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Living in Chicago, by way of Dayton, OH and Havertown, PA. Contact me at atozpod@gmail.com.

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Wednesday, September 05, 2007

from Fallin to Fare Thee Well

Day 435, Session 91:
When/Where:
Friday August 31st - Heading home for the holiday weekend.
First song:
Fallin by De La Soul Ft. Teenage Fanclub
Last full song: Fare Thee Well by Indigo Girls
Progress: 1268-1281 of 5288
Total Songs Heard: 1052

Passed the "Family" section of titles today, including the song Family Tree by Ben Kweller. I've actually been thinking quite a bit about the old family tree recently, what with my recently becoming an uncle and all. I've been lucky with my tree. It's been very straight forward and easy to understand. My parents have stayed together so there's no extra branching for step- or half- siblings. My grandparents were the same way, so there's only 4 of them to worry about. I grew up with all the parents and grandparents (along with a bunch of aunts, uncles, and cousins) involved in my life, so there's no tricky question marks along the way. Not that there's anything wrong with step-siblings or the occasional intriguing question mark, but my simple mind has enough trouble keeping track of the number of relatives I have.

4 grandparents (although I've had 6 grandparent figures in my life, the rest of the tree gets way complicated if I start down that road.)
2 parents
2 sisters
8 aunts & uncles related by blood (not counting their spouses)
13 1st cousins
and now 1 nephew.

Any theoretical kids of mine are going to have an even smaller tree than I do; the wife and I only combine for 3 siblings. I guess it's getting that way all over. As time goes on the family unit keeps shrinking. Don't need as many kids to mind the farm or to go to work to help pay the bills. I'm not doing anything to help the situation either. I wonder if somewhere down the line the ever shrinking American family will come back and bite us in the ass.

I suppose as long as we have die-hard Catholics and ineffective abstinence-only teaching in school we don't have much to worry about.

Family Tree - Ben Kweller

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I guess that your in-laws don't count as family or siblings yet?

matt said...

The in-laws definitely count, but despite my relative (ha!) success at remembering all their names while in their presence, I could not definitively answer the number of aunts, uncles, and cousins those new branches have added to the tree.

Rather then get it wrong, I chose to omit non-blood relations entirely.

Plus, adding in all the wife's relations (not to mention the gaggle of second cousin type relations I grew up with) totally blows apart the 'my simple mind can only handle a compact tree' vibe I was going for.

matt said...

I suppose it is important to note for the record that the nephew was not spontaneously generated... there was a brother-in-law involved there.