my_middle_name_is cr0wl excess 091204 ... raze karel. it's czechoslovakian for charles. it isn't really my middle name, though. it's part of my given_name. what happened was my grade school teachers kept accusing me of spelling my own name wrong. it started in kindergarten. the teacher would cross out "karel" and tell me it was spelled "carl". i would try to explain it to her. she wouldn't listen. my parents had to call the school and tell her that really was my name, and i really did know how to spell it. i wasn't stupid. i knew how to spell a lot of words. i taught myself to read before i learned to speak. this happened with every teacher i had, until someone decided it was easier to start calling the second half of my first name my middle name instead. no one ever told me i was spelling "john" wrong. the truth is i don't have a middle name. i never have. and it was strange to feel like a part of me had to go missing to satisfy strangers who didn't know a thing about me or my heritage and didn't care that they were killing my already-dead great grandfather every time they took my name away from me, because it was his name too. 211017 ... tender_square my middle name is marie. my mother's middle name is marie. my grandmother was never given a middle name. but my great-grandmother was named josephine maria, so this could be where it originates from, though my mother is unsure. i just looked up the meaning for "marie," because it always struck me as a sort of boring name, but google says it means "star of the sea," which makes me appreciate it more now. 211017 ... unhinged faith because i needed to be separated from my mother because the hospital i was born in didn't have a neonatal intensive care unit and she had faith i would survive without her, a prayer, a benediction, a blessing 211017 ... nr tender_square: i've actually thought before that most people named marie i've met have been super smart, genuine, interesting people. i've actually only noticed this connection with people named marie. mine's lindsey. 211017 ... nr sometimes i wonder if my childhood would have been different if i'd gone by my middle name 211017 ... e_o_i tender_square, we are name_twins! My middle name is also Marie. In this case, my mom just thought it sounded nice with my first name. Better than a more "English" variant like Mary or Miriam, because it changed up the accent pattern as well as ending on a vowel: KIR-sten ma-RIE. I agree with her reasoning there. All of those names have weighty ancestry: Bible characters with important roles who've had many people named after them in turn. Resonances in many languages, similarities to sea, bitterness, love, etc. ...Yesterday I started writing about Miriam, because she was important to the Basel leg of the trip, but I didn't finish. (And now I'm supposed to go out for supper so I can't write much more but I also wanted to say it really sucks about your phone_frustration. I've had similar problems but not so bad.) 230702 ... epitome of incomprehensibility ("leg of the trip" as if the Kassel program was a trip. Well, in the colloquial sense, sort of. But the class itself was in one place.) 230702 what's it to you? who go blather from