Ruminations on My Name

If I had been a boy I would have been called Bradford. My mother liked Brad, but not Bradley, so Bradford it was to be.  But, as is obvious, things didn’t go that way and instead I ended up with a name that was shared with two other girls in my class at school and two other girls in my year at camp. It’s not entirely that I hate my name, not really. It’s not the sound of it that I find displeasing, it’s more the completely abundance with which girls born on or around 1981 were given it. Growing up I wanted something different. Not even exotic or unusual, just something different. There aren’t any good nicknames, and after years of enduring The Linzer you really start wishing there was another derivative.

My online moniker has been LViBoheme for years. Since junior year of high school when me and mine became obsessed with Rent and it was an acceptable alternative on ‘La Vie Boheme’ which was far too long, and probably unavailable, for AOL. It stuck. Even though I am no longer obsessed, though I still like rather a lot, with Rent the term La vie boheme, translated quite plainly for the French as ‘the bohemian life’, has always been the sort of ideal I adhere to, good or bad (probably bad).

(Sidebar on the fact that although this has been my handle for most things for all those years it was, in fact, my sister who thought of getting a tattoo of it. It never even crossed my mind, and now she’s just plain gotten there first. Even if she did have to ask me for the translation after the fact.)

But as far as this blog goes I am LadyLinzi. I don’t know who is reading this, but apparently there were 56 of you the other day, which… even when accounting for K clicking several times… is far more than I had anticipated ever setting eyes on this thing. There’s something about anonymity on the internet which is mostly blown to shit as most people are linked from my facebook page, but who knows. And that’s part of the joy of blogging, saying what you mean and what you think, not needing to sensor it past any sort of publisher, and being a sort of disconnect. There’s no photo of me smiling from the back book jacket at you (and it’s looking more and more like there never will be) and I’m not there in front of you, waving my hands around like an idiot and trying to get my point across. Point is, in so many ways this isn’t me, this is LadyLinzi.

At Fleur-de-Lis Camp we’re a little weird. Maybe a little more than a little. We’re very weird. But somehow partway through your first summer on Laurel Lake in Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire you stop caring that it’s weird and you become a part of it. At Fleur-de-Lis Camp counselors in training are CTs, and counselors and Ladies. And I don’t mean that they’re considered that I mean that they are flat out called that. I was CT Linzi once, but then I grew and became Lady Linzi. The campers call me that. And some ex-campers still call me that. What’s more… I sort of like it. Something in me, the bit that never really grew up and got sick of the same old name I’d always had, the one that just wanted something different, likes being called Lady. Is that why I’ve adopted it into my blog name? I’m not entirely sure, but it’ll do.

So, as our good friend Shakespeare once said, quite eloquently I might add; “What’s in a name? that which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet; So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d, Retain that dear perfection which he owes Without that title.”

I never got the unique and different name that I wanted, but in the end it really doesn’t matter at all.