A brief treatise on names

and schedules, but that's less exciting.

How did you get your name?

This is ganked and modified from Pexels, but totally looked like khaleesi minus her flying reptile eggs and vaguely menacing face. (I mean, I’d have resting bitch face, too, if someone took Jason Momoa out of my clutches. No shade intended, obviously.)

I always wanted one of those names that has a long, storied history behind it. Like, my mother named me after her childhood neighbor who fed her lemon cookies and told her about burning bras. Or I’m named after my great aunt who knitted everyone squeaky-acrylic panties for Christmas. Something cool.

But the truth is: My birth name is just something my parents thought was pretty. A little family tie-in, but the name I use now is just because mom liked it. (Elizabeth.)

I haven’t used my actual first name in roughly three and a half decades. At first, I dropped my first name because it felt sort of common and I had kind of a love/hate relationship to it anyway. My hometown wasn’t exactly known for its kindness and forgiving nature, and my name just felt like it had too much small-town stigma. Just by way of illustration, I went home once with my now-husband, more than 25 years after I left it, and some little chippie I went to junior high with saw me at a bar and stage-whispered to her galpals that OMG, that’s Namey-fucking-Maiden-name¹, as if we were all still thirteen years old and shunning each other over the brand of lip gloss we have on.²

Let’s just say I sort of welcomed the anonymity of an actual city, far far away from the cornfields into which I was thrust at birth, and having a whole new identity was a very freeing development.

I’ve gone through several iterations of Elizabeth — Beth, Elizabeth, e, Elli, and now settling back on Eliza — to find the one that fits best³. Now, only my bank, the IRS, and my mother still use the original one. If you were yelling it at me from behind, I probably wouldn’t even turn to look, because I wouldn’t know you were addressing me.

Interestingly enough, I found out semi-recently that my birth mother was going to name me Tammy. I’d have been Tammy Magnusson if I’d had another life, and aside from the fact that I know some truly awful Tammies (and a couple really cool ones, to be fair), it sounds weirdly okay.

I kind of wonder who Tammy Magnusson-Metz would be⁴.

So, question, because I’m nosy and curious: how did you get your name? Does it fit you?

In other not-at-all news, I’m trying a different schedule.

This one, to be specific⁵:

Shamelessly ganked from Pinterest with no attribution. If you know where it came from, drop me a comment and I’ll edit it.

I can’t say as I’m following it to the letter, since my stupid Igor-foot is still being less than functional, so an hour of movement is mostly out the window⁶. Also, the weather sort of dictates whether I’m going to bother being outside, since I don’t really want to be wet for that long unless I’m in a heated pool. My free time is less TV and more killing murlocs in a shared hallucination, but I AM limiting scrolling time and have been getting quite a bit of drawing and making-of-stuff done in the three hours allotted.

I’ve also found that that two hours of research time is almost exclusively 1.5 hours of extra reading and only half an hour of throwing the next day’s/week’s to-do list onto a Notion board…but that the selfsame Notionboard where I collect pre-determined tasks has been really, really good for knowing WHAT to do with tomorrow’s three-hour creative block.

For some reason, in previous attempts at planning⁷, I hadn’t really hit upon that whole detailed list of stuff to do tomorrow thing. It seems sort of basic now — things I get done the most efficiently have always had lists of very small, broken-down tasks — but having EVERYTHING including research, reference materials, and how long I think that’ll take…is super helpful the next day, when I’m still brain-foggy and have mostly forgotten that yesterday existed until the second cup of caffeine.

I think this list was probably made for people at home during the pandemic, but as someone for whom the pandemic quarantine was pretty much just a typical schedule with the addition of a layer of viral/existential dread, it’s still helpful for me.

Thought I’d share it in case it’s helpful for you, too.

And with that, I’m off for the weekend. And possibly the week.

J’s home this week. All week. One of his clients needs help here in Portland, so I get to have him here every night⁸. I’m going to try to keep up with my usual activities, but…as you can see from the past week’s silence while he’s been here, sometimes the extra company means extra distraction.

I might just focus on packing (since I’ll have Mister Muscles here to lug boxes).

We’ll see.⁹

1. That sounds really weird with all the privacy stand-ins, but trust me, it was petty, judgy, and subtle as a brick.

2. And to be equally petty, fifteen more years later: Shut up, Angie fucking Loughrey. SO THERE. NEENER-NEENER, etc.

3. Literally anything but “Lizzie”. I will ignore the crap out of you if you try and call me Lizzie. It just sets my teeth on edge.

4. I mean, a rose by any other name, et. al.. But you can’t deny that some names just predispose you for various lives. Merton Jones sounds like an aging accountant with a predilection for brown suits. Lana “Boom Boom” LaRoux has the ring of a Broadway triple-threat from the 1960’s with a collection of maribou kitten heels. That kind of thing. Or is that just me?

5. yes, I know it’s not so much a schedule as a “here’s where your priorities should be”, but since my circadian rhythm is much more of a general suggestion than a time-bound regimen, it works for me.

6. One can only engage in so much chair-dancing before it starts to feel inauthentic.

7. versus my natural inclination to just wake up and float on through the day like a leaf on a particularly rocky stream made of inspiration and distraction in equal measure.

8. Which I love, even though it takes my tenuous routine and tosses it all up into the air so it can float down all around me like chaos confetti.

9. At least it’ll be Daylight Savings Time and there will be sun into the evening proper. I love that so much. Loooove, y’all. LOVE. BRING ON THE DAYLIGHT.