Characterization

It’s All in the Name, Literally

She bent her head over the test, gnawing her lip as she feverishly scribbled into the tiny bubbles. Her eyes darted upwards to gauge the time, the teacher was coming to the end of the carefully scripted directions. She scowled at the middle initial box, those people with middle names have all the luck. There was no such reprieve for her as she moved on to her second last name, trying to quickly calculate whether or not she would run out of bubbles. The personal information page was always the most difficult part of standardized tests, at least until freshman year when she stopped paying attention in math and consequently did terrible in it on every exam.
The name is her parent’s fault, as are most things in life. They both wanted to name her after their grandmothers but didn’t want one grandma to have all the glory of the first name while the other was relegated to the solitary bubble of the “middle initial here” wasteland. Two first names, two last names and a Spanish conjunction, thrown in, to round the whole mess out. An interesting sociological question arises, that age old problem of nature versus nurture. Did she love to read and write and craft legions of imaginary friends because her DNA programmed her for creativity? Or did needing to learn and pronounce all those letters lead to her near photographic memory and love for words that were so much less complicated. It would certainly explain the more common names of her imaginary friends; macaroni and monkey.
As she got older and began turning in assignments late all the time, was it a natural tendency toward laziness and procrastination or was she simply too exhausted after writing out the class, date, and her entire first and last name to move on to the assignment portion of the assignment? At least her talent for making things up came in handy when she needed excuses for those late assignments and the occasional skipped class. In fact, despite her love of writing, those excuses are the most complete and successful products of her creativity.
Perhaps the compromise her parents made for her name has allowed her to compromise when it comes to her conflicting passions. She’s able to be a super liberal near-hippy, while being a down home country girl who loves horse back riding and George Strait. An environmentalist who thinks the full-throated rumble of a Hemi pick-up is one of the sexiest sounds imaginable. A loyal friend and a terrible gossip, an intelligent debater who often talks to inanimate objects, someone who thinks tiny dogs are kind of useless and obnoxious but her mini Chihuahua/pug mix is the best dog ever and has nabbed the title of most adorable creature in the history of the universe. She’s sarcastic with a very inappropriate sense of humor but still gets teary eyed during Disney movies and insurance commercials. Oh she’s complicated alright, and it’s probably all because of that name. Or maybe everyone’s complicated and the name is just, well, a name. Somehow this was all going to relate to that whole nature versus nurture debate, but somewhere during her second beer the author forgot the connection.