My submission to “Hello, My Fucking Name Is…”
Today I discovered Hello, My Fucking Name Is…, a website that offers people a chance to explain what their name is and how people get it wrong. From the Why This Site page:
This site is a joke, but the topic is serious
Crafting our personal identities is a lifelong process on which we spend quite a lot of time and attention. So then why is it that people can be so damn casual about paying attention to people’s names? In my four decades of living, I’ve been called more than 11 different names—and I’m sorry to say that not one of them is an ACTUAL variation on my name…
Submitting your story is as easy as clicking a button and filling in a form. Your submission is moderated — probably for spam, certainly not for language. The stories there are pretty funny expressions of people’s frustration of other people getting their name wrong.
You may think it odd, but people get my name wrong all the time. Seriously. So I decided to write up my own submission. It’s in moderation there now, but here’s what I submitted.
My name is Maria. Not Marie. Not Mary. And, for Pete’s sake clean out your f-ing ears, not Gloria.
My name is not Marie. The only Marie in my family was my uncle’s wife. They got divorced. She stole heirloom items from my grandparents estate that should have gone to my sister, brother, and me. She has liens against her that come up every time I try to buy or sell a property. I hate her, I hate her name. When you call me Marie, you remind me of her and that pisses me off. I’ll allow you to do it one time — because most people do — and if you do it again, I will correct you. Firmly. If you do it a third time, after being corrected, I will ignore you since you so obviously ignored me. My name is not Marie.
I was named after my grandmother. Her legal name was Maria. Just because people called her Mary don’t think you can call me Mary. You can’t. My name is not Mary.
If you think I introduced myself as Gloria, you should see a doctor about your obvious hearing problem. My name is not Gloria.
Yes, I realize that when you meet me for the first time, you might have an uncontrollable urge to sing, “I just met a girl named Maria.” Control that urge. I’ve heard it too many times for it to be even remotely funny anymore. All it does is make you sound like an asshole. Especially if you have a crappy singing voice.
You can also skip singing My Maria, Ave Maria, Take a Letter Maria, and How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria. Give it a rest already.
And one more thing. Just because my name is Maria and I live in Arizona, don’t look so surprised when you meet me in person and I don’t look the least bit Mexican. I’m not Mexican. My mother’s side of my family immigrated from Italy — not Mexico — in a time when it was still socially acceptable to immigrate into the United States from another country. Deal with it.
The other entries might be shorter, but they’re mostly in the same vein. Check them out. I think you’ll find them amusing. I did.
The resulting email messages are nicely formatted to present the entire contents of the blog post. This is an example from earlier in the week; I subscribed to test it out. I chose the HTML format, but there’s also a plain text format. This even looks good in a mobile device like an iPad.
Understand that I’m in a foul mood this afternoon. I went out to run a few errands, leaving our new dog, Charlie, in the condo’s small walled-in patio. When I returned 40 minutes later, he greeted me in the parking lot. He had escaped by tearing down some metal mesh and squeezing through the back gate. He then tried to get back into the apartment through the screen security door, tearing the screen to shreds from the outside.