Barrett - It's stuffy.
*Inspiration: Syd Barrett, founding member of Pink Floyd who, ironically enough, was the polar opposite of stuffy.

Blaise - Sounds like a cowboy name. [Me: I was thinking of Blaise Pascal, the mathematician.]  Mmmm. (noncommittal.)

Blake - It's a fraternity name.  He's a weightlifter and orange from the fake tanning.

Bryce - It's a little pretentious.

Cedar - Too close to Cletus.*
*Funny story proving once again that Dani is funnier than I am: Dani's friend Jessica married a guy named Cletus.  He wasn't a redneck, surprisingly, but he was the third "Cletus" in family succession, so he wanted to name their first born Cletus as well.  The wife (understandably!) was firmly against this.  They were hoping for a girl to render the issue moot.  Dani said, "Oh, well, that won't stop them.  They could always name her Cletoris."

Chitin - Isn't that what whales eat?  [Me: That's krill.]  Isn't that what whales' teeth are made out of?  [Me: No.]
*Inspiration: Science-themed name.  Chitin is actually a molecule similar to cellulose.  It makes up cell walls in fungi and the shells of arthropods (i.e., crustaceans, insects, arachnids).  Technically whales do eat krill, but, no.

Circuit - That's just stupid.  [Me: Why?]  You're trying too hard to be from the future.
*Inspiration: Trying too hard to be futuristic.

Clive - How about Chive?  Spicy!

Colin - I like it.  [Me: With one L or two?]  How about one L and two Os?  Or maybe Colon.  [Me: Uh...]

Dex - [Me: We should have a girl named Alexis who we'll call Lex and a boy named Dex.]  Yeah.
*Inspiration: Dani loves the show "Dexter."  While I'd be okay saddling my son with the name of a fictional serial killer, I just don't like the name Dexter.

Django - Everyone would call him DeeJango like BoJangle.
*Inspiration: Django Reinhardt.  You know me by now, right?

Drew - Can we spell it "Dru"?  [Me: No.]  Then no.

Echo - Everyone would think we named him after Echo on Lost.
*Inspiration: Science-themed.  Also, I was looking for non-Italian names ending in "o" to counter a sister's name ending with "a."

Ever - It sounds like it's not complete.

Future - Oh, yeah (sarcastically); that's better than Circuit.  Why not Future Circuit?

Grey - Why not Blue Black or Greenish Yellow?  Tope?  Smoke?  Azule?  Azure?  Sienna?  Cornflower?

Gus - That's our dog's name.  [Me: So?]  The dog was here first.  And it sounds dim-witted.

Ian - I like Ian [Me: Why?]  Because it sounds like Ewan.  (Note: I vetoed Ewan on the grounds that naming a son after an actor his mother fantasizes about is entirely too Oedipal.)

Jack - I like Zack.  [Me: I said Jack.]  Yeah, that's good too.

Jake - I like Jake, but it kind of sounds like a dog's name.  [Have you ever known a dog named Jake?]  I don't think so.  But I could.

Leash - I'm not even gracing that with an answer.

Max - It's simple.  It's got an X in it.  [Me: I always say that about AleX.]  I like it because you like it.  [Me: That's not the case with Kayla.]  Well, you're just stupid and that's not my fault.

Oscar - I'd call him Ozzy because I think that's a nice nickname.  Better than Gar.

Pascal - That sounds like a little frog on a Discovery Channel cartoon learning math.

Peter - I don't want our child made fun of if his name's Peter. [Me: How would they make fun of him?]  Because that's his penis.

Reece - Only if we can spell it Rhys.  Like that rhesus monkey.  [Me: They don't spell it that way.]  Oh.

Salad - What about Salad?  [Me: No.]  Why not.  [Me: It sounds like our kid's going to be a vegetable.]

Tyler - It's a white trash name.  Came straight from the trailer park.

Xenon - Too gassy.
*Inspiration: Periodic table, obviously.

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Brushes with death... and life.

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I only had one grandparent remaining when I was born, and she was gone when I was only three.  Both my parents happened to be the youngest of their respective families which is why their parents were much older,  and then they in turn (though I was an only child) were older when they had me.  As a result, I've only know my aunts and uncles as old men and women.  To date, my mom lost a sister of her three siblings, while my dad is the second to last remaining in his generation of ten(!).  Factor in all the siblings' spouses and assorted cousins who have passed away over the years, and you'd be right in assuming I spent a good portion of my childhood in funeral homes.

On Dad's side we used to try to have an annual family reunion, but those faded out almost twenty years ago.  One year just before the reunion was to be held, one of my very young second cousins died in surgery to correct a congenital heart defect.  The reunion's organizers understandably thought it would be in bad taste to have a get-together so soon after such a tragedy.  The following year shortly before the next reunion was scheduled, another relative died, and it just wasn't proper to get together to celebrate right then.  And besides, everyone had just seen one another at the funeral, right?  That was probably twenty years ago, and the momentum was lost.  The first Dani met of most of my extended family was at my mom's funeral.  Because that's our family reunion now.

As upbeat as my partner Dani is, you'd never guess how intimately she is involved with death and the dying.  When we first met she was working both for a radiology clinic and was in charge of a cancer charity plus running a support group after hours for cancer patients and their families.  Before and subsequent to that she was involved with Alzheimer's patients in one way or another.  Presently she works at a hospice.  Patients die literally every day around her from all manner of terminal illnesses.  However exciting your spouse's office dramas are, I'll bet they don't regularly feature death scenes.  Sometimes we'll be talking on the phone while she's at work and she'll stop and say, oh, sorry, she'll have to call me back; someone's dying.  With anyone else you'd read that as figurative hyperbole, but, no, that's what goes on there.

Still, when my mom was diagnosed with cancer about a year and a half before her death, we were all sort of in denial.  I mean, intellectually we knew there was an end coming (like I said, she'd been going on about that for years).  But it just didn't really click.  After all, we always thought my dad would go first.  See, my folks moved from the country to their current neighborhood back when I was in college.  Dad had the beginnings of heart problems that made it difficult to keep up a rural home with lots of land.  I only came home on the weekend, and not even every other one after a while unless he specifically requested otherwise.  It was taking a toll on him and they knew they'd better get out before it killed him.  As in literally.

The first house they moved to upon retreating to suburbia was a two-story, and it was a bad idea they didn't pick up on right away.  They only stayed in it for a year before realizing that the stairs were wearing Dad out.  Don't worry; they didn't lose any money on the deal and ultimately moved into one better suited to them and right down the street.  In the years subsequent to all this my father has had a double bypass, two stents put in (separate occasions), and a minor heart attack.  The latter could have been much worse were it not for the fact they live right across the street from a major hospital.  (No, this is not by accident.)  On top of everything else, he has had an abdominal aortic aneurysm for years that grows ever so slightly between each annual scan.

My mom saw her role as taking care of my dad until his bad coronary health caught up with him.  We didn't know how much time he had left, but we figured she'd overtake him, right?  Then she showed up with cancer.  This was a few months after my aunt, Mom's sister and ten years her senior, moved in with them following a bad fall in which she broke her shoulder.  The three of them would sit around and lay odds on who was going first.  My mom was always the longshot until she received her diagnosis.  The day she passed, her sister repeated over and over at Mom's bedside, "...it should have been me."

For all the sorrow, there was a lot of relief too when the end finally came.  You don't see the dying process in movies.  Cancer patients look sleepy as they say something witty or poignant, and then pass on quietly into the great unknown.  They close their eyes, their grip relaxes, and... scene.  In reality it generally doesn't work like that.  There's this gradual slipping away, sure, but it's over the course of weeks or months.  Things shut down both mentally and physically.  It's difficult to witness it.  Someone you love is winding down in ways that aren't graceful and poetic; they're awkward and painful and sickening and unpleasant.  Surprisingly, by the time of Mom's funeral almost a week after she passed, I felt almost buoyant.  So did my dad.  We had worked through a lot of grief in the meantime and we emerged from that with this near-euphoric feeling that I think was born out of that horrible stage finally being over.  We'd still feel the loss, but the most terrible phase, the one no one really warns you about, was behind us.

Other than these rambling anecdotes, I don't really have a punchline here or any insight to impart.  The ironic timing of these events was that all the while one family member was slowly slipped away and leaving us, another one was slowly coming to life in Dani.  He's literally just beginning to kick inside his mother this week as I write this, a week after my own mother is gone.  Both experiences are new to me, at least up this close.  My family identity changed twice in rapid succession but in a zero-sum way.  As I said above (if you didn't know already), I'm an only child, so it was strange when my mom passed away to sit and have a conversation with my dad, realizing that was "a family talk."  All two of us were present; there was no longer a third.  And it's just as strange to me to think ahead not of just a "Dani and I" now, but in the as-yet unrealized concept of us as a family of three.  It's been a very surreal year.

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Survey says...
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Don't get me wrong, I recognize the attraction to these things.  They are bubblegum.  They let you run in place in ways less demanding than the gym when you're too tired or apathetic to do anything but type.  Best of all, they're asking you questions you already know most of the answers to.  After all, odds are you know yourself better than almost anyone on your friend list.  And that will still be case afterward since surveys of this variety tell their readers almost nothing of substance about the respondent.

I went through a phase some time ago wherein I took to the survey trend as well.  This was a couple years before MySpace got off the ground, so I tended to find questionnaires elsewhere, but it was essentially the same material.  This isn't rocket science, after all.  These aren't controlled instruments endorsed by the APA.  No, by and large, they're superficial questionnaires generated by superficial teenagers.  The medium may have changed, but this is nothing more sophisticated than the age-old tradition of passing notes in class.  However, instead of being time-wasters, they can (and should) be employed to explore more deeply than the limited scope they present on a first reading.

For example, one use I found in these instruments was in collecting a large set of qualitative data about myself, and from those, I could find meaningful patterns.  I realize most people tend to test "S" on the Myers-Briggs rather than as iNtuitives, but if you are active on MySpace (much less so for the Facebookies), odds are you're a "big picture" thinker; you're going to see patterns in seemingly random lists.

In my case, I found that when I treated one of these lists as a self-inventory of, say, my favorites, I found a deeper understanding of who I was through an awareness of the commonalities of those favorites.  For example, if you list your favorite movies, an implicit finding is what you left off.  You tacitly make a (non)list of movies that don't rate very highly with you by their very exclusion.  More specifically, you might arrive at a virtual map of your sense of humor via the comedies you love and those you hate.  For example, in my case, I know that, whatever the hype, I should go into Ben Stiller movies guardedly if at all, and wait for the dvd in any case.  Existential discoveries aside, this knowledge alone has saved me a lot of money.

And that's just quick list-type surveys.  Reading surveys as though there is greater scope of inquiry built in turns this otherwise inane pasttime into an opportunity for creativity or perhaps some therapy.  Questions with all the depth of "Extra" interviews with Jessica Alba have the potential to serve as introspective exercises if you make the effort to read them as prompts and invest in them accordingly.  I have heard from a number of folks that the reason they don't blog is because they don't have anything to say, and yet they can't help but snack on surveys like they're going out of style.  Well, there's your opportunity.  Surveys full of yes/no questions don't elicit much more than a one-word response in affirmative or negative if you take them at face value, in which case, what's the point in answering them?  I always scan through the list and assume there's a "Why?" at the end.  That's what matters the most anyway.

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