Monday, November 22, 2010

Peanut

One thing that you should know about me is that I make nicknames up for EVERYONE. I think it started back when I was a boy crazy teenager. My friends and I would go to one of those restaurants that has butcher paper over the table, and a plastic cup full of crayons for drawing. It was mine and my friends' tradition to scribble down the name of the boy that we liked at the time. Since it changed so often, I, to this day, have a stack of butcher paper slips with the nicknames of various boys that me and my friends were momentarily madly in love with. Half of the time, we didn't even know their names. It was things like "Waiter Boy," "G-Dawg" and "Mike"... but his name was really John and weird, lame stuff like that. And I still refer to certain people from my past. My high school friends will remember someone called "Jen Eliot Boy" and I call my best friend "Nar Bar" and my little brother "Ton." Also, one of my friends used to refer to me as Diablo Champignon, or Devil mushroom. K? I think I've illustrated the point very well. I enjoy weird nicknames.

So, I still have a tendency to give people nicknames. More often than not, it's to differentiate between people I don't know well. Almost everyone I see at the hospital gets a nickname, since more often I can tell them apart for their various diagnoses than their actual names. I went through a period where I consistently called a dad "Paul Bunyan" because he had the tendency to tell these stories which could not possibly be true. Like one time, he ate berries with a bear. I'm not kidding.

This habit extends to my children. They get weird nicknames all the time, and you can hear me screaming them in Target when I've lost Andrew for the 900th time. In that minute. The problem is, people here in Utah give their kids such freak names that sometimes, I'm afraid people think that I've actually named my kids whatever I'm yelling in the store.

In a way, I get it. We live in a very kid-dense state. EVERYONE has kids here. Many children. Everywhere. So I can see why people want to give their kids names so they aren't the 40th "Brandon" in their classes. But I was at the doctor's office and heard them call out "Sailor?" and I watched a little four year old girl head off with the nurse and her mom. Not to mention the names that I see in the NICU. Oh, so very many names for inanimate objects. Also, we went through a strange alcohol-naming trend in the summer. Corona? Hennesey? Weird.

Anyway, if you ever hear an exasperated mom yelling "PEANUT?" in the store, it's me. And I didn't actually name Addison "Peanut." She just gets called that randomly sometimes. The same goes for Andrew, who is regularly referred to as "Bubba Boo." While I may live in Utah, my children still have reasonably normal names like Addison and Andrew. I would say that the name Andrew is almost TOO normal. But down here it's like "Andrew? Where did you come up with such an archaic name?"

Also, I might refer to you as "Jellybean" for no reason at all.

1 comments:

The Molcak's said...

hahaha, I was at Costco the other day and I called Macy "Mace", and this man says "What kind of a name is Mace?" Good thing that's not really her name or I may have been offended! LOL!

 
designed by suckmylolly.com