Like a Guy with a Paintbrush
Now, I�ll let you in on a secret, kids. My first name is phonetic chaos. It starts with the letter K, which is supposed to make a shh sound. It should sound like �Share-steen.� When I pronounce it for people, they say things like, �Oh, that�s so unusual.� Or, �I bet people get that wrong all the time!� To all of these statements, I respond with the same thing: �It�s Swedish.� After twenty-seven years of this little song-and-dance routine, you can see why I�m bitter about humoring comments on how all Swedes are supposed to be blonde (and that�s the tame line of questioning, if you read me). You can also understand why I have absolutely no faith in the transcription ability of customer service representatives. You understand how people could get confused with a first name like mine. But with a simple Painter, well, that�s something altogether different. I had a conversation with a telebanker (sounds ridiculous just by itself, doesn�t it?) that actually went down like this:
Telebanker: Your last name?
Me: Painter
Telebanker: Tainter?
Me: No. Painter�like a guy with a paintbrush.�
Telebanker: Lainter?
Me: Yes. A laintbrush.
Telebanker: Okay, Miss Mainter. Sorry about that.
Me: No problem.
So far, there are several popular variations of my name. They include: Carsten, Kristin, Kirstin, Keirsten, and Barton (8th grade substitute teacher). In every foreign language class that I�ve taken (Spanish, French, and Russian), my �foreign� name is always a version of Katherine. It gets better.
I almost married a guy whose last name was mispronounced as �Tan-creedy� or something similar. I could have ended up a Carsten Tancreedy. Clearly, there is only so much of this name business that a person can take. Tancreedy was one name with a high rate of mispronunciation too many.
The theory behind my name, according to my parents, was that it would keep me from being shy. Instead, it condemned me to a lifetime of explanation that eventually ended up as �I�m pretty sure my parents were doing a lot of drugs back then.� It isn�t true, but it could be. It seems reasonable.
My kid brother (who is no longer a kid) is named Seneca. His biggest problem until he was three was that my mother refused to cut his hair. She thought it was beautiful and she couldn�t bring herself to cut it (pageboys were in style, which didn�t help his case much).* People used to tell her what darling little girls she had. Anyway, after the haircut, his problem has been telling people where his name came from. It seems that my mother chose his name for several reasons:
1. It was the name of the airplane my dad was flying when my brother was born (most sentimental).
2. The philosopher (most pretentious).
3. The native people (most hippie-sounding).
4. There was a character on a soap opera named Seneca (most truthful).
We found out about reason number four only a few years ago. We had no previous knowledge of my mother�s soap habit. Seriously�the only person I�ve ever known to watch soap operas is my cousin who played baseball for Texas Tech and scheduled his classes around Days of Our Lives (along with several of his baseball roommates). It was a pretty shocking discovery, my mother and her soap opera character-named son. But I guess it�s a hell of a lot better than Brantley, which is what my father wanted to name him. (My slated name was Mariah.) Christ. Did these people have any good options?
Apparently not. Which is why I�ll continue to tell people that my name is Share-steen. Cher. Like the Woman with Tattoos on Her Ass. Yes, and Steen, Rhymes with Green. My brother will continue on with his Like the Apple Juice. And we�ll both top it off with Like a Guy with a Paintbrush.
*It is amazing that those Lawrence boys became famous while wearing pageboys so far after the sideswipe haircut revolution. Remember that? Boys had longer hair on one side and a spiky kind of dealie on the other? What the hell was that?
