mike: so someone comes up to him at a party and asks him about his name…and this guy like [siiiiiigh] gives an audible sigh. come on, you’ve gotta know that if you legally change your name to “beanbag america” you’re going to have to answer some questions.
eric: what about “peembom”?
[silence. silence, then laughter]
mike: [laughing so hard as to almost be squealing] PEEEEEM bom??!!?
eric: yeah, that was my like imaginary friend. you know that sound the phone makes when you leave it off the hook?
[pat cackles. kate and kara titter in delight]
eric: yeah, ok, so i would say that, you know, that was peembom calling me.
later –
diana: you never told me about peembom!
eric: well, you never asked
diana: when did you have this imaginary friend?
eric: i don’t know, like for a few years when i was 5 or 6.
diana: wait, i want you to imitate the sound that a phone makes when it’s off the hook
eric: ehh ehh ehh ehh ehh ehh ehh ehh ehh ehh ehh ehh ehh ehh ehh ehh
diana: i don’t understand how the sound the phone makes is peembom…
eric: look, i had an imagination, ok?
* transcript not verbatim. events have been ellipsized for the sake of time, space, and not having to type “laughing so hard i almost (peed my pants/choked/cried/etc)”
it’s ‘amerika’, with a ‘k’, by the way.
if in fact i sighed (audibly), it was probably in response to being asked what i changed my name from. or even worse, ‘but what’s your real name?’ my real name is beanbag amerika. that’s what it says on my driver’s license.
well, here’s the $25,000 question: why DID you change it and what WAS your name before?
also, awesome website. do you use blogware – is that movable type – or did you do all the code yourself? and cheers, 2003 was in general pretty good for me too, although the spring was the high point.
the why i don’t mind answering: my parents were hippies. they were living in india in the early 70s. my father had started using as a name ‘orangepants amerika’, as he was american, and often wore bright orange pants. as they decided to settle down and start a family they began thinking up baby names. ‘beanbag amerika’ was the name they settled on.
by the time i was born they had cooled on it some. possibly because of worries that i would be mercilessly picked on in school. possibly because my more conservative grandparents just wouldn’t approve. the name on my birth certificate is an very common biblical name. i was named after a great uncle i think. they called me beanbag for a few years, but once i was old enough for school everyone started using the name that i was officially born with.
in eight grade i moved to a shortened version of it. in high school i pretty much stopped responding to it unless i recognized the voice that was calling it. there were two or three other people with the same name in my geometry class of about sixteen people.
when i started using the internet, circa 1993, i cycled through a number of online handles, eventually settling into ‘bean’ as a shortened version of me pre-natal name. when i moved out to california in december of 1996 i started introducing myself to new people as ‘bean’. in 1998, on the cusp of my first move to austin, tx i changed it legally.
i can’t say why exactly i changed it to ‘beanbag amerika’ and not simply to ‘bean amerika’ or even just ‘bean’. maybe because i felt a little guilty about giving up the history of my family-based name and this would at least honour my parents in some way, if not the generations who came before them. i’ve thought about dropping everything but ‘bean’, to keep it short and simple. i’ve also thought about beginning to introduce myself to new people as ‘beanbag’.
as for what it was before, that’s not something i really like to get into. my name is what it is now. what it was doesn’t really make any difference. some of my family and a few older friends still use my birth name, but for the most part i’ve moved on from it. there are ways of finding out. some people have managed to pester it out of me. or they’ve overheard someone who has known me for years slip up. but i don’t give it up easily.
thanks about the site. it is all hand coded in perl. i wrote the original version in 1998 (before i changed my name, actually) and have revamped and retooled it over the years. the current version, just shy of a year old, was almost a complete rewrite, cleaning up the perl and reformatting the html using style sheets instead of tables.
awesome, see that’s way cooler than what anybody i know was thinking which was probably like – he’s just weird. orangepants i can get, but why ‘beanbag’?
i’m actually pretty fascinated by what names parents cycle though before settling on one…for instance my mom wanted to name me ‘vanessa’ or ‘alissa’ while my dad wanted to name me ‘jennifer.’ most of my life i’ve wished they would’ve gone with my dad’s suggestion, because ‘kara’ is hard enough for people to get (no, with a ‘k’…no, ‘care-a’ not ‘car-a’), much less ‘karalee’ which is my actual first name. i stopped introducing myself by my whole first name when i got to college, because since i was no longer one of only 3 asians in school, people though my last name was ‘lee.’ some college friends see like my driver’s license and are aghast at the whole name.
but back to the point here, why ‘beanbag’ in particular? not maybe like ‘bluepants’ to continue the trend or something like that? i’m serious, i’m not trying to like mock you or anything, i really want to know.
also, could you recommend a good book to learn perl?
My mom wanted to call me “Sunshine Blueskies.” Luckily my sister talked her out of it. Later she asked if I wanted to change my last name to her maiden name, seeing as how she divorced my dad when I was 2 or something, and I was like, “If you want me to, I will, but it just seems like a lot of trouble to me.” I kind of think names in general are weird and and arbitrary and dare I say, distasteful? Well, maybe that’s being a bit strong, but I guess it just irks me that people are so deadset on labeling and defining everything all the time. There’s some correlation to “The Big Lebowski” here I think; “I’m the dude, so that’s what you call me.” But anyway, maybe I just think about words too much, I’ll stop now. =P
honestly, i’m not really sure where ‘beanbag’ came from. quite a few people, it seems, refer affectionately to their first child as ‘bean’ or ‘little bean’ while not actually naming them as such. my name could have come from the same general feeling, but my parents just decided to make it a little more unusual. i guess it’s something i could ask them one day. i’ve never found myself to be terribly curious about it.
as for learning perl, i’d recommend the o’reilly book named, coincidentally enough _learning perl_ (the llama book). also helpful is _programming perl_ (the camel book), which is basically a perl reference manual, but may be enough of a learning tool if you have any other programming background.
in regard to the distastefulness of names: i too have spent time on the anti-labeling bent. one of the interesting things that came out of my original use of the name ‘bean’ online was that people weren’t sure whether i was male or female. (this was the text-based net, before the web and google and easy access to pocketfuls of digitally manipulated but still gender-recognizable pictures of myself.) i enjoyed that ambiguity, because it left a very specific and significant label unlabeled.
recently though, i think i’ve given up on hating labels. yes, they can be divisive, starting with the difference between ‘me’ and ‘you’ and spiraling from there, but you can have fun with them too. in a recent classified ad that i posted looking for a new home i described myself as ‘ambiguously straight’. this was my response to feeling marginalized by all the roommate wanted ads looking for a ‘female, or possibly gay male’ roommate (there were more than you’d suspect).
so rather than looking at names and labels with distain, fight back. label _everything_ the way that _you_ see it. that’s my philosophy of the moment, in any case. i might feel differently about it all after dinner.
I too am blessed with an androgynous name. It is cool.
What is more, one of my favorite fictional characters is named Bean.