Often, when I see something I like, I want to drop all my own ideas, methods, habits and goals and just adopt those new ones.

I've got a short little span of attention(, and oh my nights are so long).

Presumptions of ethnicity

I just ordered some goulash at a soup place for lunch, and the guy serving it looked at me like I had said the secret password. "Where are you from?" he asks (I'm assuming he was Croatian, as the soup in question was in fact called Croatian goulash). "Canberra," I answer, disingenuously. He looks slightly disappointed. I take pity and elaborate. "I know that's not what you mean, but there's nothing to tell," I say. At a loss, he wanders off to serve someone else.

This is something that happens to me all the time. People think I've got something where there's nothing. Examples from the last seven days:
1. Greek people at the election speaking to me in Greek and being confused when I can't understand them. Their first words to me in English are "you're not Greek". "Sorry!" I say.
2. I told this story to ****, and he said "mmm, what IS your, you know ..." "Ethnic background?" "Nothing," I supply.
"Well it can't be nothing ..." he says, fairly enough. I sigh. "Anglo-Welsh mongrel." End of conversation, confirming my suspicions that he was, in fact, looking for a more interesting answer. Like, my parents were refugees from the Armenian genocide, and I grew up in a small weatherboard house in Marrickville, where my Yaya sang me to sleep with traditional lullabies.
3. Last week, a girlfriend (as my aunties down the south coast charmingly call their female friends) made some allusion to my Jewishness. "Huh?" I counter. "But I'm not Jewish" "Oh!" she says, taken aback. "For some reason I assumed, because [insert ex-boyfriend's name here] is ...," trailing off into a pit of illogicality.

Etc etc etc. A normal week.

I have a vague exotic [read: woggy] look, apparently. According to peoples' visual assessments, I should be either Greek, Italian, Croatian, Hungarian (but that's silly), Jewish or I dunno what. Those are the ones I get the most.

So I think I should come up with an ethnicity for myself that doesn't leave people so let-down. Suggestions below, please.