The Name Change

My first name is nine letters long. My last name is also nine letters long. Add in my middle name and we get a grand total of 23 characters. Plus spaces. That's a lot of typing. With many opportunities for error. Not to mention there are roughly 83 ways to spell my first name. There's a Catholic spelling, a Greek spelling, a lazy spelling, phonetic spelling, on and on.

I thought this morning that shortening my name might be nice. People try to shorten it all the time, against my wishes. That or they come up with something completely unrelated. I mean, if you say your name is Barbara, I'm not going to say, "Oh, it's nice to meet you Francis." But people do that to me on a regular basis. Then again, people are basically stupid. (Forget good or evil, the answer is stupid.)

So I came up with Pie. Because you'd remember someone with a name like Pie, right? And everybody likes pie so they'd like me. If someone randomly said, "I love pie", I could say, "I love you too." And that would make me a nicer person. Nobody hates pie. There are too many kinds to like And even if someone did say "I hate blueberry pie" I couldn't take it personally because I'm not Blueberry Pie. I'm just Pie. But if they said "I love okra pie", even though that sounds gross, I could choose to take that personally and feel good about myself.

I think I'm onto something. If we all had nice names, then we'd all be nicer people. Your neighbor could be Chocolate. A co-worker could be Puppy Breath. Name your baby Pajamas and see what happens.

I'm going to start with Pie.