Happy Hanukkah + rant

Today is the first day of Hanukkah and I was lazy and didn't buy my electric menorah that I was planning to light just to keep track of the days. (Not that it actually matters, but I might as well have pretty lights in my apartment for something with which I am connected ethnically, even if not religously.) In the title for this entry, don't forget to pronounce both H's as rolling H's. If you don't get a soar throat from reading the title aloud, then you're not pronouncing it correctly.

Also, happy late Festivus. In addition to an electric menorah, I should buy the requisite aluminum pole to properly celebrate Festivus next year.

Yesterday, I did the canonical Chinese food and movie thing. My mother had left a message on my answering machine to suggest a dinner to celebrate Christmas, which I have no desire to do. Having been sick for three weeks and in general in a bad mood on the day she called, it was a good thing I didn't return the call for a couple days. (Dealing with my mother generally leads to large increases in my general stress level, so I wasn't about to call her when I was already ready to blow up half the world.) My immediate reaction was extreme annoyance about my Jewish mother inviting me to a dinner (at a place of my choice) in honor of Christmas dinner rather than one in honor of Hanukkah (and keep in mind I am getting this from a person who claims to believe in that crap devoutly rather than from somebody who shares my belief that all religion is bullshit) as if she thought that was something I wanted. Really, despite years and years of evidence and explicit and vocal statements on my part, she really has no fucking clue what I like and what I don't. (She either works like a short-memory Markov process or is far more devious than I could imagine and is perhaps purposely or perhaps subconsciously pushing my buttons with her actions and statements. Or maybe it's some combination thereof?) After I wasn't feeling as sick and my mood had improved, I became rational enough to treat the dinner invite as a good thing and pretend in accepting the dinner invite that the other statements in the invitation hadn't been present. However, it had to be Chinese food. Otherwise I would have (politely!) refused. :)

The dinner was at a decent place in Old Pas I had never eaten before. I can't remember the name at the moment but it's near the corner of Raymond and Union. Next time I go, though, I'm going to order the Peking Duck two days in advance (now that I know they have that).

There's not much to report at the dinner aside from the usual stresses of being with my family, so I'll rant about these for a while. (This is your warning to move on if you want.) My brother had a nice temper tantrum and needed to be convinced by the restaurant owner (I think it was the owner) that the bathroom faucet was capable of having cold water and not just scalding water. After that ordeal, which lasted several minutes (although I missed much of it because I walked away from that in disgust and waited for him to finish), my brother came out and came up with some excuse to justify himself. (I didn't buy it, but I was interested in moving on with life.) My mother and father made their usual variants of showing that their priority is money rather than something related to what I consider the most important battle of life, which is boring vs interesting (and variants thereof). Interesting sometimes means fun, it sometimes means challenging, or it sometimes means some combination or something slightly different, but it's invariably along these lines. My mother's comment wasn't actually bad, but she reacted poorly when after she stressed prosperity as the object of a toast that I stated that I felt that her constantly focus on monetary and material goals in such things (creativity and other stuff being considered an afterthough if any thought at all) reflected poorly on her values. Now, this comment wasn't particularly appropriate (and it came out before I could stop myself, as usual) and it's definitely my fault for volunteering this statement, but I do believe this to be true (quite ardently, in fact). My father's version of this was a variant on an old theme---this time he asked if I got any money for the research papers I published, which irked me to the extent that I proceeded to give him a brief lecture/rant (probably with too angry a tone in my voice) on the point of scientific research and how publish-or-perish works. He (and other members of my family) have asked me on multiple occasions whether I get money for [fill in the blank]. Again, this is a poor reflection on the priorities of the people asking me this question. (To be fair, it's pretty much my mother and father who have asked me this crap and not either of my siblings, so I should leave them out of this.) Whenever I tell them about a project, that is invariably the first thing they ask about it---not whether it's cool or interesting or challenging or fun or creative or otherwise worthwhile, but whether I am going to get money for it. It's bloody disgusting!

My father also asked me why I had a blog, although I think he was just curious. His precise wording might make it seem like he was asking in a manner in which he had decided in advance that it was a ridiculous thing to do, but I don't believe that's how the question was meant. I believe it was meant in the usual academic 'Why are you doing this?' manner which is blunt but which wants to know the merits of (in the scientific case) the approach being taken. The tone was really the same thing I get from my colleagues all the time and might only give a negative impression if one didn't realize this simply because of my father's somewhat neanderthal approach to communication in general. Oh, and apparently my sister reads the blog occasionally, so I'll send out a wave to her in case she's reading this. Maybe that wine rant did get back to my family after all, but it's not like I'd ever write anything here if I weren't willing for it to get back to them. There isn't anything in here I wouldn't be willing to tell them directly. They may not like what I have to say, but that's hardly different from their reactions to what I actually do say to their face.

I'm going to go try to smooth the chip on my shoulder now. :)