I am of two minds about names.

It sounds really, really stupid, but one of the major qualms I had about actually, you know, dating Chris was that we have the same name. And so people have to put qualifiers next to our names when we're together, just to tell us apart. (I'm girlKris, he's boyChris, mostly. Even though he hates the boyChris thing for reasons I completely fail to understand.)

I'm kinda sorta starting to think that I'm going to have to change my name.

Chris refuses to--he says that Christopher (his full first name) is very smoking-jacket-stick-in-the-mud, and Stephen (his middle name) just does nothing for him.

So then it falls to me. My full first name is entirely unsuitable, but I do have a perfectly serviceable middle name--Anne. I like it, I occasionally use it in cases like at Kidd Valley, when we both order something and they need both of our names. And, yes, I have a whole bunch of names that have belonged to me and that I could very easily pick up again.

But. But but but. I have always, and by always I mean "from the very moment that I realized I was expected to get married some day", been completely and totally against changing my name for anyone. I never wanted to give up my last name unless i was doing it on my own and changing it to something of my own choosing.

I have always had very strong and perhaps somewhat peculiar ideas about my identity. Symbolic things have always been important to me; for me, the symbolic becomes the real so easily that I am always wary of the power of a symbolic change. And changing my last name to be the same as someone else's, especially a male's, would be a very real bowing down to a society that swallows women's names and identities, that assumes that a woman will submerge her identity inside of her husband's family.

I hate that assumption. And so I vowed that if I ever married, I would simply refuse to take my husband's name.

With women, it's different. I could totally see myself in a cozy little relationship with another woman, merging finances and lives, and poring over books of geneology to pick out a last name together. That seems so more cooperative and equal than having one partner be basically ordered to take the other's last name.

The thought of taking another person's last name fills me with panic, and I'm not even very attached to my last name. Now, talk to me about changing my first name, which I am attached to, which I do like, which I chose to be called by over ten years ago and haven't gotten over my enchantment with after seventeen years of being called by a name I despised. Kris. It's a foot put down, comfortingly genderless, spelled just a touch differently than most people spell it, and it's mine.

It is who I am. It stands for me. All of my friends call me by it.

And I'm not sure I want to change it just because I happen to be dating someone who has a name that sounds the same as it. I mean, Anne is a fine name. But it's a name that I was hurt under, it stands for a person who died three years ago, bleeding and broken and very, very small and sad. Who am I when I am called Anne? I don't know. She's a stranger. She's my great-grandmother.

I haven't decided yet if I'm going to bend on this one, if changing my first name falls under the heading "reasonable accomodation" for me.

Or if Chris is just going to have to get used to being called boyChris.

Tonight is Hypocrisy, which should be fun. I think I might read one of Tarin's poems, but I haven't really settled on it yet; I might just sit and listen. This week should be quiet, which bodes well for getting some work done on the site; I have some new images I want to play with, and some updates to the postry sections and the notebook that I keep meaning to do.

Mmmm, quiet.

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