An Inconvenience?

So we're right smack in the middle of the holidays. Christmas is over, New Year's is next week. Around 9:00 PM on Christmas Night, my Dad says to me, "Seems like an awful lot of work for just a few hours."

That's quite true. And while I enjoy the holiday season, as I'm sure many people do, I can't help but consider a lot of it to be an inconvenience. I'm the kind of person who creates a schedule that I follow. That's not to say that I'm obsessive-compulsive about having to have my pens in a certain order, or counting the number of times my turn signal ticks before I can make a turn. But I like to have my life planned out to a certain extent, and the holidays just turn that whole thing upside-down for a week or two.

The actual day of Christmas was quite enjoyable for me this year, so if there was only a way to eliminate all that preparation that goes along with it, we'd be golden. But I digress.

The only other gripe I have about the holidays is the whole social aspect. I like to be sociable when I feel like being sociable. The holidays just come around and declare "You must be a sociable individual on December 25th and December 31st!" Fuck that! But again, if I would celebrate Christmas only when I was in the mood to do so, it would probably come around with the same consistency as the locusts. Or even Halley's Comet. Heh.

I think the main problem I'm alluding to here, is that I find it difficult to spend vast amounts of time with my family for one simple reason -- we don't have anything in common! It is impossible for me to carry on a lengthy, meaningful conversation with one of them because we simply don't have anything to talk about. My main interests revolve around computers, computer gaming, movies, music, anime, and other minor sub-topics of this list. Most of my family members don't even know what those things are, let alone have any interest in them. Sure, they try to sound interested in the event that I decide to talk about them, but it's pretty much the equivalent to talking to myself.

I certainly love my family. But I'm not exactly sure they get that impression from me as I'm laying on the couch Christmas Day watching the football game and half-listening to their topics of conversation, which interest me about as much as mine interest them. I don't even LIKE football, but I'm quite sure I would get yelled at had I tried to play a computer game while they were visiting. Or maybe they know me well enough to know that since I *wasn't* in front of the computer, I was telling them they are still important to me.

I hope so.