I’ve already posted that I’m with my grandparents for Christmas, and I ought to mention that Christmas is a religious event for them. Christmas, for me, has been purely commercial from a young age, without even getting into my lack of faith. They don’t mind going to Christmas mass - being stuck with far too many people in a hot, sweaty church listening to an excessively long sermon, late at night when you’d rather be in bed. I’ve been able to shirk the responsibility of going by way of my father a few times, because he isn’t religious either, but now I have no excuse.

        My mother, it seems, is either religious or feels compelled to be religious to please her parents - I’ve never figured out which, as she doesn’t really . She has tried a few times to bring us back into the fold of Christianity, especially around the accepted ages for first communion and confirmation, but eventually we’d get lazy and stop going. So I’ve had my first communion and I’ve been confirmed and I’m “a member of the Catholic church” and as I told her today I don’t want or need that status. And, I think, she feels like it’s her failing as a parent that I’m not particularly faithful.

        Earlier my mom told us that we would, in fact, be going to Christmas mass. A shame, really, because I was planning to learn Python at that time. Anyway, she took my brother and I aside to tell us that we would be going and we would be participating in communion (I’m sure that’s not how you’re supposed to say it). Some more backstory: I decided not to do communion at my brother’s confirmation, though I don’t remember what inspired that little rebellion. I know that I told my mom it would seem dishonest to do that when I don’t actually believe. At any rate, I told her that I would do the socially accepted thing and avoid making her look bad in front of her parents. She said that she knows we don’t go to church often, and that she’d like to fix that, and asked whether I would go to church with her in Ottawa. I said no, and that I don’t need or want it.

        The part that makes me suspect she feels responsible for my lack of faith, and that it’s bad/wrong for me to not be religious, is that she said there might come a time in my life when I want to be religious so that my children will have a place to belong. I feel bad about that, but I’m doing my part and going to church tonight. I don’t, however, have an hour or more to waste every sunday morning. Sunday morning is when I buckle down and do schoolwork. If I’m going to replace good working time with something else, it’s got to be worth more than whatever work I could be doing, like fencing practise.

        There’s no real moral or purpose to me telling you this, I just felt like making a post about it for the sake of exposition. So now you know, and my disk defrag is done, so I can get back to using my PC. My dad used to run a disk defrag overnight and forbid anyone to use the computer until it was done, and I guess I picked up the habit.