Dinner with my family ...leaves me wondering how on earth I came from that environment, and ended up so different. They're a pretty shallow, unreflective lot who seem to take great comfort in imposing and reinforcing sexism.

Replace 'sexism' with 'materialism' and you have my family. The same thing happens when I talk about Disney being evil or SUVs being the Chariots of Lucifer.

Incapable of dealing with issues abstractly, these people ASSUME I am making an ad hominem comment of some kind. The typical response to this is to just ignore it. 'Turn the other cheek' as it were.

For them, it's not possible that I hold my beliefs independent of theirs... it's an either or. Either I agree with the family or I am expressing my desire not to be part of the family.

For me to have different ideas, and express them, they believe I must be saying that I think they're stupid, or at best am just being arbitrarily combative. Rather than respond to what they see as bait, they either play off my comment as a joke or ignore it entirely.

I think my frustration with this comes from reading too many books. In a book, when someone expresses a viewpoint that goes against the norm, it's generally because the author wants to explore that idea in dialogue. Other characters respond to this challenge of their opinions not because it's the typical reaction, but because the author needs them to respond to it in order for his dialogue to occur.

I need to get in touch with whoever is writing my life and give him a list of dialogue topics for my yet-to-be-written chapters.