On: Boxes and being forced to check them

Yesterday I had a meeting with HR at one of my new jobs (dance teaching artist work is back in action), and I had to fill out a crapload of paperwork. I'm finding out that working in the NY school system is much more complicated than working in Chicago Public Schools, as I have to have a physical, a TB test, get fingerprinted twice, present my degree and my passport and fill out about 30 pages of forms.

Anyway, on one of the unnecessarily invasive census forms, I had to list the first and last names and birthdays of everyone in my current household as well as EVERY address I've had since I was 18. Do you know that since I was 18 I've lived in a total of 4 cities, 3 states and had 10 addresses? I've also had 7 phone numbers and one pager number. (Whatever. I'm a gangster.)

On this same census form, I was FORCED to tick a box stating my ethnicity. The problem with this? There were only 7 boxes, and my ethnicity was not listed. There were boxes for white, African-American, Asian, African, Pacific Islander, Hispanic and biracial/mixed race. Nowhere was there a place to indicate being Middle Eastern, Arab or Indian. There wasn't even a box for "other," which I loathe checking, but it's at least true. So you know what I had to do? I had to check Asian. I'm fucking Asian. (Sorry if you're Asian.) Because, you know, the Middle East is technically on the continent of Asia. Unless I'm actually Egyptian, which means I'm African, and I just fucked up the entire census demographic reading.

Anyway, frustrated with this ongoing situation, I turned to my friend Google, asking "Why is there no ethnicity box for Arab?" I didn't find a real answer, other than a few people speculating that it's impossible to account for all races, so I'm not the only one who feels slighted. I did find this cute blog post by another person in my same situation, so at least I didn't feel along in this cruel, cruel world with no box to cling to.