Meh. I gave up the name thing years ago. Few people can spell “Audrey”, and if they can’t handle my first name, forget about my surname.
I had hoped that I’d marry a guy with a nice, simple, can’t-fuck-it-up kind of name, but I just had to find one who also needs to spell out his surname all the time too. So much for that idea. >_<
Are you a 5’3’ biker chick with badly dyed hair and worse teeth?
If so, then you are her and it was nice to talk to you at the BBQ last week. If not, then I would stick with Angel.
I’m a 5’3’’ chick with blonde highlights, bleached teeth, fake nails, and that is presently wearing a pink shirt, denim mini, and pink wedge sandals. So, no, I don’t think that was me.
Though I’ll be honest, she at least sounds like more fun than I am heh. 
Always, always give the name “Elvis” at this places.
argh. My name is Daniel. I am hispanic though, so I say it as an american would say “Danielle”. My first year in the US was a long one. What’s your name?. Daniel. puzzled How do you spell that? D-A-N-I-E-L. Oh, like Daniel. Yes Daniel, just like Daniel.
One of the doormen in my building has taken to calling me Laura, which is not my name. In fact, it’s not even close. He’s even called me Laura in the process of reading my name off the mailing labels of packages I receive, despite seeing my real name there. The origins of “Laura” are a complete mystery to me, and I’ve given up trying to get him to get my name right.
When I hear the name “Angel” without any other identifying info, the first image that comes to mind is a very sweet Hispanic guy I work with. The second Angel that comes to mind is the person in the middle of this picture. Sorry. 
My RL name is Eleanor. No one can spell it and (almost) noone can say it. I’m called Ellen, or El-ner or Ele-ah-nor (wth?) or Ellie. Hate that.
The spellings would keep me here all night–how hard can it be? Too much so for the average bear, apparently.
I named my daughter Laura-thinking noone could mess that up. Wrong. She’s called Lauren, Lahra, Lorie…
Baffling.
I can make rice, but sometimes it’s hit or miss. What I can’t make and no longer try is piecrust.
Don’t be so self-conscious. Why not call the club, “People who can’t cook rice on the stovetop.” ?
Simple yet eloquent.
I understand where you’re coming from. I always thought my name was pretty basic. 4 letters (A-K-I-L) and not much of a challenge. Inevitably, if someone has to read my name off of a piece of paper they just end up staring at it for a few minutes. And forget about asking someone to spell it. If I see one more damn ‘Y’ in my name I will lose it. I can understand the temptation to add ‘E’ or ‘Q’ (though they almost never add a ‘U’ when they add the ‘Q’) but where the hell do you get the ‘Y’ from? I am just glad that very few people have to read my name out loud.
My name is Antares. Whee.
For most of my life I just went by Tara. My last name begins with B and I went to a small school so I was always first in alphabetical order all through elementary school and high school. So the teacher would start calling roll with “Uh…” and I’d just say “Just call me Tara. And I’m here.” At my high school graduation, the principal asked me three times how to pronounce my name, and still got it wrong. And got my middle name wrong, too (Janeva - pronounced like Geneva, Switzerland. He pronounced it “Juh-NEH-vuh.”)
I still go by Tara among friends, but Antares at work and for my public music stuff. For the record, I pronounce it “Ahn-TAR-ace.” But I’ve heard so many mispronunciations, I just say “close enough,” for the most part.
At work, when I have to take phone calls (I work in an inbound call center as a CSR - most of the time I do email but sometimes I have to do phones too) I’ve given up on Antares because it’s just too much of a pain to spell it (why do they care, anyways? I gave them an order number, isn’t that enough?) so I identify myself as Tara. This would seem to be pretty simpl, but I still get Sara, Kara, Para(?), Paris, Karen, Mary, and once, Jose. I do not know how my voice came across as that of a Hispanic man, but… oh well. I just went with it.
So I have given up as well.
I’ve never tried to cook rice. I can’t really think of other things I’ve given up on lately…
Let us speak of the wonder that is the rice cooker.
(A rice cooker is not to be mistaken for a vegetable steamer [that also steams rice] that you can buy at the small appliance centre at Walmart. A real rice cooker cooks rice, perfect every time, and keeps it perfect to eat for hours on end, and it says so right in the literature. It also steams vegetables, you can see where the confusion arises, yes?)
Rice is indeed a religious ritual, but it’s really quite simple once you get it.
First, get a rice cooker from the local Asian market. They have small ones. If you like rice, it will become your most used small appliance. They are not expensive.
Wash the rice a couple of times by swishing it around with water until the water is milky, pour off and repeat once.
Now put your palm down with your fingers spread on top of the wet rice. Fill, until the water reaches up to the second knuckle on your fingers. This measure works no matter how much rice you’re making.
Flip switch on the rice cooker to ‘cook rice’. Enjoy perfect rice any time for the next 4-5 hrs.
I promise you will be delighted with the results, and wonder why it seemed so hard.
I once worked with a guy whose last name was DiRienzo and everybody pronounced it with four syllables - dee-ree-en-zo. A while later his younger brother started working at the same place and I noticed that he pronounced his name with three syllables - dee-ren-zo. So I thought I had probably been mispronouncing it all along and the next time I was talking to the older brother I asked him if his last name was pronounced dee-ree-en-zo or dee-ren-zo. And he said either one was fine and he had no preference. I told him he must have a real mellow outlook on life if he had no preference on how his own name should be pronounced.
You get called Angstrom, Angharad, Angrim, and Angrod a lot?
Is it “Throatwobbler Mangrove”?
My last name is pronounced differently than it’s more common use as a first name. I used to correct people, and my wife still does, but 30 years of mangled attempts by people I don’t particularly care about made me realize that it doesn’t really matter.
You should hang out with astronomers; they’d know how to pronounce it correctly.
Although she tolerates it in the press, in case anybody should ever meet Elizabeth Taylor in real life, don’t even think of calling her “Liz”…she HATES that. Her friends all call her “Elizabeth”. Only those who pretend to know her call her Liz.
Born close to Christmas and thought of as a present for my brother 2 years older (named Jorge, but said like George), I was named Noel. No big deal, right? HAH!
He was unhappy with me, not having realized the attention the newborn would get instead of him.
He immediately asked for another brother, and 2 years later Nathan ( Yiddish for a gift?)was born on Christmas day. Jorge, then 4 years old, liked that one.
I may never recover from the immense embarrassment I suffered with my name, especially at the age of 16 or so, when I received a complimentary subscription to Seventeen magazine !
Someday when we know each other better, I will tell you some of the other given names in our family.
Ugh, try Alejandro; over here it throws everyone into lingual convulsions. So I just get by with Ale*, simple enough, no? and yet, some people take that and turn it into Alale, go figure.
*Which by the way it´s not pronounced like the brewed drink but more like the french word alez, but without so much stress on the last vowel.
See, Angel to me is a GUY name. Know tons of Ángel, Miguel Ángel, Luis Ángel… it’s quite a popular name for guys where I’m from, alone or combined. Then again, knowing that you don’t mind I’d probably be calling you Angélica Guapísima (Angelique Bellissima 
)
My paternal lastname is three words. I don’t know what’s worse: trying to get people familiar with Hispanic marriage customs to understand the “de Something” does not, in this case, imply a Mr Something whose Mrs I am; trying to get people to understand that in legal documents they must use all three words (please don’t cut my Dad in half); or trying to convince Corporate ITs to not use the whole Og-damned string of sausages…
Is there an established joke about this one? Because this is my surname, and I am another instance of the name-inversion phenomenon. Apparently nobody loves Raymond… at least not as a first name.
I went to a bilingual (english-french) university that was full of students from a hundred ethnicities, and they had no problem with African and Arabic names. But they very nearly issued me a degree with my names reversed.
I now work for a large, international organization that is constantly bringing in new personnel from nearly two dozen countries. They can handle the Finns, and the Russians, and the mishmash-Flemish-Walloon Belgians and the polynomial Spaniards and the Scandinavians with their special vowels. But nearly every department had me registered as “de heer Francis Raymond”, when the reverse is what’s on the resume, birth certificate, passport, and various forms that I gave them when I showed up. Which is fine. Call me Francis all you want; when I do military stuff, I go by my last name anyway. But my email address, my security badge, my registration with the ministry of foreign affairs… these things are important.
So except for these matters, I basically just roll with it. It doesn’t bother me until it causes confusion, and I’m not concerned when people localize it to their native tongue. I respond to both my first name and my last name, and don’t even correct my boss when he introduces me to people as “Monsieur Francis Raymond.”
(And my goodness, the “everybody loves Raymond” thing caught on quick. In North America, anyway.)
