Are you happy with your name?

Image from realbollywood.com

Can you imagine hearing this line in a movie:  Hi, my name is Bond -- James "The Real Thing" Bond, son of Joseph "The Original" Bond of Lexington, England, not to be mistaken for James "The Earl" Bond of Norwich?

It's such a mouthful that the snappy and memorable James Bond name becomes a loose and forgettable punchline.

Allow me to use self-deprecating humor as I try to expunge a rather embarrassing deed that stemmed from a knee-jerk reaction, out of my system.  You see, today is the first month of my blog at Blogger.  And I can't get over the fact that I named it "therealcuriousbiker," as if somebody was pretending to be me, or worse, has the same wild imagination as to put curious and biker together -- oh my, the height of conceit, and I'm in the middle of it!

A little more than a month ago, my first web host Wordpress suspended my original blog www.curiousbiker.com because of a spam intrusion (They have reinstated it, but I have since moved on). Devastated but determined to post my Christmas story Wish, I decided to open a new one at Blogger -- this site.

curiousbiker.com no more

Thinking that my loyal readers from Wordpress should distinguish me from other bloggers, and assure them that it was me that they were reading and not some weird dude on a bike, I hurriedly typed the pretentious and super insecure "therealcuriousbiker" as my blog name.  Well, what's done is done and there's nothing I can do about it except flog myself until I exorcise myself from the embarrassment of having a blog that begins with "the real."

But what's in a name, really?  Well, judging by the amount of time that most expectant parents deliberate and sometimes argue over it, then I guess  it's a lot.

From digital-photography-school.com

My parents though were not as imaginative when it came to giving names.  My eldest brother Emerito was named after our mother Emerita; Rico, the second eldest, bore half the name of my father Teodorico, followed by Santiago who was the namesake of my uncle Santiago who was himself, the junior of our grandfather Santiago.  I don't know where Ramon, my next brother's name came from, perhaps it was from Ramon Magsaysay, or could just very well have been a product of a coin toss between Ramon and Roman. Same goes for my next older brother Gerardo, who sometimes wished that the birth certificate registrar should have just omitted the letter "o," to give him that oh-so French-sounding name: Gerard, perfect for a little brown baby.  And me?  The very proletariat-sounding Marcial, not that I am not one, but come on, something like Keith or Johnston would have sounded good on another brown little baby like me.

But no.  Being proletariats (masa, if you're having a hard time) themselves, my parents did not have time for humor nor of keeping me away from future insecurity.  I was born a day after an anniversary of the declaration of Martial Law.  So with a little tweak on the spelling, I was named after a horrendous event in our nation's history.  And I was not even born on the exact anniversary!  I suppose because I was a fairly long baby -- all 22 inches of me -- my mother probably started to labor on the 20th, saw my feet came out on the 21st (exact anniversary), but by the time my entire body popped out, it was already the 22nd. But I don't have any recollection of my birth, nor of the time when I was baptized with my permanent name, who knows, perhaps they were asking me "O anak, anong gusto mong pangalan mo?"  But what can a baby do? I couldn't even mutter dada then, let alone Keith.  So when the first sound that came out of me was a wail, then it was settled -- I would be named Marcial, and there's nothing I could do about it.

From westoncommunication.org.uk

It could have been worse, I know.  They could have just as easily named me Post Marcial or Almost Marcial, and I would have, as a baby, done the close-open thing with my hands whenever my parents or elder brothers felt like playing with me: "Close...Open, Post Marcial; Close...Open, Post Marcial.  I'm relieved and thankful that I never had to go through that.  Life is good.  So I tried to cope with my name.

When we grew older, and without us talking about it, me and most of my brothers separately introduced ourselves as Jinx when we each went into college in the big city.  Jinx is short for Enjinx, a name resulting from the mispronunciation of our family name Enginco, which should be pronounced "en-hing-ko," and not "en-ging-ko" as was the common mistake of many.  Jinx had a nice ring to it, kind of mysterious and a bit on the naughty side.  It also gave a thin veneer of confidence to an insecure probinsyano suddenly immersed in city lights.

From pinoyexchange.com

It turned out that I wasn't the only one disturbed by my given name.  A classmate introduced himself as Allan, a name that suits his tall and masculine physique, movie-star good looks and model-like fashion sense.  He was the epitome of metrosexual long before that word became fashionable.  During our time, he was described in explicit terminology -- makalaglag panting kagwapuhan.  Heck, if I was gay I would have had a crush on him and would have taken advantage of him because we were good friends.

But his school ID, which he clipped (ID laces were still in the invention stage) so that his name and picture faced his chest, clearly stated, in capital letters that he was DELFIN -- a name that conjures a picture of a short, buri-hatted, dark-skinned man wearing kamisa-de-chino and canvas drawstring pants, holding on to a bayong containing native chicken; certainly, not some gorgeous hunk who made girls swoon with a drop of his fingers.

Rustico or Allan? From baliktanaw.wordpress.com

I asked him why the name Allan.  He explained that it was in honor of his grandfather Allan.  I thought to myself, come on, Allan my ass!  If your name is Delfin, then surely your lolo must be a Rustico, or a Gorgonio, or a Geronimo or any name that was fashionable back in the days when Filipinos still had leftover angst against the Spanish occupation and still fresh from the euphoria of American liberation over the Japanese.  I mean, can you picture an old man named Allan?  Nope, I don't think so.

But I called him Allan just as long as he called me Jinx.  And we were friends with Charlie Brown -- and that's his real name and nickname, which suited him for he was a chubby, rosy-cheeked Chinese-mestizo, English-speaking conyo.   By then, I was beginning to like the sound of  my name as my Manilenyo classmates pronounced it with a rolling "r" and a sliding "s" so it sounded more like Morr-sshhall, than the jologs sounding Mar-syal.

There are always exceptions to the rule though as proletariat names can sometimes be very cool, too. My best friend in college was named Pag-alay, which I thought was most appropriate for a very pretty and very intelligent girl; a perfect offering or a gift to the gods if ever there was one.   Her father,  a nationalistic lawyer, named her two other brothers Pag-alab ang Pag-diwang.  Those are cool names according to my standards.

I guess giving children names that they won't like was contained in the first editions of Good Parenting magazine, to fortify the child's character as he grows older.  You know, overcome an insecurity and you become more secure of yourself, and thus more in control of what you can do?  Or it could have been an old-school ploy to make a child mature into a fighter who would redeem his proletariat-sounding name to announce to the world that: I am Marcial and you are reading my blog, or I am Delfin and I'm going to operate on your heart, or I am Pag-alay and I am going to save you from lethal injection!

I no longer hate my name, in fact I love it -- Marcial I. Enginco.  It sounds strong and authoritative, respectable even.  It sounds, well, me.  And yes, I am also therealcuriousbiker.  Nothing wrong with it either, right?

-------

My mother taught me long ago that I should always put my middle initial every time I write my name, in honor of her family lineage -- the Itliongs of Pozorrubio, Pangasinan.


I'd like to know what you think of this article.  Please leave a comment or a reaction.  And if you did not like your name as well what did you do so that you eventually grew into it?