Wind In My Head: Namesake
Wind In My Head
Monday, January 23, 2006
Namesake
I start off relatively slow on Mondays. It snowballs by about 11, but early in the morning, it's quiet and a good time to catch up on reading. Skimming the headlines of the Onion, "Sean Penn demands to know what asshole took seanpenn[at]gmail.com" screamed out at me, with Mr Penn looking extremely disgruntled.It reminded me of this one time I got an email in my hotmail mailbox from this girl in Malaysia who shared the same name and email address with me, give or take an underscore. She wanted to be friends with me seeing that we shared the same name. I thought it was the strangest thing in the world. Almost like a car enthusiasts club- all those with Minis join a forum and it becomes a fraternity of sorts. So she wanted to unite the Ondines together and figured we'd be good friends because we shared the same name.
Some stand by that theory- that if you have the same name, you'd have generally the same type of character or personality depending on what the name means. My mother's friend met me at eleven and thought that the name my parents had christened me was way cool. So she named her daughter after me replacing one of my many 'e' s with an 'i'. I met my name sake some years ago and Packrat commented on how similar we were. Both of us were high-strung (his words, not mine), did not tolerate any rubbish from our mothers (who also shared the same name!), shared the same neuroses and didn't particularly like the inebriated party scene... Of course, this theory can be disproved quite easily, but I like it. And we all subconsciously believe in it.
My sister-in-law refused to name her daughter Naomi because she said she didn't want a dark skinned brat. Packrat wouldn't even let me consider Chloe as a potential name because he said the girl on Smallville was too whiny.
What's in a name? A whole bloody lot I think.
Ondine tossed this thought in at 11:45
3 thoughts...
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At 5:41 pm
儒 said... i once emailed someone with the same (pinyin) name to ask what chinese characters they were.
didn't do it because i wanted to be friends with someone with the same name, but because i wanted to find out how many other people out there has exactly the same chinese name as me.-
At 6:30 pm
Tym said...
"Naomi" = dark-skinned? Because it's in the Bible or what??
The thing about teaching is that you run the danger of repeatedly having problem students who might all have the same name, and then you swear you'll never name your kid that.-
At 8:56 pm
Ondine said...
Naomi as in Naomi "I won't get out of bed for less than $50 grand" Campbell, actually.