weeks. The conclusion of the conversation: flax seeds are excellent sprinkled on cereal.

The Grandparents

I'm about to go to Tampa to visit my maternal grandparents. They're fabulous. Traveling with my mom and step-dad, however, is not fabulous. They both get disproportionately upset about all trips (this one happends to involve a two-hour car trip on I-75). Right now, Abbe, my step dad is freaking out because I'm using the internet upstairs and he needs to turn it off before we leave, and if he can't do it RIGHT NOW he is going to have an aneurism. Lovely.

Meanwhile, when all is said and done it'll probably be another hour before we leave.

And do you believe, I still love them anyway. I'm patting myself on my back as I type...

Home Sweet Home

If you notice that I tend to use the word 'neurotic' frequently, understand that it is with good justification. My parents make me look normal - and that, my friends (and non-existent readers), is saying something.

My father is a very endearing combination of germophobic, generous, selfless, impressed with his own intellect, kind, and conversationally-inept. It ends up balancing out quite nicely, since for all his insulting/asocial behavior he's enough of a mench to keep his friends.

Today we had Nancy (one of my best friends from high school) and her family over for a late lunch. It was more or less fabulous and very much along the lines of what gatherings at my father's house could be expected to be. Neither he, nor my step-mom are into the whole 'hosting' thing, so when they invite people over the only preparation that happens is of food. Thankfully Nancy's family is pretty adaptable.

"Tacos" were the main dish for the evening. My dad chose not to break with his historic three item repertoire: tacos, tofu stir-fry, and spaghetti with "meat" sauce. All three are made with the same combination of tofu crumbles, canned tomatoes, and onions all sauteed together. The difference is in the vehicle for the tofu crumbles: wheat taco shells fried in canola oil, nothing, and spaghetti. My dad is subtle like that.

The problem with a phrase like "variety is the spice of life" is that in order to get its point across, one has to accept the premise that spice is indeed appealing. I think that might be my dad's problem. Or maybe he just interprets "variety" as "tofu crumbles" - I understand the two are often conflated.

To blog, or not to blog

At this point, the question is moot - since I'm blogging. But I haven't blogged in a while, so at some point it ran through my head. The debate, if you're interested (and how can you not be, since no one actually reads my blog?) went something like this:

To blog:
- yay for internet semi-competence
- all the cool kids are doing it
- it's cathartic in that exhibitionist kind of way
- maybe someone will stumble upon my unique set of neuroses and really appreciate them. And maybe that someone will be gorgeous, intelligent, fun, funny, and rich (for the parents, of course).

Not to blog:
- umm, honey, you don't have time to sleep
- you can't even SAY the things you're thinking, do you really think you can publish them on the internet?

Now that I'm thinking about it, I really may have made the wrong choice to begin blogging again. Whatever, I contest the culturally-specific, phallocentric notion of "rationality" anyway.

So for now, I guess I'm back in the game.

Re: Previous post

j/k. I figured it out. But I'm not going to take it down, because I've thrown (insert appropriate word here, because I'm too lazy to think of it) to the wind.

This is going to be my profile photo, and I'm so inept that I can't figure out any way to do that without publishing it on my blog. All zero of my readers are just going to have to suffer through it. Tough shit.