naming conventions
Someone once gifted me two pairs of wooden, laser-cut earrings: a pair of studs and a pair of danglies. One pair is No-Face from Spirited Away—the “hungry ghost” archetype—and the other is Ghostface, the masked prank-caller from the Scream movies. My apartment is so small, I can admire my earring collection from the toilet—and I often do, especially when I haven’t brought a phone in.
I’ve never been in love with my own name. It’s “Jennifer,” the most common name designated to newborns between 1966 and 1991. It’s from the Welsh name “Guinevere,” whom I played in two out of four performances in our high school production of Camelot.
I’d always thought my name meant “fair lady”! Do you know what it actually means? Pale phantom. I don’t want to be a pallid ghost of myself! What the heck!
I don’t like “Jenny,” either; it always makes me think of a “spinning jenny,” and anyway, a “jenny” is apparently a word for a female donkey. Well, that squares. I recently learned that January 14, an important date in my life, is also the “Feast of the Ass” (wikipedia link). That Wikipedia link is absolutely hilarious btw; I cried and cried when I read it because I am not great with comedy.
Anyway, my birth dad called me “Jenny,” but my birth mom called me “Jennie,” and they were still fighting over the spelling well into my childhood. Two of my dearest friends, independently of each other, took to addressing me as “Jeni” in correspondence, circa 2002. Which is a cute name, for sure, but… why add new letters? And why take letters away? It’s the inexplicable removal of letters from my name that bugs me most; my name does not need to be further truncated.
I attempted to change my name when I first went away to college. After much deliberation—and after the swift and utter failure of “Frankie,” which, in retrospect, would’ve been too much like the videogame character “Mario Mario”—I quietly changed the name on my outgoing email to “Jenn.” It worked. Everyone acted as if it had always been my name.
I remember telling one friend, my childhood church-friend Matt, about what I was up to. “I like it,” he had said. “Jenn Frank. Like Frank Black, of the Pixies.” Ooh, I liked that. Get in, say your name, get out, I thought. Make it fast, I thought. Don’t waste people’s time, I thought.
People have since asked me why there are two Ns in my first name “Jenn”; the repetition of the final letter is so audacious, they will tell me, personally affronted.
“It’s just for the byline,” I explain. “My name is really Jen, but the second N makes my name look ‘finished’.”
“That’s true,” they may say. Or “oh, I guess.” Or “okay.”
“Plus,” I will say, now annoyed, “there are two Ns in my full first name, so it’s not like I’m just making stuff up here.”
So my full name (first, middle, and last) means “Pale Ghost” + Star of the Sea and/or “wanted a child” and/or “Belonging to Mars” + pointy spear or javelin, and/or “Free Person.” I don’t love the ghost part, and I am frankly not loving the part about being a childless Martian, either. The last part—about being pointed—is fine. I can appreciate that I can be a little sharp and not always on target.
Recently my 21-year-old neighbor knocked on my door. I opened it. “Hey, Jen-Hen,” he greeted me.
“You absolutely cannot call me a hen," I said to him, "in West Hollywood." I heaved a big sigh. “Besides, I am nonbinary,” I said. I tried to say it funny, but it came out sad.
“Oh!” he said. “I’m so sorry!”
“Wait,” I said. I frowned and examined my doormat. “Let me say this: I have mom issues. I don’t think I have a maternal bone in my body. I bought a book called Discovering the Inner Mother, but I still have not read it. I am really struggling with gender on both a personal and macro scale, and it has nothing to do with you.”
“For what it’s worth,” the 21-year old said, “you remind me of my mother, a lot.” There was a look on my face. “Who is queer,” he added. I relaxed.
“I don’t know why I’m so tender over this. Maybe it’s really just that the shoe fits,” I said, then smiled at this neighbor kid, whom I really do worry over quite a lot.
Later that day, he would knock again, after our phones had blasted three separate evacuation warnings. He was coming over to offer me a ride.
“Do you think our building will burn down?” he whispered, wide-eyed.
I sighed. “No,” I said, “I genuinely don’t.” (Let me stress, in present tense, that our building is fine.)
I said more after that, and he kept pushing me to tell him whether to evacuate, but giving advice is not a responsibility I want to bear. I finally said, “Listen. You have a car, so you have more time to think about this than the rest of us do. I’m not going to tell you what to do. Whatever you choose is the right choice. Our job right now is to watch, wait, and be sober-minded. What we’re not gonna do”—and I eyed another neighbor’s apartment door—“is flee into the night without a plan. Okay?” He nodded.
Well, it’s the kind of thing that is easier said than done. We all have different reactions to different kinds of emergencies, and it turns out I’m okay in a wildfire, but bad in other natural disasters, like tornados. Right now I am trying to learn how to be watchful and patient while drowning. The answer is to stop thrashing around, but I am trying to learn to swim.
My 21-year-old neighbor returned to my stoop a few days later. “Jen-Jen the Pen!” he cheered. “That is my name for you.”
“Oh wow,” I said. “Thank you. I love it. My parents called me Jen-Jen.” I didn’t specify which set of parents.
“Because when I see you, I see writing in the air, like this.” He drew squiggles in the air next to him.
“Oh, weird, okay,” I said.
I don’t really know how to end this, except just to say that I prefer “Jen-Jen the Pen” to “Jen-Hen,” and to any other variations on “King Arthur’s Depressed Wife” and “ghostface.” But for the time being, I will probably stick with “Jenn” professionally.