the link below (the MST3K baby sweater) is fixed now. Thanks, TChem, I guess I hit ctrl-v twice.

Chilly and rainy here. It's been grey and foggy the past couple of days. I don't mind it, though - it's as if my eyes are better adapted to this kind of light than to the bright sunlight we've been having. I found that as I was running errands yesterday details and colors kept jumping out at me from the gloom: the faded robin's-egg-blue of one of the stucco houses here, the surprising red-violet trim on one of the few gingerbread-Victorian houses that's still being kept up nicely. The weather looks like it's SUPPOSED to look to me in the winter. It's a more meditative sort of weather.

I'm reading yet another book for the directed readings class. I *love* being in charge of Directed Readings. It doesn't meet on a regular basis so there's no time commitment to fit in to the schedule. But you still get an hour towards your load calculation. And I have a reason to sit and read books - even ones not that closely related to my specialty - during my office hours ("Oh, yah, it's what one of the students chose for Directed Readings, don't'cha know.")

Right now it's "Genome" by Matt Ridley. I had kind of overlooked this one - I thought it was more a book about the SCIENCE and the PROCESS behind the Human Genome Project, which, frankly isn't that interesting to me. (I've read a couple of the Richard Preston books that mainly dealt with the process and with the personalities involved and just didn't get into it that much - it was like "yeah, this guy's being a jerk and this woman is careless in the lab. Bla bla bla. If I wanted to hear about this kind of stuff I'd watch CSI or something"). But it's not. Ridley goes through each human chromosome pair and discusses the genes on them, or the "meaning" of the chromosome. (Chromosome 1: mostly involved with rRNA and other stuff like that. Chromosome 2: actually 2 chromosomes that fused sometime after the human lineage and the ape lineage separated.) It's pretty interesting but I feel like I've not got to the really good part yet. It will be interesting what Ridley has to say about behavior. One of the things I wonder about is how much of human behavior is genetically shaped, and how much is idiosyncratic or environmental. I think of my own family - not only have I been told I "favor" (mainly because of posture and expression, I think) a great-grandmother that I've only seen photographs of, but I also have the compulsive book-buying habit of a grandfather I just barely knew (I've been told one of his sisters commented, "Cy will go around in a ratty old winter coat and spend all his money on books!"). And my brother - it's even more pronounced in him. My mother claims his sense of humor is much like her brother Stanley's (Jon never met Stanley - I don't even think I did, or if I did, I don't remember it). Other members of her family have commented how much he resembles Stanley in gesture and appearence. (Well, the appearence makes sense: my mom looks like her brother, and my brother looks like our mom.) But the gesture, the way of speaking - that's a little eerie. I'd chalk it up to the "family" characteristics being filtered through a masculine personality (Stanley was the only boy in the family who lived to adulthood), but I've never had my mother tell me that I remind her of her sisters. (Then again, I take after my father's side of the family more, physically. And he had no sisters that I can be compared to.)

But it makes me wonder, when I do certain things - is this ME, or is it some little bit of DNA that came down from who-knows-who? Or is what I think of as "me" some kind of amalgamation of DNA that I've received from everyone in my direct parental chain and some kind of environmental effect on that DNA?

Actually, I'm not sure I really want to know. I'd rather think of myself as a "me" rather than as a receptacle for DNA (which is partly why I find it difficult to read Richard Dawkins).

But then again, it's interesting and strangely comforting to me to think that I carry DNA from all those ancestors - from the Scotswoman who was my great, great, great, great grandmother on my mother's mother's side. From the Germans who formed the line of my father's mother. From the Irish on my father's father's side*. I wonder what those people knew - what they were good at - what foods they liked. And I wonder if any of the traits that their friends and relatives would have said were typical of them, show up in me.

(*as for my mother's father's side, it's harder to know - a couple of "breaks" in the known transmission due to people having been orphans. It's not even clear if the family was Scots or French-Canadian - the surname could have been Scots but it also could have been an Americanized version of a French name. I don't show any marked fondness for poutine nor is the French I can speak particularly gutteral...I'd be more inclined to think Scots [and for less frivolous reasons than those])