How do you explain what you do to your relatives?
time_management: While not pertaining to relatives or holidays, here's my experience as pertains to the social pull of various careers.Graduate student.0: "I'm a grad student." 1: (Deadpan/barely impressed.) "Oh. You must be really smart." 0: "Don't worry. I'm not."Analyst at a pharmaceutical consulting company.0: "I'm a consultant." 1: "Oh." (Isn't everyone?)Quantitative trader/developer at a hedge fund.0: "I'm a trader." 2: "Oh." ++Unemployed.0: "I'm a treasure hunter." 1: WTF? OR "I'm asking what you do for a job, not..."Working for a startup.0: "I'm starting a tech company." 
1: "Oh, cool!" 
0: (Excited.) "Yeah, it's fun. I'm using a ridiculously powerful programming language called Lisp. It looks like this." (Points to some monstrosity of a macro such as ONCE-ONLY.) 
1: "Uh, yeah..."++ The use of 2 here is not a typo. Finance is not nearly as "sexy" as I thought it would be before going in, and the standard-error descriptor is, in fact, appropriate.