Who In The World Am I? DNA Results are IN!

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They are here!

The results of my Ancestry DNA test that I got as a Christmas gift are in. I have always wondered what my “special sauce” was, given to me through relatives, now long gone and where on Earth they called home. The results are back and after I laughed for a long time, I had a sense of wonder as so many of these places have called to me, through music, or food, sights and sounds. Some of these places, I have visited; others are still on my bucket list.

I’ve spent my lifetime only knowing that my paternal grandparents were Italian (Sicilian and Calabrese) and my maternal grandparents were Norwegian (mom’s dad) and Czech (mom’s mom). I’ve been trying to build a family tree and have hit dead ends on all lines somewhere around the mid 1800s. Until I launch an expedition to the motherlands to comb through church records, I will probably never know anything specific about the stories of my great grandparents and theirs as well.

But blood doesn’t lie. Even if I don’t know their names and their stories, they live on in the structure of my cells. Maybe, they gave me a freckle on my arm or a color in my iris. Maybe the sound of my voice is similar to theirs or a strange love of exotic food; or the powerful wanderlust that has pulled me to countries far and near.

I laughed when I saw these DNA test results because I have some living relatives who harbor not-so-very-well hidden feelings about some cultures, religions and races that they consider *less than*- and even *terrorists* by circumstance of birth.

Well buckle up girls, because these results are YOUR results too.

Italy/ Greece-32% …

Western European (France, Germany, Netherlands, Switzerland) 20% …

Scandinavian 16% … (Sweden, Norway)

Eastern European (Czech Republic, Austria, Poland) 12% …

MIDDLE EASTERN (Syria, Iraq, Iran, UAE, Jordan, Oman, Yemen, Saudi Arabia) 8% …

Great Britain (England, Scotland, Wales) 3% …

EUROPEAN JEWISH (Ukraine, Israel, Poland, Belarus, Hungary, Russia) 3% …

Iberian Peninsula (Spain/Portugal) 2% …

NORTHERN AFRICA (Morocco, Western Sahara, Algeria, Libya) 1% 

And trace DNA from Finland, Northwest Russia, and Caucasus- a reference to more ancestors from Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Syria and others.

I am an interesting blend of so many cultures that are currently under scrutiny by people with very small minds.

I’m actually kind of bummed that I didn’t find any Orient, South Pacific Island, South American or Native American sparkles floating around in my bloodline.

Here’s what I know- I am a child of Earth in all its technicolor glory, and I carry a little bit of many, many cultures that make this the amazing planet that it is.

Everyone should have this test run just to see who it is you’re hoping doesn’t get let into America. Because they are not THOSE people. They are OUR people.

Suck it up, Buttercups.

Take it away, Michael…

 

Road Trips and Blue Pills and Music…Oh My!

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If you follow my blog, you already know I’m kind of a music freak. In some alternate universe, I’m a HUGE rock star. In this one, I’m a huge fan. There are just a few types of music that I can’t handle. They usually involve sounds that resemble metal cheese graters shredding my soul into julienne pieces and 3.2 minutes of recorded Tourette’s syndrome rants about women’s Va-jaja’s, assault weapons and counting money. Beyond that, I can pretty much, lean into any kind of music you throw my way.

Though I’ve sited mostly older music in these posts, my playlists hold primarily new and amazing bits from young artists. This is a renaissance time for music and there are hundreds of young artists out there with phenomenal work pouring out of them. I’m listening to “Satellite Heart” by Anya Marina as I write this. Great song.
This morning, I finally set up my iTunes on the new laptop and got chills of joy as the zillion files floated down from the cloud and filled my library. It was like Christmas morning and I was 6 years old. Crank the JBL’s!

For some weird reason, I have acquired a ritual of listening to a few specific songs each time I take a road trip. I load a playlist for the drive as part of my packing chores and I faithfully add The Allman Brothers, “One Way Out”. It’s the musical equivalent of a 100 mph run on a vacant stretch of Route 66. Excited to see my old pal again, I clicked play and heard the familiar opening guitar riff slithering out of the speakers. Damn it to hell! Instead of my best road song, all I could hear was the background music in that fucking Cialis commercial where the guy is on a beach and about to hit the open road, so of course, he’s thinking about his erectile dysfunction problem.

I don’t know about you, but I hit saturation point with those commercials about five years ago. I mean, come on! Enough already! We get it! It’s called…aging.

There are some completely legitimate circumstances for the use of E.D. meds. SOME. We’re not stupid though. There is no way in hell that pharmaceutical advertising departments would pour hundreds of millions of dollars into the promotion of their pills to people who do not need them, if they weren’t earning billions in return. They’re sitting, right now, around their board rooms tables high fiving and laughing their asses off because they have successfully convinced a ridiculous percentage of the male population to “ask their doctors” for a little somethin’-somethin’ to jack up their weekend. What most of those guys actually need is a personality transplant and (surprise!) their partner’s just might work their own somethin’-somethin’ to insure an outstanding performance in the boudoir.

For the miniscule fraction of the population that is under 45 years of age and suffering ED, you are a major rarity. Factoid: most of the blue pills dispensed in America are used by NON-E.D. sufferers who are rolling the dice that they do experience an erection lasting more than four hours. These are the same guys who were huffing spray paint cans in junior high, mind you. Still at it I see. Another large percentage of the little blue pills end up as hand out favors at bang parties where guys with heavy gold neck chains and crystal bowls full of blow get their jollies with the young girls who dropped out of hair & nail school and now work the morning shift at the strip club across from Walmart on I-94.

Do you think this might be nature’s way of keeping wrinkly old guys from chasing after 25 year old girls who should be waking up next to Taylor Kitsch and not Larry King?

To be serious for a moment, 1 in 4 women, across the globe, will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime. I really don’t think a product that makes guys hornier is what the world needs right now. Especially not when I have to sit through fifteen E.D. medication commercials during a three hour block of prime time TV and then I have to watch aging male senators casting a vote on the hill that takes away my right as a woman to govern my own body. If I made the rules there would be no blue pills at all as long as there was no right to choose. At the very least, the pharmaceutical companies could add a birth control element to the Viagra/Cialis/Crushed and powdered panda testicle potion or whatever the hell else men use to continue getting laid after their bodies have put on the breaks.

So, yeah. My Allman Brothers song is tainted…forever, with the acrid stink of corporate greed. I need a new song. You know how you can adore a particular fragrance and every time you smell it, your mood is elevated to a happy place? Well, some skeezy individual has bathed in my fragrance and now, I can’t smell it without the new visual accompaniment of the skeezer. “One Way Out” has been skeezed. I have to find a skeeze free song, quickly, because it’s summer and the road is out there waiting and I want to hear something that won’t plant the vision of Larry King with a boner when I crank up the volume and put the top down.

Suggestions? Send me yours.

Now, if I can just get the image out of my head of the antique bathtubs with the two naked people bathing side by side on a cliff overlooking the 6th hole on Pebble Beach…