Back from Ill-in-nowa.
Family is crazy. Well, everyone is crazy, but family seems more crazy because A) you don't get to pick them, and B) you spend more time around them than most other people.
So I went down to Chicago to close out shop at The Museum, including a short exit interview, then over to my aunt and uncle's house for dinner. Except, dinner always includes too much wine over there. And after the weird of that group and the subsequent hangover, I drove over to my grandparent's place and stayed there a couple days, which was a whole other different kind of weird.
I mean, it's the contrast. It's not the way my grandfather casually talks about death as a funeral director, or the way my grandmother feels the need to push food till stuffed and sick (and I was sick, in the toilet, not that you needed to know that).
The weird is the whole different bubble of awareness of the world.
It's like two separate microcosms, non overlaping magisteria of culture. On one hand, you have the pop liberal, nearly vegetarian, city lifesyle of my aunt and the nearly bourgeousie trial lawyer uncle, and their delightful yet often painfully detached from common experience children, in that little pocket of first world soccer moms and text text text and armchair philosophy.
And in the other you have the nearly southern parents of my father, moderately conservative, quietly religious, and huge on high calorie meals and old fashioned kill them with kindness style OCD.
From my outside view, both the shallow concern for everything of the former household and the controlling interest of the second seem nuts, despite being far apart on just about any spectrum. Some people would say, oh, but the former must be so much more standable. Well...theres a lack of control there. Too much control in the latter, and a lack of control in the former. I mean, parents having to cuss out their son for cutting off the legs of the mother's new jeans and taking other things from their closet and completely disregarding their trust, and him basically just ignoring that because there's very little obvious discipline in the household, people just sort of do what they want and the hell with other people's feelings. That's nuts too.
So, as fun as it is to wade in stranger insanity, I'm glad to be back to the more familiar type for a while.
So I went down to Chicago to close out shop at The Museum, including a short exit interview, then over to my aunt and uncle's house for dinner. Except, dinner always includes too much wine over there. And after the weird of that group and the subsequent hangover, I drove over to my grandparent's place and stayed there a couple days, which was a whole other different kind of weird.
I mean, it's the contrast. It's not the way my grandfather casually talks about death as a funeral director, or the way my grandmother feels the need to push food till stuffed and sick (and I was sick, in the toilet, not that you needed to know that).
The weird is the whole different bubble of awareness of the world.
It's like two separate microcosms, non overlaping magisteria of culture. On one hand, you have the pop liberal, nearly vegetarian, city lifesyle of my aunt and the nearly bourgeousie trial lawyer uncle, and their delightful yet often painfully detached from common experience children, in that little pocket of first world soccer moms and text text text and armchair philosophy.
And in the other you have the nearly southern parents of my father, moderately conservative, quietly religious, and huge on high calorie meals and old fashioned kill them with kindness style OCD.
From my outside view, both the shallow concern for everything of the former household and the controlling interest of the second seem nuts, despite being far apart on just about any spectrum. Some people would say, oh, but the former must be so much more standable. Well...theres a lack of control there. Too much control in the latter, and a lack of control in the former. I mean, parents having to cuss out their son for cutting off the legs of the mother's new jeans and taking other things from their closet and completely disregarding their trust, and him basically just ignoring that because there's very little obvious discipline in the household, people just sort of do what they want and the hell with other people's feelings. That's nuts too.
So, as fun as it is to wade in stranger insanity, I'm glad to be back to the more familiar type for a while.