How replaceable am I?
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According to the above information, I'd say I'm quite rare indeed. If I die, my countrymen are left with only nine of me. So I'm only slightly more replaceable than a house cat, which is born with nine total lives.
Actually, it's interesting having my name. For a long time when The Internets were young, I couldn't find any other Jen S.'s* at all.
*Here I must interrupt my own post, just for a moment: I'm still trying to decide where I'm going with my anonymity, or lack thereof, on the web. Pretty much since 1990 I've practiced full disclosure on the 'net with my name and location, as I think practicing anonymity just breeds fear and possibly even predation ... kind of like what Michael Moore talks about in Bowling for Columbine with guns, fear and violence in U.S. society being inextricably linked. I may just be rebelling against my mother who always kept our names unlisted in the telephone book, which never made sense to me either. If everyone were listed, wouldn't the phone book be much thicker, and the victim pool be much larger, thereby making our chances of becoming targets smaller? You know, the larger the pool, the smaller I am? Well, that's the way I see it, and anyway, I wasn't born with the fear gene. So, despite the fact that my full name and location can be found with very little Googling, and possibly with only a click or three from this very page, I'm still deluding myself and others by sticking with the "Jen S." pseudonym for a little while longer. I don't know why. I'm confused and I'm OK with that.
So anyway, for a long time when The Internets were young, I couldn't find any other Jen S.'s at all. I lived my life in the early 1990's believing that I might be the only one on Earth. My last name is rather uncommon. It's not unknown, but it's the kind that is mispronounced and misspelled more often than not. There were no other S.'s in my school, and I mean not in any of my schools, through the time I graduated college at age twenty-*COUGHgagAhem*. I have yet to meet another S. who is unrelated to me.
Yet the name Jennifer is exceedingly common. Mike Doughty went to school with 27 Jennifers, and while that may be a record number, I knew quite a few myself. When I hear my first name, I usually don't look up. There is always a mug, or a key chain, or a fake license plate, or a t-shirt with my name on it at the dime store. (Do they still call them that?) I'm Jen, there are a million or more just like me, and that's completely normal.
So I'm absolutely conditioned to hearing and seeing my first name everywhere, but to believing that my last name might as well be made up. It may as well be Swernylzipizlillamasteaksammich. Hearing my last name spoken aloud, and I mean in a place where people don't know me or my name, like if I were crossing a crowded street or in a shopping mall, is much like hearing someone say, "Hey, Swernylzipizillillamasteaksandwich!" It's weird, and it makes you turn around. And I mean you, too. What I'm saying is, in my mind, I fancy that if you heard that name, you'd turn around and think it was just as strange as if I heard that name. It's just. That weird. To hear. To me.
So weird that when a movie came out a few years back and the main character had my last name, I found it downright difficult to watch. Because they kept saying his name, and it was my name, which I never hear, to the point where it doesn't sound like a real name to me, and watching the movie I was just so distracted by hearing the name because, isn't everybody else also thinking, "Wait, so that's a real name?"
Why couldn't they just have made his name Jones?
I guess this is kind of like how your birth date is special to you. The combination of your month, day and year sounds "right" to you, doesn't it? It's fairly unique, at least among most people you know. You might feel slightly more connected to someone who has a birthday a few days away from your own, but you know that your date is the "right" one. So when you see your birth date used for something else, like when they show the date on an episode of Law & Order, or when some newsworthy event happens that becomes forever tied to your birth date, you feel some kind of ownership of it, like it has something to do with you, and perhaps like your privacy is being invaded. Or not. But that's how I feel about my birth date, and that's how I feel about my last name. Because through my entire life, my last name has actually been more unique to me than my birth date. I've been able to name other people, both celebrities and people in my schools and workplaces, with the same birth date since I was a child. But never with the same last name.
So now I know that there are nine other Jen S.'s in the United States alone. And I find myself wondering, when are their birth dates? What color hair do they have? What do they like? Are they tall? Are they young? Are they better than me?
It's rather neurotic, to say the least. But I know for sure that it's ME, no matter how many others share my name.
Labels: memes
posted by Jen S. at
9:53 PM
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5 Comments
