The original title of this thread was “Big self-indulgent bloated boring wall of text,” but the board rules say I oughtta have more descriptive thread titles, so I hereby respectfully comply.
So if y’have a hard time with walls of text, do find another thread. 'Cause I’m gonna talk about my name now.
Names are important. Names have power. Names help us to define ourselves. One should take names seriously. By the same token, it is said that to hold someone’s name is to hold power over them.
Boy, is this true. One of the quickest ways to start somethin’ with another human is to make fun of his name, particularly upon first meeting that person.
From the movie “REPO MAN:”
“So what’s your name?”
“Otto.”
“Otto? Otto WHAT? Otto PARTS? HAHAHAHAHA!”
In only two lines, we have established that this individual is an ass, and deserves to die somewhere in the third reel of the film. Simple, yes?
Giving someone a hard time about his name is pure, unadorned cruelty. The vast majority of us did not choose our names, and if we had, we would likely not have chosen the label our parents hung on us. This is as true of me as anyone.
My middle name is “Kirk.” It is the name I use most often. My close friends and girlfriend call me that, as does anyone who knows me reasonably well. People who DON’T know me well use my FIRST name, which is on my driver’s license and my credit cards, but ONLY there… it’s my FORMAL name, I guess. I don’t use it much, except at work. If you know me at all in person, in any informal capacity, you call me “Kirk.” If someone I don’t recognize calls me by my FIRST name, I know that I either worked with him at some point, or he’s a salesman working off a list.
It’s a handy thing.
(…unless you know me only from the internet. Then I’m “Master Wang-Ka,” or “Doc Bedlam,” on boards which won’t let me get away with that one. Which works fine for me, and calling me that marks you as a member of yet another rather small and exclusive club.)
My parents named me Kirk because a branch of Dad’s family had “Kirk” as a surname, and there were a scattering of “Kirks” on Mom’s side, as well. Amusingly enough, in Auld English, it means “church.”
A few years after my birth, a TV show made the name famous. You might remember it – “Star Trek.” It hung the prefix “Captain” in front of my name, and made it a household word. It also generated a joke that I would hear many, many, many, MANY times as I grew up. The joke was made upon making polite introductions, and was triggered upon hearing my name. The joke was “Captain KIRK! Hey, it’s CAPTAIN KIRK! Hyuk-yuk-yuk! Hey, CAPTAIN KIRK! Where’s MISTER SPOCK? Hyuk!”
I didn’t much care for this joke. It wasn’t funny the first time, and after several hundred iterations, it gets SERIOUSLY abrasive. Furthermore, some people who fling this non-sequitur in your face actually expect you to ANSWER it. Where IS Mr. Spock?
I remember grown men making this joke when I was all of six or seven. What made it worse was that I did not watch “Star Trek” when it was on the air; I discovered it in reruns when I was around ten or eleven. I was much more a “Gilligan’s Island” kind of guy as a small child. This meant that I did not GET the joke, and having a grown man or woman shout it at me was somewhat akin to a stranger, upon learning YOUR name, scream “BOB! AHAHAHAHA! Your name is BOB! AHAHA! PURPLE MONKEY DISHWASHER! AHAHAHAHAHA!”
It wasn’t funny. It was vaguely threatening. Until I learned about the TV show, it was confusing. It left me completely out of the loop, feeling somewhat patronized, ridiculed, and not so good.
This is where I encountered the NEXT kind of person who makes this joke – the kind of person who becomes riled because you do not find the joke funny. “What, you can’t take a joke? What the hell’s wrong with YOU?”
Well, it might have to do with the fact that I’ve heard that joke before. Hundreds of times, literally. Or perhaps my problem has something to do with the chump who just laughed in my face and openly and publicly ridiculed me in front of others, immediately upon meeting me. If the first thing I had done when YOU introduced yourself was to laugh and ridicule YOU, what would YOU have done?
In my teen years, this actually led to a couple of shoving matches with people who found my lack of humor openly offensive… and my willingness to explain this lack of humor doubly so. In their view, anyone with such an amusing name should be willing to indulge anyone who wished to make fun of it, and my failure to do so was a very offensive denial of my destiny as a public clown. I should either accept the joke and laugh with it every time as if I’d never heard it before, or CHANGE my name, for the convenience of those who might otherwise choose to make a joke of it, if I was going to be such a poor sport.
(now that I think about it, I once reacted by laughing uproariously and going on at great, laughingly sarcastic length about how I had never once, in all my life, ever, ever, EVER heard anyone make that joke before, and how original and witty the joke was, and I just couldn’t stop laughing at this incredible, witty, terribly original joke that no one else had EVER thought of and thrown in my face before… the evening did not go well. I’d hurt the poor guy’s feelings, by making an *ugly, hurtful *joke out of his innocent, harmless joke)
Over time, though, I mellowed. I actually began to like my name… it wasn’t a bad name, and it did act as a kind of automatic asshole detector. Anyone who made the “Captain Kirk” joke upon meeting me was certainly not someone I would trust with anything delicate or diplomatic, and anyone who frowned over my lack of hilarity was certainly not someone I’d loan five bucks or my car keys. My name served a very useful purpose!
In the eighties, the new “Star Trek Next Generation” show began, and soon nobody remembered “Captain Kirk” any more, and that was okay with me. My asshole detector did not function as well as it had, but it’s not like there aren’t many, many other ways to note the jerks in your vicinity.
But in recent years, you may have noticed that actor William Shatner’s making a comeback. He’s doing commercials, he’s got TV shows, he’s everywhere. Captain Kirk himself has bounced back!
And now, I look at the name I’ve had since my birth… once associated with a space hero dude… and now associated with a fat, vain, bald guy, a ham actor and attention whore with an ego the size of Baltimore.
Daaaang. Maybe the name IS more descriptive of me than I wanna admit…
Has anyone ELSE ever had this problem? I’m kinda curious.
