Happy holidays, everybody, and I want to send some special love out to those of you who have

journeyed to the homes of your significant others for the first time during the holiday season.

That is a very stressful situation. It's a kind of hidden cold war that nobody even talks about.

No one talks about it on the news. No one will talk about it on TV, but right now,

if you really tune in and take a deep breath and really feel the force, that is the connective

tissue between all human minds on the planet right now, you can actually feel the tangible

oozing stress of boyfriends sitting at various tables and couches with the disappointed parents

of their girlfriends. It is a real sweat right now. It's a little marathon that nobody ever

talks about. It's the process of getting through two or three or maybe even four days with your

significant others' parents. And man, it's a mind-fuck. It's a mind-fuck. It might be great.

Maybe their parents are awesome, but sometimes their parents could be awesome, but they don't

think you're awesome. The parents could be disappointed by you, for example. This has been my

primary experience every time that I've ever gone home with any significant other.

It's always, now I could easily be projecting this, but I imagine that if you're a traditional

Republican parent, the last thing you want you to see your girlfriend bringing into the house

is some bearded acid casualty, weirdo who won't stop spouting off about unfortunate philosophies

that have absolutely nothing to do with steel production or whatever business they were part of

when they were young. It's a weird feeling now. I don't know the answer to getting through it.

Quite often, for me, the answer had been finding some prescription medication and trying to numb

myself as much as I could during the time period, but I don't think that's the best answer. I mean,

really, there's a lot of, I think there's a lot of cool ways you can frame it so that you don't

have to feel so freaked out. There's, you know, you could pretend to be an anthropologist. You could

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