Would it be weird...

...if I asked people to start calling me Jay?  Or maybe Jaye, which is contrived but at least moderately feminine-looking.  Everybody I meet online thinks I'm a guy named Jay anyway because of my email address.  My sister sometimes calls me JMac, which is definitely my rapper name, should I ever need one.

 

I think it would be more palatable than any of the alternatives.  Someone who was over last week kept calling me Jenn and I did very admirably with not leaping across the table in full-throttle mode.  Jenny is not much better, and perhaps light-years worse.

 

Is it dumb to live with the same name for 40 years and then decide I'm  not satisfied?

 

When I was growing up, a friend once called and asked for Jenny:  my father told them there was nobody there by that name.  He really hated nicknames of all kinds.  And to be honest, I'm happy my sister Abigail seems to be growing into her name.  I hated it when she was born:  "Abigail Rachel is an old-lady name!"  It turns out it's a pretty cool name for a 20-something whatever it is that she's turning into.  It's definitely a smart name, and I think more substantial than just Abi.

 

Maybe I'm supposed to grow into my name?  But, honestly, I have always pictured Jennifers as blonde shiksas.

 

Jay.

 

J.

 

I like.

 

I had a friend who grew up with an awkward Dutch last name that he hated; he went around for years asking if such-and-such a last name suited him.  I don't know about anyone else, but I always figured he was joking until finally, he chose the same name as his first name, and made it legal maybe about a decade ago.  His first name was one that is also a fairly common last name, and he has a respectable initial "C." stuck in the middle so it doesn't look (much) like a typo.  And I actually like it a lot, even though I was probably the only person on earth who could reliably spell AND pronounce his original name (both in the conventional North American way and the original Dutch way, which were different, in case you were wondering)

 

Hey, maybe I'll change my name to MacLeod J. MacLeod!