I'm really horrible at remembering faces and matching names to them. When I teach, I get my students mixed up all the time, especially if they switch seats. Unless someone is really distinctive-looking, everyone kind of blends together into "tall white guy in baseball cap" or "short girl with long blonde hair" or "Asian guy with glasses," with usually several people in each group each semester. I try to just avoid calling them by name unless I'm absolutely sure of it, but every once in a while I mess up. Once, last year, I accidentally called one black girl by the name of the only other black girl in the class. I knew exactly what the Look she gave me meant, but I realized there was no good way to say, "No, it's not that I just think all black people look alike! I can't tell those three white guys apart, either! And those girls over there all have the same hairstyle and switch seats all the time, and I have no idea who any of them are!"

People who bother to guess usually think I'm Italian.

Dear Snow,

I hate you.

sarameg

I mostly get Jewish and Italian (which is correct) Although I am not sure how people reconcile the stereotypes with the fact that I am very fair.

I do not see the twin thing with Noah and J. Noah does look just like you, Kat. It's adorable.

My mom got the Asian thing a lot too. I think a census worker refused to believe she wasn't mixed race and actually wrote her down as such. She also has pictures of her with straightened hair done up in a sari with a bindi and she looks totally Indian.

Which is weird for a woman who was a redhead as a child.

Snow. More snow. Make it stop.

Hil, do you have faceblindness? I have some friends with that. Hairstyle changes mess with them something awful.

In our little family, people always ask us if Noah and his friend J (who is a year younger and Vietnamese!) are twins. [link] I don't see it, but it totally pisses off J's mom who hates me.

They don't look at all alike! Noah does look vaguely like he could be related to a fannish friend's son, especially in pre-mobile pictures, though.

Echoes, despairingly, Zen. So tired of it.

I also don't see the J and Noah twin thing.

Hil, do you have faceblindness? I have some friends with that. Hairstyle changes mess with them something awful.

I don't know. Never really thought of it as having a name, just as something that I'm not good at.

off to google

Over the years, a number of rude strangers have asked my mother if my sister and I were adopted. My sister looks like my mother's sister and niece, but not particularly like my mother. I don't particularly look like either side, which helps me maintain the comforting fiction that I was switched at birth.