And before that...

Today is the day of my people. Half of my people. You may not know this but I'm fairly Irish. Black irish... VERY black Irish HAHAHAHAH. No seriously though, my mother's maiden name is... Oh my god. Do you know how stupid I am? I was just about to post my MOTHER'S MAIDEN NAME on the INTERNET. Wow. My idiocy is stunning.

Anyway, let's pretend my mother's maiden name is O'Shaunnesy cause it's something equally Irish. And I am that half Irish. I guess really my mother is probably half Irish; I think her mother was sort of a white mishmash, though she probably had some Irish in there. But her dad was the quintessential O'Shaunnesy... his parents, Mary and Dennis O'Shaunnesy, immigrated from Ireland. And even creepier, Mary O'Shaunnesy's maiden name was ALSO O'Shaunnesy. Creepy, but honestly they weren't related. I think. Maybe that's one of the stories that doesn't really make it past that generation, for practical purposes. Who knows.

So yeah, the point of that story was to show you just how deep my O'Shaunnesy blood runs.

Many many many of my cousins on my mom's side have red hair, bright red hair and freckles. We don't do much O'Shaunnesy family gathering anymore, since my mom's mom died in 1987, but when I was little we got together every year, and all my redheaded cousins would be there... there's this one picture taken at the one Giant Family Reunion we had, where my uncle denny is all dressed up in his kilt for the bagpipe band (he played the big bang bang drum) and me and my sister are talking to him and all around us, everywhere you look, are white people. And at the time, at that age, I think I was only barely starting to understand race and I was definitely not yet aware of how much my sister and I (and my father) stood out at that gathering. No one was ever in any way weird about it to us though. To our faces at least, who knows what we were protected from. But I really don't think we were protected from anything, I think everyone was relatively unphased by our race.

Anyway, happy Day of My Other People. On this day, you may refer to me as Mary O'Chen.