they've always told me I should write a book of my random thoughts

Monday, April 18, 2005

Odd One Out

Growing up I've always known that I was sligtly different than the rest of my family. (Which is a little scary in itself considering the odd personality traits that run in my family.) Out of the five people in my family (my parents, two sisters, and me) I was the only one with blue eyes. There used to be little wooden ginger-bread looking figurines above out kitchen door and they went in order from my dad, to my mom, to Beth (my oldest sister), to Rebecca (my middle sister), to me. And the first four figurines all had the same brown eyes, but the last one was different: it had bright blue eyes. I can remember looking up from studying at the kitchen table when I was little and smiling at the figurines because mine was different, I was different. But I recently learned something that makes me wonder if I inherited all of my parents' recessive genes. I recently learned that I am the only person, again out of 5 people, that has "O" blood type.
A little history for people that don't know anything about blood types, "A" blood type and "B" blood type are both dominate (when together they are co-dominate) meaning, if you have that gene, you'll be that blood type. But if you don't have the "A" blood group or "B" blood group genes (or we'll say have the recessive gene of "O"), you're considered to have type "O" blood. Well, first learned that both my sisters have type "A" blood, then I learned that both my parents have type "A" blood. So since both my parents have A blood and I somehow ended up with type "O", this means that my parents must be heterozygous for type "A" blood (they're both AO).
So I've decided that nature was against me even in the beginning. What are the chances that I would be the only person to get multiple recessive genes from my parents? There is a mathematical and scientific way to discover this, I'm sure, taking into consideration random selection, independent segregation, independent assortment, and the punnett square, but that's beyond me; so we'll just say that it's about a 15% chance.
My dad's comment on this was "Yeah, I'm going to figure out who he was one of these days." (being the bitingly-sarcastic individual that he is). I looked at him and said "Right. Since strangers off the street have looked at me before, when I was alone and said 'You're a Cleaveland, aren't you?'" So, if I wasn't a very attractive female equivalent of my dad (I'm not talking about a she-man looking type person, so get that image out of your head), there might have been some questioning for the mail-man.. but wait that was my dad at about the time I was conceived/born too!

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