Sometimes I try to think up aliases that I could use instead of my own name. Naming of children can be a debacle, for reasons like, “Oh, you were named for a hoary ancestor to please a whole bunch of relatives I shouldn’t have given a shit about.”

It’s funny too, my mother hated her name, but she turned right around and foisted some strange conventions on my brothers and myself. They named my older brother after my dad, but decided to call him by his middle name to avoid calling him a diminutive of my dad’s name. So wait, you name somebody something you don’t want to call him? Ok. Did anyone think through that every standardized form is First Name, Middle initial? Apparently not.

For me, they did the same thing but for the sake of their odd convention, not because I was named after someone. First initial, and odd middle name. Oh, the childhood teasing I endured because of my name was fierce.

Did these jerks do this to my younger brother? Nope. Apparently they actually used their brains for him and decided to call him by his first name. And yet instead of seeming fair, it’s just permanently commemorated their thoughtlessness with the first two with some sort of lame apology via the third. Didn’t help the other two of us at all.

It’s my thought that children should have provisional names that they could then choose the permanent versions of when they reached the age of majority. Yes, you can change your name today, but it’d be nice if they were considered impermanent in the first place. Who’s to say though, maybe no matter what we’d choose for ourselves, we’d outgrown it like a animals outgrow their shells. I could better own it as my mistake though, rather than something someone else did to me. If one must name their own children, it’s my considered opinion though to not get cute with them. That’s about you, not about them. Consider the impact you might have on the person you’re affixing it to.