A Boy Named Grace
This morning’s NYT has an article on the impact unusual names have on kids. The thinking goes, either, that boys named Sue grow up to be stronger for their misery (as Johnny Cash wrote) or it leads to a life of delinquency (as researchers formerly believed). Modern findings show that people are more influenced by factors of greater significance than the name, like how pretty someone looks, and, thus, Cash was right—kids named Dee Cline can rise into adulthood better at handling criticism than their peers and are proud of their fucke-dup names.
This is all good. My middle name is Grace, you know. (I have another middle name, too—Wilson—they both come from me maternal lineage. )
But Grace was shameful as a child, it was pejoratively-gay in middle school, and then, magically, it was my pride and joy as a fully-fledged faggot. Cum hoc ergo propter hoc, okay, asshole? Do criticisms roll off me like water off a duck’s back? Clearly not. Maybe they would if I’d grown up with Grace as my first name, instead of my middle–but this is not Folger’s Crystals and I am definitely not switching. The article was over and that was to be the end of my funny-name reading for the day…
So no sooner did I finish the thoroughly researched yet trivial article, however, than I crossed the page to an even more thoroughly researched but non-trivial article on the fate of our fair planet: In a nutshell, everything we love will be sucked into the sun. Cheers. The article mentions a scientist at the University of Texas. His parents gave him a doozey of a name: Manfred Cuntz.
Mr. Cuntz. Sounds German, but he’s in Texas. I’ll bet he’d rather be named Grace.