the friday five for mar 17 2023
Work has been exhausting. This weekend has been overcast and rainy. My body is still having weird rashes and pains. I do not want to think or write about any of it. So here is The Friday Five on Sunday, check thefridayfive for more..
1. Will you be doing anything special for St. Patrick’s Day or is it just another day for you?
St Patrick's Day is not a thing for anyone outside of the US, i think. Maybe in Ireland, although i suspect the way they celebrate it there is nothing like how they celebrate it in the US. A much better and more inclusive holiday this week was Pi Day, which theoretically you could celebrate in any culture - including non-human/interstellar cultures - as long as you have at least 3 months per year and the third month has at least 14 days. Also, my mother died on Pi Day, so it's a two-fer for me.
I was too busy with work to do anything special, though. I bought a can of apple-flavored booze to evoke apple pie and ate 燒仙草 grass jelly as a treat. I only realized the next morning that sliced up guava with some oats on the top tasted more like an apple pie and i should've perhaps done that after work instead. But i was exhausted, so ugh.
2. What is your ancestry and do you do anything special to celebrate it?
One and probably two generations back i am Dutch and New Zealandish. I think three generations back German comes into the equation, but i'm not certain because due to Second World War that heritage wasn't emphasized in the Netherlands. But before the war Germany as a country the way we understand it today didn't really exist so it doesn't really mean anything anyway. Also around then New Zealandish ancestry gets political too because it was still part of the British Empire. More generations back there are stories of my ancestors in what is now called Scotland, Jamaica, Haiti/Dominican, Malta... But that's just following one or two single threads back amongst what at that point is mathematically hundreds or thousands of ancestors, so it's somewhat arbitrary to claim one or the other as canonical. The way i see it, all of us have the same ancestry, and that is the human species. Everything else is just fanfic.
But of course some people take their fanfic very seriously, so if someone wants to celebrate a religious or cultural event that they consider an important part of their ancestry, more power to them. I don't really celebrate much personally, but i've used both Day of the Dead and Tomb Sweeping Day to remember friends and family members who died, Pi Day as an excuse to eat pie, Easter as an excuse to eat chocolate, Queen's Birthday as a prompt to listen to London acid techno, and New Year's (either calendar or lunar) to take stock and think about what's next. With partners i have celebrated other days (most notably Christmas and Halloween) but i think the fact i don't any more is testament to their lack of relevance in my personal "ethnicity", whatever the fuck that is.
3. If you found a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow, how much of it would you spend on play and how much would you tuck away for another rainy day?
It depends how much gold. If it was enough to never have to work again, then i would do that. Anything less than the freedom to never work again is useless to me, since from my job i already earn much more than i need to pay for my lifestyle but not ever enough to actually quit working.
4. Have you ever traveled to the home of your ancestors, providing you don’t already live there?
I have visited Germany and Holland and New Zealand and Scotland. Even lived in all those places too. Never visited Haiti/Dominican, Jamaica or Malta, but the fanfic of imagining an ancestor "just like me" living there is strong, so it would be entertaining to visit at some point. But, eh, i also wouldn't mind to just visit some of the places where my closer family members lived. Like my granddad lived (and died) in Philippines, but i never visited. That might be interesting, even if i never go to the places he lived, just because it's fodder for imagination, and it's fun to imagine stuff when you travel. My dad spent some of his youth in Nigeria, and i think he was born in Kenya. I visited as a young child but i have no memory of it, so that would be cool to see. Even my own family i think we lived in Gibralter for a brief period when i was a baby, but i don't remember it, so seeing that would be neat too. Still, there are dozens of other places without a personal connection that I would also like to visit. When i was younger and more new age-y i just imagined that maybe i had been there in a "past life" or something, which was obviously nonsense but otherwise a harmless belief. Really whatever your imagination can come up with is good enough reason to visit a place.
5. Have there been any surprises in your family tree?
I imagine anyone could find a "surprise" if they looked for one. Mathematically speaking if you went far enough back, eventually you're going to find something other than average guy and average girl got married and had average kids. If you include descendants of ancestors like cousins, second cousins etc you could very quickly find yourself in a "family" of people that includes millionaires, criminals, celebrities, everything. But if you didn't have a personal connection to them, does it matter? Of course not.
This is one of the things i find difficult about ancestry. Like, you can claim whatever you want, but did you actually live it in your daily life? If you didn't, then who gives a shit? I understand that's me coming from a place of privilege, because i never had my culture taken away from me by a more dominant one. (Although i am certain if you searched my ancestry you could find people technically related to me who had.) For people who have had the direct experience themselves, or whose parents or grandparents had that experience and passed the trauma down, i get they have a stronger impetus to rediscover parts of their ancestor's culture that might have been lost, and protect it when they found it. But for me - and honestly for the majority of people - i still reckon looking into ancestry is just a bit of idle entertainment, it doesn't really mean anything. You could just as easily be "surprised" by a twist in a soap opera.
1. Will you be doing anything special for St. Patrick’s Day or is it just another day for you?
St Patrick's Day is not a thing for anyone outside of the US, i think. Maybe in Ireland, although i suspect the way they celebrate it there is nothing like how they celebrate it in the US. A much better and more inclusive holiday this week was Pi Day, which theoretically you could celebrate in any culture - including non-human/interstellar cultures - as long as you have at least 3 months per year and the third month has at least 14 days. Also, my mother died on Pi Day, so it's a two-fer for me.
I was too busy with work to do anything special, though. I bought a can of apple-flavored booze to evoke apple pie and ate 燒仙草 grass jelly as a treat. I only realized the next morning that sliced up guava with some oats on the top tasted more like an apple pie and i should've perhaps done that after work instead. But i was exhausted, so ugh.
2. What is your ancestry and do you do anything special to celebrate it?
One and probably two generations back i am Dutch and New Zealandish. I think three generations back German comes into the equation, but i'm not certain because due to Second World War that heritage wasn't emphasized in the Netherlands. But before the war Germany as a country the way we understand it today didn't really exist so it doesn't really mean anything anyway. Also around then New Zealandish ancestry gets political too because it was still part of the British Empire. More generations back there are stories of my ancestors in what is now called Scotland, Jamaica, Haiti/Dominican, Malta... But that's just following one or two single threads back amongst what at that point is mathematically hundreds or thousands of ancestors, so it's somewhat arbitrary to claim one or the other as canonical. The way i see it, all of us have the same ancestry, and that is the human species. Everything else is just fanfic.
But of course some people take their fanfic very seriously, so if someone wants to celebrate a religious or cultural event that they consider an important part of their ancestry, more power to them. I don't really celebrate much personally, but i've used both Day of the Dead and Tomb Sweeping Day to remember friends and family members who died, Pi Day as an excuse to eat pie, Easter as an excuse to eat chocolate, Queen's Birthday as a prompt to listen to London acid techno, and New Year's (either calendar or lunar) to take stock and think about what's next. With partners i have celebrated other days (most notably Christmas and Halloween) but i think the fact i don't any more is testament to their lack of relevance in my personal "ethnicity", whatever the fuck that is.
3. If you found a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow, how much of it would you spend on play and how much would you tuck away for another rainy day?
It depends how much gold. If it was enough to never have to work again, then i would do that. Anything less than the freedom to never work again is useless to me, since from my job i already earn much more than i need to pay for my lifestyle but not ever enough to actually quit working.
4. Have you ever traveled to the home of your ancestors, providing you don’t already live there?
I have visited Germany and Holland and New Zealand and Scotland. Even lived in all those places too. Never visited Haiti/Dominican, Jamaica or Malta, but the fanfic of imagining an ancestor "just like me" living there is strong, so it would be entertaining to visit at some point. But, eh, i also wouldn't mind to just visit some of the places where my closer family members lived. Like my granddad lived (and died) in Philippines, but i never visited. That might be interesting, even if i never go to the places he lived, just because it's fodder for imagination, and it's fun to imagine stuff when you travel. My dad spent some of his youth in Nigeria, and i think he was born in Kenya. I visited as a young child but i have no memory of it, so that would be cool to see. Even my own family i think we lived in Gibralter for a brief period when i was a baby, but i don't remember it, so seeing that would be neat too. Still, there are dozens of other places without a personal connection that I would also like to visit. When i was younger and more new age-y i just imagined that maybe i had been there in a "past life" or something, which was obviously nonsense but otherwise a harmless belief. Really whatever your imagination can come up with is good enough reason to visit a place.
5. Have there been any surprises in your family tree?
I imagine anyone could find a "surprise" if they looked for one. Mathematically speaking if you went far enough back, eventually you're going to find something other than average guy and average girl got married and had average kids. If you include descendants of ancestors like cousins, second cousins etc you could very quickly find yourself in a "family" of people that includes millionaires, criminals, celebrities, everything. But if you didn't have a personal connection to them, does it matter? Of course not.
This is one of the things i find difficult about ancestry. Like, you can claim whatever you want, but did you actually live it in your daily life? If you didn't, then who gives a shit? I understand that's me coming from a place of privilege, because i never had my culture taken away from me by a more dominant one. (Although i am certain if you searched my ancestry you could find people technically related to me who had.) For people who have had the direct experience themselves, or whose parents or grandparents had that experience and passed the trauma down, i get they have a stronger impetus to rediscover parts of their ancestor's culture that might have been lost, and protect it when they found it. But for me - and honestly for the majority of people - i still reckon looking into ancestry is just a bit of idle entertainment, it doesn't really mean anything. You could just as easily be "surprised" by a twist in a soap opera.