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<h1>Zk | index</h1>
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<h1 id="naming-day">Naming (Day?)</h1>
<p>On names, changing them, and JD leaving</p>
<p>Points to consider:</p>
<ul>
<li>Initials</li>
<li>The meaning of &lsquo;Madison&rsquo;</li>
<li>Jesse as first dog</li>
<li>Keeping Scott - why, why not</li>
<li>Clary and that baggage</li>
<li>Author names (keeping MJSC as a pseudonym)</li>
<li>Plurality</li>
<li>Being weird</li>
<li>Meaning of the name as a whole</li>
<li>Coming up with names as a writer, all that time on behindthename</li>
<li>JD story:<ul>
<li>Do I start from marriage? From dating? From his mother&rsquo;s death?</li>
<li>I should try to keep it from just being a bitch session.</li>
<li>But also bring up Jujube losing Zephyr and him.</li>
<li>Discussions in the past about him leaving</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
<p>What text?</p>
<ul>
<li>Could do some Jeff VanderMeer texts? Like, there&rsquo;s Ghost Bird in Southern Reach, and there&rsquo;s the strange bird, and there&rsquo;s Borne who was named almost deliberately&hellip;</li>
<li>Texts with weird names (esp in &lsquo;normal&rsquo; contexts) that just treat them as normal.</li>
</ul>
<p>Do I write this as a prose poem?</p>
<hr />
<p>Names bear power, I promise myself, my characters promise each other. Names bear power and yet we are in so many ways beholden to them. They bear power over us, even if we don&rsquo;t want them to. They bear power over us sometimes <em>because</em> we don&rsquo;t want them to. We don&rsquo;t choose them, do we? At least most of us don&rsquo;t. The vast majority don&rsquo;t, even, to the point where the joke goes in trans circles, &ldquo;Nice name, did your mom pick that out for you?&rdquo;</p>
<p>It&rsquo;s true enough, more often than not.</p>
<p>I was born Matthew Joseph Scott. </p>
<p>My mom, when asked, said that the choices for my first name were either Nicholas or Matthew. &ldquo;They were just the two most common names for boys,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;If you&rsquo;d been born a girl, we would&rsquo;ve named you Sarah.&rdquo;</p>
<p>She wasn&rsquo;t wrong, of course. In one class of eighteen people, there were six Matthews, and two of my close friends through most of elementary school were Nicholas and Sarah.</p>
<p>Joseph was my grandfather&rsquo;s first name. My dad&rsquo;s dad. I&rsquo;m told that he lived past my birth, that he got to hold me and know that I was his grandson. I&rsquo;m told that I went to his funeral.</p>
<p>Scott was my dad&rsquo;s last name, so of course that&rsquo;s what I wound up with, too. I&rsquo;m not sure where that comes from, beyond that. I know little about my paternal grandfather, from whom the name comes, other than he was half black, half Huron, according to my dad. &lsquo;Scott&rsquo; isn&rsquo;t exactly a name I associate with such a background, but I admit that this is an estimate made largely on vibes.</p>
<p>I was Matthew Joseph Scott. I was Matthew to my teachers and even most of my friends.</p>
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