I think somewhere along the line I missed out on the cian gene. And I don’t think I’m the only one in my family either.

By family, I mean between me and my siblings. Okay, true. That probably doesn’t help because, as anyone back home knows, the saying goes, “Who isn’t Trickie related to in the Park?”

Talking about my family tree is a bit, um, tricky. See, there’s not really a tree, but more of a forest with interlocking trees and bushes, basic woodland gridlock.

As an example, I went to ancestory.com one time to see what it was all about. I logged on and put in my name, it pops up a message that said, “We’re sorry. You don’t need our services. Just look around over your shoulder anywhere in Illinois and Wisconsin and you’ll probably see at least one person you’re related too.”

I’m not kidding.

Okay, I am kidding, but but I do have six brothers and sisters from one house (biological mother) and then three more from another (step mother’s side). And I have never met my biological father and don’t know anything about his family, so there could be others.

So there’s a lot of people that in one way or another–blood or adoption or step or whatever –that I’m probably related to. But I don’t think they have much of the cian gene either.

I noticed this lackingness (is that a word? screw it, it is now) especially well in the past 24 hours.

Last night, sugar-mama wanted to watch some DVR since there wasn’t much on. She likes The Amazing Race, it’s one of her favorite shows and a DVR standard. I don’t hate it, so it’s one of the ones we’ll watch together sometimes.

Last night (which could have been whenever in the past three weeks since it was on DVR), they went to Russia, which is one of the many places I hope to get to in the next couple decades. When they were there, they got a roadblock that they had to either go to a film house or a music house to do a task.

I immediately said film house because I’m terrible anything music-related. I lost that cian gene, as in no way am I a musician. I don’t really think anyone else in my family is either, but if there is any musician-like qualities in anyone, it’s not me.

Example: During college, I was required to take a music class. It was a liberal arts school, so there were some slapdick classes that had to be dealt with to get the piece of paper. This was one of the worst. I would have taken Analytical Geometry, Numerical Analysis, Development Economics and U.S. Economic History–all classes that I did actually take–three times before I would have voluntarily taken a music class.

So, what’d I do?

What I normally do. I tackled it head-on. I made a plan and stuck to it.

I took every single class I could think of ahead of it, and then took Music 101 in my final semester of college. I was a senior and there were more than 30 people in the class, including two juniors. The rest were freshmen.

I hated it. Hated every minute of it, and I didn’t even have to learn anything.

It was reading music sheets and learning the symbols for musical notes and that kind of stuff. I never failed a class (this is actually an astounding fact for my college career; in high school, however, I was relatively smart, in AP classes and such, but it got lost in translation to college) but I came close in this one.

At the end of the class, we had our final. It was a clap test. I got a D- on a clap test. I hardly could look at music and then clap my hands together to a beat. I actually had to study for like two days, getting two chicks, including one of the freshmen in the class, to help me.

In other words, the cian gene is missing from my DNA and it almost made me fail a clap test.