Skip to main content

A Boy Named Ramon -- Invitation to Write #64

For Writers:

My mom decided it would be fun to stick me with the middle name "Ramon." First, nobody pronounces it correctly, as they usually say "Ray-mund." Or, some have fun with the latin implications by heavily twirling the Spanish "r" and saying "Ruhhh-MOAN." According to my mom, however, the name is simply pronounced "Ruh-mon."

You might have noticed that most people have absolutely no say in what they are named. That honor usually goes to your parents, which means most children this year will be named either Jacob or Emily. And we don't even have control over our nicknames. I knew a guy in college that we stuck with the name "Slick," and pretty quickly, he ceased to be "Travis" altogether.

If you're female you can marry into a name as well. One guy in Texas actually did take his wife's last name recently, but it required a court battle for him to do so. Of course my wife always thought that it would have been cool for me to take her last name. She liked the soap opera ring to "Bret Bauer."

If you had the power to go by another name, what would you choose? What do you you like/dislike about the name/nickname/married name that you inherited? Does your name fit your personality?

"I sometimes think I was born to live up to my name. How could I be anything else but what I am having been named Madonna? I would either have ended up a nun or this." -- Madonna

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Jesus and the Inconvenience of His Word to American Christians

I'm not a preacher, but if you follow the teachings of Jesus, it was he who said: Do to others as you would have them do to you. That's from Luke 6:31 , and reading all of Luke 6 isn't a bad way to spend five minutes of your time.  https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=luke%206&version=NIV I guess a lot of Christians understand the Golden Rule and practice it in their daily lives. Others, however, especially political Christians (and specifically those promoting Christian Nationalism) seem to ignore the Golden Rule. They don't care about humanitarian issues. They claim they either don't exist, aren't the problem of the United States, or are the fault of the victims. They counter with distractions like, "Why do you care so much about THEM when you should be caring about the REAL people who matter?" Sorry, but I don't recall Jesus ever dividing people into those who matter more and those who matter less. Of course, Jesus also said not to j...

Microblogging? The Future of Writing with ADHD

Bill Bennett is a very common name. Right now, I'm reading a book by the Australian film maker Bill Bennett. He hiked the Camino in 2013 and then wrote a book (and made an Australian movie, not available in the U.S.) about it.  Seems he kept a blog about that hike, too. I went to look for his Camino blog, and found he started one years after the hike, but he didn't post regularly... His last post from 2022 announced his had Parkinson's and had kept the diagnosis secret for 4 years.  Now that almost three years have passed from that post, I wonder what's happened to him.  Blogs are weird. They just sit there. Anyone can stumble upon them, and read them. So I decided to keep looking for his Camino blog.  https://billbennett.blog/home/ *** And I found another Bill Bennett, this one from New Zealand, who keeps a microblog. It's current and updated. "What's a microblog?" My wife asked. Well, I said, it's a small blog. Just a sentence or two for a post. ...