Sugar and Spice and Everything Nice, With a Pinch of Ginger

January 12 is National Kiss a Ginger Day. Red is the color of fire, and I wear my hair wild, as a warning:

Not too close or you could get burned.

I am one of only 2% of the world's billions who have mutations in their MC1R gene. I feel pain differently — more senstively; I am left handed — as per usual; and I have freckles — lots of them. My hypersensitivity to hot and cold and, especially changes in them, make me a barometer as metaphoric as the red mercury in a thermometer.

The weather is changing, but you don't know it, dullard. You can't feel it, insensitivo!

My ruby coiff labels me passionate and intense, with an explosive energy that can be contained only ever so. My head is that of a struck match in initial sparking that warns of the conflagration to come. Yet, I can be deceptive, sinister, as sinistratae can be, belying my fire and spirit with the cataplexy invoked by beauty, i.e., personality: Stronger letter to follow.

My scarlet hair and porcelain complexion create a stunning contrast, attracting peripheral vision gazes before people see what's coming. And what's coming is me! One side, brunettes and blondes! You're in the line of fire.

I am Irish, somewhere; and hot tempered and volatile. I am intellectually superior, and I know it, because I am just that. Other women assume a wildness in me.

They are right. And they've been warned.

I navigate the crowds like parting the Red Sea. Pharaohs who follow are doomed to be swallowed alive by my ruddy intentions. Men are beguiled by me; women fear me; geneticists love me.

Love me, hate me, embrace me, spurn me, but you will find yourself a mix of all of these things, conflicted, and slowly going mad. You can blame me, forgive me, seek me, and leave me, but the conflict will remain, as deadly alluring as the songs of the Sirens, against which not even Circe had a chance (who is Greek, not Irish!)

So go about your day and beware the glare that arrives at eyes at 700-nanometer wavelengths. Is is I.