10+1 things that start with E

Apparently the Python randomizer has a sense of humor.

Elaine, Edith, Elizabeth. The three sisters. Which I guess makes this as good a place as any to tell the story of how our parents were completely nuts. Mom says that the choice of all Es was entirely by accident. Not that I believe her, but it makes some small amount of sense….

I am named after my maternal grandmother, whose name was Helen. Seriously. But the aunt who raised her was also named Helen, so she spent her childhood as “little Helen” to her aunt’s “big Helen.” She didn’t like that too much…and one always knew when Grandma didn’t like something! So I was not to suffer the same fate; ergo, Elaine: a variant of Helen.

Edith was named for our Great-Aunt Edith, sister of Helen. Edith was Mom’s favorite aunt, and died before any of us were born, of extreme high blood pressure. The other fact I know about Great-Aunt Edith: she was very very short, and when Mom was a kid, used to press down on her head as a joke. (I think Thao used to do something similar to Elizabeth….) Edith is also a name that generally is not seen in people born after 1915, which I suppose is why my sister generally doesn’t use it much. (E. Rose or Gillian.)

Half of the women in our family have Elizabeth in their names somewhere, but IIRC, she was named particularly for Aunt Susie…whose middle name is Elizabeth, and who has gone by Beth for many years. Except to her big brother, of course, which is why we three girls and Mom are the last people on earth to call her Susie. Anyway, that’s who Elizabeth is formally named after; when she was in 4th grade, she tried to get everybody to call her Anne — her middle name — but it didn’t take.

(The difference in success between Edith & Elizabeth? Partially temperment, but mostly timing. Edith waited until college, when she could start afresh with people who’d never known her with that name.)

And yes, all have the same first letter in our names sucked. Probably least of all for me, because I was first. (Lady Elaine Fairchild, OTOH, was the bane of my early childhood life.) And most of all for Elizabeth, because she was last, and Edith and I each had established our reputations in school to live up or down to. Strangely, I remember with great fondness the elderly Irish priest who never, ever got our names right.

Eleanor, which is what my freshman year history teacher in high school called me, because he knew another Elaine who found it annoying too, and my high school counselor called me for four years for no reason that I can fathom. Actually, once after I graduated, he asked Edith, “how’s your sister Eleanor doing in college?” Nice.

Entropy, because Greyson gave me the faux title “Random Chaos Girl” when I worked at the museum, and then we turned it into Director of Entropy later.

The Evergreen State. I’ve lived in Washington for almost 15 years now, and I love it here. My first glimpse of Washington came when I was heading to start school at UPS, driven up by Mom, who’d never been this far north either. We crossed the Columbia to the sight of enormous evergreens, and the sight of the river and trees made both of us gasp. I’ve never really lost that feeling.

The Emerald City, being Seattle on the one hand, “The” city of the region. I’ve spent many days there, often with my best friend, who has lived there for seven? eight? years now. And as someone who lived in Tacoma for nearly 10 years, it’s the rival city as well. Home of my much-loved and long-departed writer’s group. Plus I always end up describing Olympia to people from elsewhere as “about an hour and a half south of Seattle.”

…and being Oz on the other hand, one of my favorite book series from my childhood. I was a book snob even at the age of nine, because I made such a fuss to my friend about how the movie was nothing like the book, and how the first book wasn’t the best one anyway. (I always said the same thing about the Anne of Green Gables books, too.)

Eric Meyer. First of all, one of the main inspirations of my career. Before there was the Zen Garden, there was CSS/Edge, and his founding & moderation of the css-discuss list helped me grow immensely in my use of CSS. Secondly, his status as web-nerd in relations to a funny story from HighEdWebDev. Thirdly, he totally looks like my friend Greyson, and because of that, I was exceptionally dorky when I met him at SXSW.

Eulogy/eugoogoly. The second being a reference to Zoolander, one of my very favorite movies. I can watch that one over and over again, and giggle just as much every time. The first being something of a reference to my father, whose eulogy was given by his father, when I was eight years old, after his death from a heart attack at the age of 45. That death and the ripples it left in our family, was the prime event of my early life.

epersonae, which to be honest I almost didn’t think to include. In 1999, I bartered some design work for a web hosting account, which gave me the opportunity to buy my first domain name. I didn’t have any particular handle that I was attached to, nor did I want to use my name. (I don’t think I even checked to see if my name was available!) In my poetry, beginning in high school, I’ve often explored the idea of seeming like a different person in different social situations, and I was playing around with something to do with personas. Which led me to personae, because I just like the way the ae combination looks. C was the one who added the final touch, saying, “you should call it epersonae,” because of my name. Which circles it all the way back around.

My one regret with my domain name is that while it looks cool, it’s hell to get other people to spell out loud, over the phone, and so on.

As a bonus, I’ll end with just the letter E, all by itself, because that’s what C calls me, and then through osmosis, so do all of his friends. Despite my calling him C here, that’s not his nickname in the posse.

I’d like to thank Dorothea for the opportunity to tell a few stories. I’ll follow her example by asking if anybody wants to be tagged with a random letter; post a comment here, and I’ll give you a letter. The rule is: take your letter and write about 10 things of personal significance starting with that letter.