Sneezing Fit Ponderings

I work with many snot nosed children, who I love dearly but who also drip with germs and bacteria (and, at times, little bugs to live in your hair). It was really only a matter of time before they transferred some sort of sore throat, runny nose, sneezing experience over to me and apparently that time was this week. It seems odd to say I wish it were sooner because then this wouldn't coincide with my first week of classes, a house sitting job, an interview (now cancelled), and bleeding (internal and external, you don't really want to know).

Despite my desperate wish to get more sleep in 2011 I've spent a lot of time awake. Even when I dutifully hop in my bed at 10 p.m. it's only to roll around (solo) for a few hours and then decide that I should just suck it up and use my late night productivity. This past week I started yet another college application and. . . SURPRISE! I got to select as many races as I wanted. And they were described.

By the time I got to this point in the application it was solidly 2 a.m. and I was awake but groggy at best. I usually answer questions about my race, regardless of whether or not I find them intrusive because I see it as an opportunity to educate someone and hopefully they might not offend the next person they see. This being said, I know it's hard to get my mutt status to fit into any form and I'm conditioned to think that I must check "other". There was no "other" on this form.

What was I supposed to do?

Ah, but the ingenious thing was that I could check Asian (including Pacific Islander, Chinese, Cambodian, Thai, Vietnamese, Japanese, Korean. . . it's a long list) and Caucasian (including Middle Eastern, to which a girl in one of my classes announced "I feel so lame now! I'm white!"). These things are, of course, socially constructed and have no meaning in the academic world unless a college is off touting it's diversity statistics. Statistics or not, so many colleges create such definitive divides between their International community and their native community (and with this, I mean natively born and raised. . . not Native American, unfortunately) that it doesn't matter.