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Hit or Miss

2 Jun 2001

Like Steve(n), I’ve been thinking about my name lately. My name is Matthew. And for years, that’s how I asked people to refer to me — actually, I asked people to call me Matthew J. Kingston, because then I had an equal number of letters and spaces on either side of the period, or fulcrum, of my name. This lead to my nickname “J-dot” throughout undergrad. There are just too many Matt’s (and far too many gay Matt’s) and I wanted to set myself apart.

Anyway, I’ve gotten lazier over the past year or two and now routinely call and sign myself as “Matt,” rendering my other domain a little inaccurate.

3 responses so far (Respond)

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A view from the other side… Growing up my first name of Kristian was a bit of a thorn in my side. (My sister, Faith, felt the same way… Yes, our mother was optimistic. Yes, her fantasies about how we would turn out were also quite wrong.) But as I grew older I stopped calling myself ‘Kris’ because there was a million (Ch/K)rises in the world and not so many Kristians.

Not that this had any difference in the long run. Some people call me Kris (including my girlfriend, Chris) but a *ton* of people call me Coventry, the name I adopted for myself when I first came online in the early 90’s. My *mom* calls me Coventry to get my attention, and many of my offline friends call me Cov, even if they don’t follow my online endeavors.

Hmm. A point, I feel if I’ve typed this much I must have one.

Identity is both fluid and static. I’ve been Coventry for 10 years, and may stop being Coventry at some point. I’ve been Kristian for 26 years, and can’t change that without officially changing my name.

That wasn’t a very good point, was it? Back to cleaning my pad…

Cov | 2 Jun 2001
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Matt –

I’ve felt what you’re going through with the name change idea. 98% of the people on this earth who know me refer to me as ‘Jerry’, though my all my ID’s say ‘Jeremiah’. On top of that, I have 2 middle names and one I don’t use at all. So the option to find a much simple nomenclature for myself is up in the air.

Jerry | 2 Jun 2001
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I hear you. My preferences have always been Richard and Ricky (go ahead and laugh), but it seems like everyone wants to call me Rich. Honestly, that always grated on me for some reason and elevated the person saying it to me to used-car salesman status. I didn’t even mind being called Dick as much as being called Rich. Like you with Matt, I just don’t even mind being called Rich anymore.

And though I have the domain richardwhitmer.com, I always feel like it’s so waspish and not very accurate, if that makes any sense. Blah, blah, blah, help me.

Ricardo | 2 Jun 2001