The advantage of being ethnically Jewish, just ask any Jew - is that you’re allowed to make jokes about Jews. Same thing with being bi and using the word “fag”.

Now, if only I was a black Jewish communist lesbian…

Well, the shopping aspect of christmas is apparently the concept of this gift exchange doesn’t stem from the actual nature of the holiday per se, but evolved much later.

What I’m saying here is not solid historical fact, do don’t take it as that.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Christmas came to replace a different holiday that came around that time, and all that religious bullshit came much later, I wouldn’t doubt it.

So, buying presents I guess, is a part of the whole thing with coming over to someone else’s house. You don’t come empty handed to something like that, you know, so you bring something over, that’s a probable hypothesis.

I don’t think anyone could possibly say for certain why this gift exchange actually exists, but it’s there. Even hannukah has some sort of a gift exchange, which strengthens my previous point that christmas was a common holiday in which some sort of meaning was injected much later.

Well, I don’t know.

No, I’m not gonna wish you all a “merry christmas”, how’s that!

I’m growing less and less happy with the content on my blog. It feels as if I am in a cage whose walls shrink increasingly rapidly, eventually forcing me to an uncomfortable posture. So what is it that stops me from saying what I want, from expressing myself the way I used to? I was pretty harsh on cripples, went down on some Ubuntu users at the time, and lets not forget other minorities. So, let’s look at it.

I’m really going out of my way to write this post, since theoretically, I’m not really supposed to pretend to just go on living, business as usual. But then again, the cage is increasingly shrinking. I can’t allow it to force me into any sort of posture whatsoever, for creativity’s sake.

Basically, every now and then someone might try to discuss something I wrote on my blog. Usually it’s something good, I guess, I heard “pay for experience, not for information” quoted a couple of times, or sometimes my “future machine” concept was crushed mercilessly by some Platonist a couple of times.

Let me get it out of the way, it’s pretty obvious that there’s some impression management going on between me and my family, especially distant relatives and such. I help them out with their own expectations, I try not to worry my family for the most part, I hide stuff from them intentionally. It’s a part of society’s expectations from an individual in the west. You are, let me tell you, terribly stupid if you think you don’t do anything like that yourself. It’s a western expectation, you’re expected to do it, there you have it. So I’m just playing by the rules, am I not?
In that regard, the Internet, then, is where I don’t really put on any masks. It’s my weak point, to some extent. In theory, whoever sees my blog is by far more likely to be someone who doesn’t actually know me, so I use my friendly stranger tone, I don’t feel the need to hold any sort of impression really, and while I’m not exactly anonymous, I can still say more or less whatever I want.

With this in mind, relatives and family members therefor break that rule of thumb. See what I’m getting at? They get to take a look at the unmasked me. They don’t want to know about that stuff, but there.
Theoretically, what I’m doing is anti-social. I’m being expected to keep a certain “fidelity” in the family field, whereas I’m not expected much of in the Internet, a common field where it’s easy to keep anonymity.

It all started back several months ago when my dad tossed it in front of me. He was not too happy with my opinions. It’s one of those things that could ruin dinner I guess.

“I saw what you wrote in your site about cripples.”

“Oh, that.. Ahm..”

An awkward moment, and a turning point. Since then, I figured I need to just put a little bit of self-censorship. Just a little, nothing too serious.

Every now and then, I’d tighten my self-censorship.

Today I had a talk with my grandma. Yep, even she reads my blog. It’s pretty serious.

I don’t know if its got anything to do with changes in my attitude towards things, although it could be that this rapture that caused created the dichotomy that is “the quiet Dushkin” versus “Dushkin, citizen of The Internet”. The first one, “the quiet Dushkin” being, more or less, me the way I used to be when I left Israel, back in the summer of 2004 - a quiet person who doesn’t complain much, slightly conservative with an acceptably long hair to a long-haired socialist hippie with opinions and an “anything goes” state of mind. (I was making a sort of a hyperbole there, not hardcore socialist really.) I’m not sure about that theory though.

So there you have it. I hope it’ll help me loosen up.