Spit take

So, Coco and I did one of those spit-in-the-tube DNA deals, mostly at her urging, because she has gotten more than a little hooked on doing her genealogy right now. After mailing the packets back and not a very long wait, we just got the results. Here's my little map:

No surprises here.

My genome presents 51% East Europe, pegged down to Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland & Lithuania, I presume based on some specific markers. Since my pop's family was Polish, this is all pretty straightforward.

The report also shows 38% Southern Italy, based on markers from South Europe, the Caucasus, and the Middle East. My mother's family was from Naples, so this makes sense. The family name on my Italian side means "The Greek", so I always imagined my remote antecedents originally came from east of Italy, and the indicators from Eurasia support this bit of personal mythologizing.

In any event, my "Ethnicity Estimate" matches to 89% what I have said since I was a kid in the schoolyard: I am of Polish and Italian descent.

There are some not-totally-unexpected traces of other Mediterranean chromosomes in there (appearing at what they call "low confidence" levels): Iberian Peninsula, North Africa, West Europe, and a little European Jewish. Nothing to make me question any family history. The only two ringers are some low confidence results for Great Britain and the Indian subcontinent: I never knew I had any connection to the British Empire, let alone a genetic one. Who knows what those results actually mean.

There we have it. And what of it?

Nothing much, really. I have always contended that my genetic make up meant little to me, that the person I am was based on the people who cared for me as I grew up (whether I was technically related to them or not), the experiences I had, and the choices I made as a result. This test didn't change that position, and if the results had been widely different from what I expected, I imagine I would have felt mild curiosity at the misalignment, but no change in my identity.

Having grown up with first-generation American parents who had totally bought into the assimilation model of immigration, exploring heritage for its own sake was never seen as being of much value. I also recognize that being white in American culture meant the specifics of my ethnicity as I was growing up did not loom as large they otherwise might have. In any case, I have never developed the habit of caring much about my heritage beyond my family of origin.

Other than the new (and horrifying) potential of someone creating a Walaka-clone, this exercise was pretty much a fun diversion, and not much more. We'll see what Coco says, though.

First failure of the new year

So, this actually happened last night, but I am counting it for 2018 anyway.

This artifact from 1928 appeared in my Twitter feed (and in a most annoying feature of Twitter disappeared so I could not find it again). I thought it would be fun to actually assemble it, so I printed it off on card stock, cut all the pieces out carefully, inserted thumbtacks in all the appropriate places, and secured them with bluetack. Here's the result:

As you can see, no amount of tugging on the scythe handle can get Father Time to open the box so Baby New Year pops out. Looking at it, it seems that the geometry is all wrong - that there's no way to make the angles work out - but I can't shake the feeling that I did something incorrectly. It's hard to imagine what, since there are only four joints and they are all clearly labeled, but the end result is that the little device doesn't perform as advertised.

And you know what? That doesn't matter.

Because it was fun to cut out the pieces. It had been a long time since I had cut anything out, and I could almost feel my tongue wanting to slip out the corner of my mouth the way it would do when I was a little kid concentrating on a task. It was fun to build the model, digging out thumbtacks to use instead of the specified pins, and finding blue tack - still good from my ESL teaching days in the 1990s! - to hold the joints secure. It was even fun to try to puzzle out why it didn't work, and to make the video documenting the failure.

And that's the feeling I am going to try to keep during 2018: it doesn't really matter if my drawings live up to my expectations, or what kinds of sounds I can coax from my ukulele, or if any thing I create succeeds or fails according to some external standard. All that matters is engagement with the creative process, a little satisfaction of completion, and having some fun. If I do that enough, eventually there'll be hits among the misses.

But seriously, I don't think this little New Year's geegaw will ever work.

Transition words

So, as we close one year and enter the next, I am not marking the calendrical milestone by talking about indeed, further, or moreover, but rather about life and the movement from one state to another.

Last year I turned 60; that seemed significant. Can I still call myself middle-aged? It seems a little presumptuous, but who knows? But now I get a discount at Value Village on Tuesdays.

Last year I became a homeowner again, for the first time since the 1980s. In the crazy, overheated real estate market of the Salish Sea region it seemed the prudent thing to do, although I have no cultural tradition of real property ownership and don't connect "owning a home" to "success" in any way. Coco and I love where we are, and that's really the best part.

But I guess the biggest transition of the year, at least professionally, is this:

I have been spending the last few weeks in a liminal space: my six-month interim appointment officially begins on January 1, but the previous VPI has been for all practical purposes gone since December 15, so for this already off-kilter winter holiday period, with several days off, students gone, lots of people on vacation, and so on, I have been transitioning from deano to veepo (to use Coco's terminology). So far, so good; but all that really means is that my office is organized and some small fires have been put out. The real challenges will come when school gears up again this week.

I am looking forward to my new role; there's a lot of work to be done and I am not walking into a picnic, but I think I can accomplish some good things for the students and for the institution.

***

There is of course one transition that did not occur last year: the transfer of power in the federal government away from the current executive and into saner, more responsible hands.

I have been at the same time heartened and discouraged by the political scene over the past year. There has been an awakening of political consciousness the likes of which has not been seen in a long time. Starting with the Inauguration Day marches and continuing with on-ground and digital activism throughout the year, and evidenced by such things as the growth of support for the ACLU, it seems that people are starting to wake up and demand real change in the way we do government in our country. At the same time, the entrenchment of the two-party system combined with my lack of faith in the Democratic Party to deviate from its neoliberal agenda in any meaningful way, along with the hurdles of the influence of big money in the system and the effects of years of gerrymandering, make me wonder if there's any hope.

I would hate to see the USA get to the point where violence or extra-governmental actions are necessary to restore sanity and balance, but with the increasing gap between the rich and the poor, the apparent challenges to critical thinking in public discourse, and the increasing toothlessness of the watchdog press, I sometimes wonder if we're not headed there. The 2018 midterm elections are going to be incredibly important in determining the fate of this country. I have my fingers crossed.

*** 

This focus on these changes in the immediate and wider outer world has distracted me a bit from the usual backward- and forward-looking inner reflections traditional at the new year. I did look back at my Woody Guthrie hommage resolutions from last year, and wasn't too disappointed in how things have turned out. I expect that that the coming year will have more of the same thrust: trying to balance managing a demanding professional life, exploring personal creativity and productivity, and participating in the political process. How do I do all that and still find time to binge-watch all these series that everyone keeps talking about?

These two help a lot: Coco and Selkie, the other two-thirds of my little family. Thanks for the love.

And thanks to all my friends and family: I have been blessed with an abundance of loving and caring folks in my life and those connections are really what it's all about. Here's to a new year of promise and positivity for us all. And let's remember the value of empathy and compassion, okay?