Got hammered with a yooper last night.

So, last night I got decently hammered with my one neighbor who's in the neighborhood for the summer for an engineering internship and has this really really Swedish name ("Lars") and comes from a big Swedish family in the eastern U.P., despite the fact that he's shorter than I am, has brown hair and a slightly upturned nose, and is built kind of slim and runty, which I always found weird with his name, since he's the least Swedish-looking person I've ever met - it seemed like his parents were way into ethnic recovery or something, which I always find kind of sad for some reason, since it's grasping after your last name after already everything but the name is gone from it.

Anyhow, me and him and my one hippie friend were drinking, and after my hippie friend got tired and left, we were drinking more, and somehow Lars started talking about how he's always been a little suspicious of religion since it all seems odd to him when you step back and take a look at it, and that it wasn't until 3rd grade back when he was in the U.P. that he realized that his family was strange and that not everyone else's family went out into the woods three times a year and did pagan rituals.

As it turns out, his grandfather was this high-level Swedish Mason who bought a huge track of land in the U.P, and the whole family moved there and they just kind of kept doing this Swedish clan religion that they said has been passed down in their family, like making their own mead and this kind of fermented berry liqueur, and during the summer they all go out to the woods and read some of the eddas out loud and find a really nice birch tree and smear the mead and liqueur on it, and then they all go home, and he said if you press any of his family members when they're drunk and occasionally when they're not, they all start bitching about Christianity and how it stole everything from paganism, like Christmas, for one thing, though they can deal with all their neighbors being Christians as long as they leave them alone.

He also said his family puts a huge premium on the family, and honor, and they have these scrolls and books keeping their paternal ancestry going back to like the 13th century, and like one family member from that line keeps it in each generation. He also said he's kind of fucked, since he's the eldest son, but he took after his mom's mom who was this short half Welsh, half French lady, and though his dad and his cousin are all these huge blonde Swedish dudes who got football scholarships to Michigan State, everyone kind of wrote him off when he hit puberty and didn't really get a growth spurt, and it's a sore spot in the family, that and how he's into playing in bands and shit... He also said that at family functions he used to get really treated well because of his being the eldest son, as well as being born on Yule, but that really doesn't happen anymore.

He also said he distrusts anyone who's too sure about religion, like some of his cousins who became Christian and are now just anti-pagan fanatics, he added at the end. He said the pagan thing is a different ethos, more about family and honor than about morality and sacrifice, though you still have the same thing as always where some people in the family are into it and the ideas, and others just kind of go through the motions and gossip and are bitchy and don't let it affect their lives, and that in any case he really gets pissed off at neo-pagans since they just kind of invented shit off of books, and that that shit isn't real, and even more than that, he gets pissed off when everyone says "Thor" with a "th" rather than starting the word off like you're saying "Thomas", since that's the way it's actually said.

(We were kind of drunk.)

He also added that at his engineering internship he coddles favor with this one boss of his who's in his late 20s and was in the military by responding to all of his requests with short, one word answers of unthinking obedience, like, "Yes sir, definitely!", and though everyone else has a hard time getting along with this guy, he gets along well, though the guy doesn't realize that Lars is just trying to respond to him as any subordinate in the military would.