it’s mentioned a few times on the packaging, and on paper, it doesn’t have the same effect (maybe it’s the exclamation mark? that shifts everything). there it is, that little word that means slobber and words and either way here, you’re being encouraged to do it with enthusiasm.

and then i’m saying “no, i don’t want to  passively participate in research” and then i’m sitting there trying to decide whether i should let them store my “sample” for up to the next ten years and that totally creeps me out and then i go on this long mental run-on sentence about cloning myself and the entire sci-fi scenario pans out in front of me.

it’s late night in northern California, after all.

but yes – i’m squicked by the idea of spitting into a tube and sending it to someone. saliva in a tube and someone opening it, days later. ERRRRPH.

i just can’t, pretty much. even writing about it doesn’t bring on the total effect but if i sit back and simply live it for a second… oh, UGH.

nope, i don’t even care that they will have a map of my genetics and where i’ve wandered in the world. my world. i don’t feel special enough for that to honestly matter. I am, however too paranoid to plainly agree to participate in somewhat-undetermined research; none of the suggested projects in which i might willingly assist in with my broad “consent”  intrigue me. i choose not to. i wonder how much of their side of that they will also live up to. trust no one.

But store my sample for ten years? Totally gross, yes, but at this point if I could clone my dog I might actually think about it.

Lately I’ve noticed her snout getting whiter. Though she still looks and acts like a young doe, my dog is going gray. She has deer eyes and a coyote smile and will love you until you fall over, and she is aging, just like me.

So I pause over that decision and I wonder if storing my DNA sample for up to the next ten years might of be of service to something (not saying someone else would want to clone me because I was the best dog they ever knew because I am terrible, really. i’m not a malicious person, but i don’t think i do the best job at being human, regardless. enough of my DNA, hopefully just the best of it, has been granted to my daughter, who is six right now; an entire genetic replica is not necessary by any means and as with any successful genetic collaborations, there are some things that perhaps should end with me now that they have tried themselves out and have found themselves lacking).

My therapist laughs when i ask her how other humans do things. I don’t know how to do this, I say, and she laughs, and she tells me i’m not actually doing that badly being human. I attribute it to the earth I have been given this go-around; without it I would not be able to stay grounded.  Even so I am a bull in a china shop.

Is it worth anything to anyone other than me? Perhaps, if they randomly find that alien gene, and then they’ll go “oh wow yeah here’s one of those” and they will flag my account and alert me immediately, and it will explain everything, this struggle i have with understanding the insanity of my species on any level; it is far too apparent to me how much bullshit we put up with for and with each other, and this is how humans mostly relate. No, I do not understand it at all and I flail.

More than likely it will be of little interest to anyone other than me; the results it holds will be as lackluster as any, destroying my romantic visions of the Levant and the Ottoman Empire and those frankincense-scented dreams.