My wife and I and our son were down from Seattle, visiting her sister, and their parents from Huntsville were there as well. Also my wife\u2019s father\u2019s sister\u2019s son, who is my wife\u2019s cousin as well as my wife\u2019s sister\u2019s cousin, and from San Francisco. Also his nephew, from Atlanta, although the nephew did not participate in this story. I don\u2019t know how it came up, but my sister-in-law told my niece, who is also my wife\u2019s cousin\u2019s mother\u2019s brother\u2019s grand-daughter, that they, her grandparents, almost named her Schumpta (if you don\u2019t hear the name often it sounds like SCHOOMP-THUH). My niece was not impressed by this, so she went with her second cousin into the play room to make a tower out of Magnatiles for my son, who was at the time taking a nap, to knock over.<\/p>\n
So I mentioned to my wife that if I had been a girl, my parents would have named me Angela. And I said if they had, it would have been awkward for her, falling in love with an Angela and everything. My wife said it would have been no problem; she would have just called me Mangela. This made me laugh uproariously, and I tried to think of a way to use Mangela in a tweet about gender fluidity, but I couldn\u2019t think of anything that wasn\u2019t potentially offensive.<\/p>\n
My wife\u2019s cousin was explaining how he and his wife had a business that sourced gluten-free flour to companies. And my mother-in-law said she was very proud of all of the cousins (her sibling\u2019s children and her sibling-in-law\u2019s children). My sister-in-law made a joke about our stripper cousin. (We don\u2019t have a stripper cousin but if we did I would respect the job, as I have had the privilege of watching a stripper perform and it would be hypocritical to judge. Also, it\u2019s a job that I imagine is much more difficult than it looks, and something I couldn\u2019t do, even if I wasn\u2019t middle-aged and out of shape and going bald and a man and have terrible taste in g-strings. Basically, I\u2019m too lazy).<\/p>\n
The conversation got a bit garbled and we had to repeat what my sister-in-law had said, and my wife laughed and replied that our stripper cousin\u2019s name was Mangela. And again I tried to think of some kind of joke, like maybe Mangela was a special-needs stripper, and in much the same way that people reference a so-called \u201cshort bus\u201d for special-needs kids, Mangela him\/herself worked a half-pole, or a \u201cshort-pole,\u201d but again I couldn\u2019t think of a way to bring it up without being offensive, not to mention the difficulty in even setting up the joke without being ponderous and tedious.<\/p>\n
And then my wife mentioned how \u201cMangela\u201d was a funny name because it sounds like \u201cManjula,\u201d a not-uncommon Indian name. Upon hearing this my father-in-law said he had a masi named Manjula, masi being a word for your mother\u2019s sister. Incidentally, the word for father\u2019s sister is foi, so my wife\u2019s cousin\u2019s mother is her foi. That\u2019s not material to this story either. But when my father-in-law mentioned his Manjula-masi that made my wife and her sister laugh, and then I had to explain to my sister-in-law how we got to Manjula in the first place.<\/p>\n
This sparked my father-in-law to ask if I didn\u2019t have an ex-girlfriend named Angela, or a friend maybe, and my wife and I said we did, once. Friend not girlfriend. My sister-in-law asked if she was the crazy one, and we said yes, although that might have been another friend of ours. And then she asked if that was the friend who\u2019s brother went missing on a hike for three days, and we had to keep saying that Angela didn\u2019t have a brother. Which made us think she must be referring to a different crazy friend. And to be clear, crazy in these contexts means mentally ill, not zany.<\/p>\n
At this point I was trying to think of other woman\u2019s name with \u201cman\u201d in them, so I could add a W-O, and I came up with \u201cSamantha is such a hard-core feminist, she changed her named so Sawomantha.\u201d I may tweet that. I don\u2019t actually know anyone named Samantha.<\/p>\n
Finally my wife remembered that the friend who had the brother who went missing for three days was her co-worker Anne. Who isn\u2019t a friend at all. And that Angela, by the way, was also a co-worker, and a friend, and by coincidence our neighbor before she moved to Austin. Also, she suffered from a crippling depression, poor thing. But I think she\u2019s better now. And I might as well mention that Angela\u2019s ex-boyfriend bought her house from her, not right when they broke up of course, but after she had rented it to another coworker for a while, who, when his wife got pregnant, ended up moving just a few miles away from where my wife and I had moved, although we still own that first house and rent it to some very nice people. Angela\u2019s ex-boyfriend got married and they had a baby but they still live in that house he bought from his ex. But never mind. None of that has anything to do with this.<\/p>\n
Anne\u2019s brother, the one who had been missing for three days on a hike, it turns out, is a cardiologist. In fact, when my father-in-law was in Seattle, visiting my wife and I and our son, he was having some chest pains, so first we called his sister\u2019s husband, who is a cardiologist, the same sister\u2019s husband who\u2019s son was visiting my wife\u2019s sister at the same time we were. And then we called my wife\u2019s sister for some reason, maybe because she knew someone who knew cardiologists, because she gave us the number for a cardiologist in a San Francisco, who recommended we talk to someone he knew and highly recommended in Seattle, who was, you guessed it, my wife\u2019s co-worker\u2019s brother, the one who had once gone missing for three days.<\/p>\n
My wife remembered all of this and reminded us about it. And then my wife\u2019s cousin asked us if we\u2019d read that long article in the new York Times about the four Indian\u2019s who had died on Mt. Everest, about how their families were trying to recover the bodies. He\u2019d brought it up, he explained, because a cardiologist had also been on the mountain that day, and he had not only filmed the four Indians, way above him on the mountain, as they died, but he had felt bad about not helping them, even though doing so probably would have gotten him killed too.<\/p>\n
My sister-in-law\u2019s father asked who was the Indian with the camera, and my wife said not an Indian, a cardiologist, and I made a joke about it wasn\u2019t an Indian, but instead a cardiologist, as if an Indian can\u2019t be a cardiologist, which was funny given that my wife\u2019s father\u2019s sister\u2019s husband, who is also my sister-in-law\u2019s cousin\u2019s father, is a cardiologist, and also Indian. And I tried to think of a joke about how if you\u2019re Indian and studying cardiology you spend so much time inside with books that you turn pale and aren\u2019t Indian anymore, but I also tried to think of a way to tie in how climbing Mt. Everest would turn you white, especially if you died. But nothing came to mind.<\/p>\n
Then my wife recalled than when she and her sister were kids, they went to Switzerland, with their parents, and it was pointed out to them that a person who was travelling past Jungfrau could see little black dots on the mountain face, and those were people who had died, and been left there, as it was too expensive and dangerous to retrieve the bodies. I managed to say something that wasn\u2019t a joke about how folks could use drones to retrieve the bodies, these days, and then I found a way to turn it into a joke about gung-ho drone-flying bros upping their game from drone racing to a competition to see who could fetch the most bodies off a mountain. Everyone laughed.<\/p>\n
My wife\u2019s cousin\u2019s mother\u2019s brother then mentioned how there were some Indians, Parsees, who don\u2019t burn or bury their dead, but hanging them in a well for birds to eat. I replied that not only was I aware of this, but that I happened to know that there was a Parsee sanctuary very close to where his brother lived in Mumbai (a place my wife and I had visited before we were married). Then my wife\u2019s mother asked what did Jews do with their dead, and my wife\u2019s cousin made a joke about not knowing if she\u2019d said Jews or Juice. I was going to try and think of a joke about Jews and Juice, but instead I told my mother-in-law that Jews bury their died just like Christians do, something I know because my wife and my son and necessarily the coworker who had moved out of Angela\u2019s house when he and his wife had a baby, live within a few miles of a Jewish cemetery.<\/p>\n
My sister-in-law\u2019s cousin\u2019s father\u2019s wife\u2019s brother\u2019s wife then said she thought that Jews and Parsees were a lot alike, which is why she\u2019d asked, but my wife\u2019s sister\u2019s daughter\u2019s second cousin\u2019s grandmother\u2019s brother said no, the Parsees had originally come from a different part of the Middle East. I tried to think of a way to use the word \u201cSemitic\u201d but couldn\u2019t. But I did mention how it was odd that when I was growing up in Wichita, I happened to live with a few miles of several cemeteries, and now, in Seattle, I also live within a few miles of several cemeteries.<\/p>\n
I explained this was because when these towns were smaller, the cemeteries were outside of town, and then as the towns grew, they overtook the cemeteries. My mother\u2019s in-law\u2019s nephew then said that in a town on the East Coast, which I am assuming was not far from where his nephew\u2019s grandfather the cardiologist lived, they kept their cemetery right in the center of town, which was a problem because when hurricane Sandy came through it uprooted several large elm trees, which unearthed lots of graves, bones and all.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t remember what we talked about after that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My wife and I and our son were down from Seattle, visiting her sister, and their parents from Huntsville were there as well. Also my wife\u2019s father\u2019s sister\u2019s son, who is my wife\u2019s cousin as well as my wife\u2019s sister\u2019s cousin, and from San Francisco. Also his nephew, from Atlanta, although the nephew did not … <\/p>\n