Sometimes, it blows me away how similar I am to each of my parents. I'm majoring in engineering, like my dad. I like science and math and working with my hands. I like watching baseball games and rough housing with other kids and boating. As with my mom, I like to read books, any and all. I like to be by myself sometimes and I like cleaning and baking (occasionally). And then, like both of my parents, I like music and dogs and plants and car rides and travelling. I think I'm also a good balance of girl and boy since my sister and I don't have any brothers. Not that I consider myself a tomboy or anything. I just think I'm a girl who's not so girly as to be creepy, but not so tomboy-ish as to be considered "one of the guys." I have a really strange sense of humor that my parents swear I didn't get from them, but who introduced me to Monty Python? Huh? Dad? Huh?
But then, there are other times when I can't even believe I am the product of these two people. I get really frustrated with my mom whenever I talk about living in California when I'm older. She always says that she wants both my sister and I to stay in Pennsylvania, but that's not the life I want. I want to live somewhere where it's warm all the time and the pace of life is a bit slower than here on the East Coast. (Not that this stupid state even touches the Atlantic Ocean...) My mom moved around a lot when she was young due to my grandfather working for the radio company. I think one time she told me she lived in 12 states by the time she was 14, or something like that. My mom likes to take vacations to other places, but she always likes to come back to cozy little southern PA where nothing exciting happens. I want to travel the world, to use a cliche. I want to live and work in England for 2 years. I want to visit Spain for a month. Then I want to live in Cali, where it's only a few hours to Mexico in one direction, and a few hours to the Rocky Mountains in another. Sometimes, I'm jealous of my sister because she's living in Austria currently. She's been there since September and she's coming home in just over 2 weeks. My mom keeps saying how she thinks Jessica is ready to come home, but I wouldn't be so sure. Yeah, maybe she's ready to hear English all around her again, but I think that once she finds a career, she's getting out of PA as fast as she possibly can. Her ideal is to teach German at a high school in New Jersey. But I think she'd be happier if she met a nice Austrian boy and had cute Austrian children and got to speak Austrian German all the time instead of coming back to this country.
Then there's my dad. This is what sparked this whole post. Tonight at dinner, he was talking about what he did throughout the day. I think he said he was a Pep Boys (a car parts shop thing) when he saw two bigger guys with beards sitting together and one was rubbing the other's arm. Then the following dialogue happened:
Dad: It was gross.
Me: What? Why was it gross?
Dad: It's just unnatural!
And that's when I realized that I am not like my dad AT ALL when it comes to political, religious, or life topics. Sure, we might share some personality traits and hobbies, but I could not have more different opinions. First of all, he was assuming that the two men are in a romantic relationship. Maybe they're brothers. Maybe they're good friends and one of them was having a bad day, so the other guy was comforting him. Maybe the one guy's wife died recently and the other guy has known both of them since college and it's just a thing for them to be physical with one another to show their affection. Second of all, I totally support homosexual relationships. Heck, I support any healthy relationship between two adults. I know my dad was raised in a different era or whatever, but it just pisses me off that he's so close-minded when it comes to this stuff. One time, my sister asked my mom what she thought our paternal grandparents would do if one of our cousins came out. My mom said that they should probably just not tell our grandparents. And I agree. My grandparents are from a completely different generation. Like, my grandpa is turning 91 this year. My dad and his three brothers were all brought up very conservative Lutheran Christian and even though my dad now identifies as an Agnostic, I think he still finds it hard to cast away his old beliefs and biases. I just find it strange sometimes that my sister and I (and even our mom) are so alike on an issue on which my dad has the opposite opinion. If two people are in love, nobody else's opinion matters. And I'd rather not have garbage like, "It's unnatural!" spewed where I can hear.
This has been a rant.
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