7 Annoying Questions Your Family Will Ask You When You Come Home For The Holidays

Might as well prep your answers now.

1. Are you seeing anyone?

Questions like this from your family have nothing to do with romance. They care not if you "had a good time" with a prospective suitor. Their real concern is the fate of holidays to come. They realize they can't keep telling the same stories to the same people every December, and you are the best hope for new blood. You are merely a missionary for your family's dogma, and they want to see if you have any prospective initiates.

2. I heard about [annoying internet thing from five years ago]. What is [annoying internet thing from five years ago]?

The internet is a very confusing, scary place, and, since you're a millennial, your family figures you can guide them through the chaos like a meme-savvy Virgil to their Dante. It seems to take about five years for an internet thing to get digested by society enough for it to finally reach the ears of your family, but now it has and they would very much like you to explain it to them.

3. The tech question.

Chances are, one member of your family has been carrying around with them a very specific tech question for the entire year and the holidays is the time to finally ask a professional young person. The question is inevitably either incredibly simple or the most bizarrely specific problem anyone has ever faced, to the point that you wonder if the family member created this problem just to torment you with it.

4. Have you heard from [person you definitely forgot about] lately?

Family members have a very strange notion of who, besides them, you consider yourself to be "close" with. At some point during the holidays, a member of your family will ask about someone that you haven't thought about in years, if very much at all. The name will rattle in your brain for a while, and will sound familiar enough, but you will never quite remember who they are or why (your family member thinks) they are significant to you. You'll answer, "Fine," and hope there's no follow-up.

5. How can you live there?

Try to keep in mind that, chances are, the members of your family have lived where they live for a very long while now, so the idea of someone not having their exact living situation is a bizarro universe to them. "You throw away your garbage over there? Well, I throw away my garbage over here." Be prepared to defend every single aspect of where you currently live as if you made it that way just to weird your family member out.

6. Why are millennials [fill in blank]?

Your family strongly believes that it is reasonable to expect someone of a certain age to speak on behalf of an entire generation of people. They have a question for this generation, and they assume you have already agreed with its members on the mass text chain on the approved statement on this important matter — and more often than not the answer is, "We are poor."

7. How are you?

The age-old question — a question so frustratingly simple, yet, by design, impossible to answer. How are? How are you...what exactly? How are you feeling? How are you doing health-wise? Financially? How are you here, standing in the foyer of a suburban house, while also, simultaneously, an occupant of a dying sphere floating in an empty vacuum of nihility?

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