Over my vacation, I met my cousin (once removed) Louis and his girlfriend (wife? I didn't ask) Cathy. At least, I think that's his relation to me; I'm never going to be able to keep my family tree straight without some fairly sophisticated software, since the huge nest of family links is made more complicated by the time over which it spans, leading to such interesting things as a great-aunt five years younger than I am. This cousin from the previous generation is fortunately only a couple years younger than I am, and since I'm unlikely to meet him again (at least not for quite some time), I've decided to just gloss over the matter and not think too much about it.

I suppose this makes me a horribly disinterested family member, but the sad truth of the matter is that my mind just can't deal with the size of my family, or really the concept of the social connection between large families at all. For the most part, these people would be perfect strangers except for the fact that I share a lot of genes in common with them. I suppose this is important to a lot of people, but I can't help but remember that I already share 98.7% of my genes with chimpanzees, and have about half of them in common with bananas (which is actually calming to remember when you have to work around — or with — a more human form of fruit or vegetable). What makes family interesting to me is either that I have a long personal history with the people in question, or the people in question have a long personal history or otherwise shaped the lives of people I personally know. Two links — that's about as far as my mind can extend. I have enough difficulty just keeping track of the names; I had quite some difficulty keeping Louis' name in my head (perhaps because my father pronounces it like "Louise", and the cognitive dissonance of having a "female" name attached to my male cousin was bothering me) until I linked it to Louise Krmpotic, the product manager for MapleTA, a software package developed by Maplesoft that I ride herd on for the Department of Mathematics at LSU where I work. The software package itself has given me enough troubles to literally give me nightmares, but Louise is a friendly, helpful woman, and so she got to be in my thoughts over Christmas, albeit thoughts driven mostly by a desperate desire not to humiliate myself by stumbling over my cousin's name.

Louis at least has some common history with my father, having also attended a seminary in the Philippines, and there was some long table discussion about what it was like for him, and how things have changed since my father's time. That was fairly interesting conversation, especially since my father's exposure to religion has left him a very irreverent athiest with sufficient historical knowledge to be spectacularly entertaining when he has the urge to comment on how things should be, or how they got to be the way that they are. This religious commonality led us to a midnight mass on Christmas, which I enjoyed much less, but that's a topic for another entry.

Being Catholic didn't stop him from being somewhat reckless, though, as his travel plans were slightly insane. He made it to my father's house after driving for five hours after having stayed up all night. More interestingly, he did it on Highway 5, between San Diego and Salinas, which gets very foggy in the winter. He didn't let it slow him down, though, as he described moving at over 40 miles an hour guided only by the distant red glow of a taillight in front of him. My father and Barbara managed to convince him to take 101 back south, a significantly safer route, though he claimed after he made it back that it took him half an hour longer, something that everyone had a great amount of difficulty believing, since it should be a shorter route, and you can generally move faster.

Still, family stranger or no, I'm glad he took the safe route back. He and Cathy made a cute couple.