Why I can no longer converse with my family...

A snippet of a recent phone conversation with my mother:

Social Scientist Mother: How was your day?
Disgruntled Julie: It sucked. I had a splitting headache all day and had to spend 5 hours in the hood doing cell culture and I was miserable.
Social Scientist Mother: Why were you in the hood all afternoon?
Disgruntled Julie: I have a lot of cell culture to do. At this rate, I'm going to make it through the 18 gigs of music on my computer before I finish this set of experiments.
Social Scientist Mother: Are you sure you should be listening to music? Don't you think you should be paying attention to your surroundings?
Disgruntled Julie: What? I don't need to listen to the blowers in the hood.
Social Scientist Mother: Blowers? Who are they? Just be careful.
Disgruntled Julie: Be careful of what? I can't get cancer from my cells.
Engineering Father, yelling from the background: A hood is a biological safety cabinet, not southeast DC!

Apparently, for the past several years, my mother has thought that I've been doing my cell culture in the ghetto-hood, not the laboratory-hood. And people wonder why I only talk to my mother every other week or so.