Change of Names

                                    my new cousin's namesake

Aunt Cristelle and Uncle Mendel are sticking with Antarctica as a first name, but there's apparently a waiting period in some places on names for babies. Antarctica 's middle name will no longer be meringue. It wil be Magdalena.  It think all three names are ridiculous, but I beleive, however stupid it sounds, Magdalena is at least a real name.

My mom, while recognizing her limited role as an in-law to give advice, tried to subtly suggest to Cristelle, that if a child wants to be different otr attract attention,he or she will find a way to do so. A parent doesn't have to predispose the child to automatic freak status by giving the kid a name no one has ever heard of before. I'm sure my mother worded it muchmore diplomatically than I did.  While you might not want your kid to be one of three in a class with the same first name, neither do you want to be the kid to who, everyone says, "WHAT?!?!?" when answering upon bing asked his or her name.  The trick is probably in finding a happy medium.  Either end along the spectrum of  happy medium is probably fine.  anywhere from relatively obscure to relatively common is good. It just needs to be an actually human's name and not the name of a reindeer or a continent.

My parents preferred common names.   Once they had decided on our names "Matthew and Aubrey, but that's another story from the past) the went to a department store that sold little objects (iny license plates, stickers, key chains, etc.) with children's names on them and checked to ensure that both our names could be found.  When my mom unexpectedly changed my name to Alexis, my dad went to the same store and checked to ensure that "Alexis" could be found on all the objects before he allowed the name to be put on my birth certificate.

Donna, regarding, "People Who Throw Glass Houses Shouldn't Get Stoned," it was a pretty good song. In fact it was their only good song. They'd start and end each gig with it, and it would be requested once or twice  during the middle as well. It was good, but not great.  It was at leasst in the key of A, which was the key that the bass player played everything in whether the rest of them were playing and singing in that key or not.The problem was that their other songs sucked worse than a  Rainbow Vac.