Bindings

It's a week after the election and I'm still getting calls from pollsters.

When they come to the questions about ethnicity i always say White, but they don't really have a category that's as white as I am. There isn't a checkbox for quasi-vampiric.

I'm not an albino in the strict sense. There is something else going on. Something stranger.

I've had my genome done and I've got slightly more Neanderthal genes than the average European. Mitochondrial DNA is one of the less common European variants.

And family rumors about Native Americans in the French Canadian lineages are probably true -- I've got a few identified genes that did not likely come from any European lineage. But most of the distribution maps for my genes are Celtic and circum-Mediterranean.

Some of the Celtic isn't particularly surprising -- the Acadians weren't Parisian French, they largely came from Brittany and Normandy. But that side of the family is not where I get my (lack of) coloring or the texture of my hair -- I take after my father and his mother, and she was born just outside Asti in Piemonte, northern Italy.

I have a little more pigment than had -- I got a little from my Mom's side.

I have very little pigment in my skin (though I'm not quite as fair-skinned as Dad and Nonna) and don't tan to any noticable degree (Burn like crazy and freckle, yes. Tan, no.)

My eyes are hazelish instead of blue and depend to some extent on what colors are around me and how far my pupils are dilated to determine how much green vs. brown is visible.

I am not and have never been blonde. My hair was very dark when I was a child and I started going gray in my early 20s. By the time I was 30 I had white streaks and a very expensive looking frosting effect that was unfortunately only temporary.

I wasn't surprised by the gray. The only picture I've ever seen of my crandmother with dark hair was taken at m father's christening, and I don't remember a time when my father was not going gray, though my earliest memories of him date to his late 20s.

Unlike a blond who spreads a little pigment out through a lifetime, we seem to use it up quickly.

I suspect this coloring variant is another Celtic pattern. My junior high English teacher was Miss O'Neill, and she was gorgeous, with the Snow White coloring: blue eyes, very fair skin, dark wavy hair. I wonder if Miss O'Neill went gray early.

I wonder if Snow White went gray early.

Science Fiction author Jay Lake (who is terminally ill) has posted an commentary that has odd relevance http://jaylake.livejournal.com/3257157.html.

Earlier today I was trying to decide between two vacation trips for next year. The much more expensive one includes time in Iceland, a place I have always wanted to see.

It feels like the universe is trying to tell me something.

Thanks to an upheaval at my ISP, my primary blog has moved to a cleaner address: http://www.data-raptors.com/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi.

I hope to have the syndication to LiveJournal working again shortly.