Tuesday, June 29, 2004
Oh Grow Up
I’ve been wrestling with this for some time and now I have concluded that the only honorable path is to punt - to evoid it altogether through circumlocution.
Here’s the issue: I spent some time two weekends ago with some very dear friends of the family. Husband and wife living here in San Francsico, they are brilliant, gracious, funny, sweet and supportive - taking time to check in on my 95-year-old great-uncle, the only one left of our clan in our ancestral Ohio home, even as they jet to china to inspect their factories, or begin the chairmanship of a new major fundraising campaign, or endow a museum, or whatever. Patrician but approachable; powerful but cuddly: these guys are great. He used to clerk for a US Supreme Court justice and is now a managing partner in a noteworthy law firm; she has had a dozen careers and knows absolutely everybody worth knowing. I love to hang with these guys.
My problem is that they share a surname that I cannot even think of without giggling. Out of respect and friendship I will defer from naming them here, but you have to believe me, everybody to whom I tell their name unfailingly asks, “What? Is that their real name?” Well yes it is, and I’m just immature enough not to be able to get over it. Recently Tom gave me his business card, printed in english on one side and chinese on the other. I have to wonder, did they translate the name, or transliterate it? Either way, I wish I had a way to really make fun of it. But I love these guys so I can’t. I just have to sit here and simmer in unrealized giggles.
Or, alternatively, I could depress the general level of maturity in parallel, maybe even complimentary, ways. For example, during all those recent trips to the vet I couldn’t help but notice that San Rafael has some kind of PR campaign going to promote, as it seems, “the canal district.” I’m not sure what that is but there are banners hanging from streetlights all over town, each with a b&w photo of some residents of the district over the words “Faces of Canal.” The part I find entertaining is that for some reason they changed the font used for the “a” in “faces.” When seen with the other letters around it, I read it as an “e” almost every time. It looks like a public campaign to support a street caked with #2. Now that’s funny.
But: not as funny as the educational evaluative tool Kel mentioned to me not long ago. She’s going for her masters in Special Ed. (I put in a period to abbreviate it so lets have no mister ed jokes) and is learning about tools used to determine a given student’s individual strengths and weaknesses, developmentally and intellectually. There are several of these testing protocols, and they typically involve several “units” that can be combined into different “clusters” that get harder as you go along. And no, that’s not the part I find entertaining - that’s just ambient crude immaturity. No, the part I find really entertaining is this. Thank you, Riverside Publishing, for picking a name that will, from this day forth, unfailingly elevate my mood.
MORAL: People with funny names have both the right and the duty to find entertainment in other funny names. People with boring names are stuck with making fun of television, movies and the legitimate stage.
