The cakewrecks blog is reminding me of the summer before sixth grade, when my cousin (same age as me) came to stay with us for the summer. When he was going home at the end of the summer, his parents said that they were getting a cake to celebrate, and asked him what kind of picture he wanted on the cake. He said he wanted a gun. My parents, who overheard his end of the conversation, were sure that his mother would ignore the gun request and get a cake with the Red Sox or Patriots logo or something.
Nope. We get up to Boston, get to their apartment, and on the table is a cake with a semi-automatic drawn in icing. And pink roses in the corners.
Hil, I'm sorry to hear about your coworker. Being from where I'm from, I have zero experience dealing with those things, though I imagined I've done the same to my Christian-Israeli friends when I just got to know them. However, when I traveled in U.S. I remember sort of "pity looks" when I told strangers where I'm from. "Oh, you're from THERE. How is it like?". Which isn't rude, but made me feel like I'm coming from outer space. Some of them actually seemed to be freaked out about this. They seemed to be satisfied with the answer of "I can't picture myself living in any other place", which is true - I can't picture myself living in U.S., for instance, even though I have plans to study for post grad in some institute that sounds very cool.
Also, I can trace similarity between some of your stories and my family's stories. My grandparents are from England, Poland, Hungary (Austro-Hungary) and Germany. After the Holocaust, the surviving relatives who didn't escape earlier went to Australia, U.S. and Israel. I only know of the Israeli branch of the family, and I know my dad had cousins in the East Coast in the 60's (he doesn't know what happened to them). Two years ago we found out some English relatives of ours, and we had the best Seder ever with them. It was hilarious - they thought that because we're Israelis we read every word on the Haggadah, and we thought the same because the grandfather of the family was the Chief Rabbi of London before WW2. I'm coming from a family that reads 15 minutes of the Haggadah just because I make them do so, or else it would be 3 minutes. After an hour and a half my dad and the "dad" of their side looked at each other and mumbled "umm, mind if we skip this part...?".
Right. Chocolate truffles are ready. Living room was cleaned last night. Schedule for university was completed (part 1 of 3). I still need to do the key chain for my friend's bachelorette party (I hope to come across a bead store on my way to her so I'll add the WWCD (what would cthulhu do?), work, clean my room and the kitchen, and oh, yeah, brush teeth. Again. Since I'm with this braces, brushing takes about 25 minutes every day, because I'm supposed to brush after every time I eat. And I'm tired, hence a little bit cranky. And oh, I was being "promoted" last night to be a mod in my musical forum. Never been asked about it, and it's lovely gesture, but it came out of the blue. A little bit.
Slacking time here is over. Time to face life. Again. Grrr. It's Friday, I'm not supposed to be awake at this time!
OMG, people. I'm handling URLs from the dawn of the interwebs now. One of them, of a gynecologic branch of some Israeli hospital, was come.to/cervix.
It gets to a point where it's a kind of Who's On First thing, but with empires.
It's weird. Findland's only been a country since around WWI, and my dad's family all immigrated to the US years before that. So, strictly speaking, they were Russian, because while there was the Duchy of Finland, there wasn't a country there. Don't try to tell Dad that, though. "My family's from Finland." "And that great-grandfather who the records said, 'came from the east'?" "Eastern Finland." "But the town the rest of them were in was already in eastern . . . " "They were Finnish."
OK, Dad. Aside from conquering armies from Sweden, Russia, and occasionally Germany doing what conquering armies do, I'm sure the bloodline is pure Finnish. Whatever that may be.
I'm sure the bloodline is pure Finnish. Whatever that may be.
According to my Finnish workmates, that would be anyone with a penchant for depression, swearing and drinking copious amounts of vodka. Also lactose intolerance.
Also stubborness and drinking copious amounts of coffee, to balance out the vodka.
And I understand that biting the nads off of reindeer as a adolescent rite of passage fits in there somewhere, too. Dad sort of skipped over that part in our little talks.
I just want to say how fascinating I'm finding the genealogy talk here. One of the things I'll get around doing some time soon is going into the history of my family, especially the German-Austrian immigrants whom we have very little info on, since my Dad's relatives were all deceased before I was born (and then he died in 1970, so not much in the way of reminicences I remember).
I'm coming from a family that reads 15 minutes of the Haggadah just because I make them do so, or else it would be 3 minutes.
Ha! Reminds me of the Seder my MIL gave a few years ago where the first night of Passover fell on the same night as the NCAA Basketball championships when the Florida Gators (ptooey) were playing. My FIL sat down and before the first glass of wine said, "If we're not done by 9:05, we're still done."
In some ways for me, genealogy is so straightforward and so complicated at the same time-- basically, went to Cuba from Spain in the early 19th century. But the great-great whatever grandfather who'd done that had made a pit stop in the U.S. and married himself a nice Creole Jewish girl from New Orleans. She converted and like a good Catholic wife, proceeded to bear him 25 children (2 sets of triplets, three sets of twins, and 13 single births) and not only did she survive, all of them did too, to adulthood. So who knows how much of the island I might've been related to. Of course, after 1959, all those records are lost, so a lot remains a mystery, although I do have one cousin who's working on trying to track down the lineage.
I come from a very secular nuclear family. Until I was 16 or 17 I had no idea that cereals weren't kosher for Passover.
