She and I were talking about names and meaning and family and history. And I thought I was interesting, even if I was in the minority. So maybe you will too.
I don’t give a fuck about family names. To start with, there’s important family and there’s family that I don’t care about one whit. The former is made up of the people I’ve known – parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents I know, and the three greatgrandparents I’ve known (I do stretch a bit to include the Alzheimer’s-riddled man I only remember seeing once). The latter is everyone else who came before. I have no obligation to them, no responsibility to carry on the family line or some other nice thing like that. If I marry, I’m doing it for myself. Not because I have a duty as the eldest grandchild to make sure the family name survives. the family name means nothing more than the family it stands for. Some good, some bad, most ultimately unimportant – I don’t want my potentialchildren to have any more obligation to my ancestors than I do now. Sure, there are maybe stories I can tell – maternal grandpa twicegreat has a lake and a county in Michigan named for his oldtime surveying. But there’s no need for them to feel some tenuous attachment to a name whose time has passed.
So I think it’d be a good idea if couples started coming up with their own names when they married (or whatever it is they want to do, I suppose). Names have some power in this sense, and here, actually, they have positive power. The name would be something new, just like the bond formed. It could be chosen mutually, representative of what the couple hoped for their union. The name would be a bond in itself. It would have no obligation, no ties except between the two people who shared it.
I ramble like a fucking moron. Sorry.

I see raindrop-amoebas spasming and dividing, a passenger-window petrie dish obscuring the rest of the world.

I’m looking at a globe right now. It may be the one that still has “USSR” marked clearly across the biggest block of single nationcolor on the sphere, but that doesn’t matter. A globe makes the world look so small, so accessible. I can walk my fingers from Antwerp to Argentina in seconds, if I so choose. A distance like half a state is meaningless – a thumb blanks it from view. And yet such distances are meaningful – somehow important parts of my life and others’ lives. Making a decision which seems so small on a globe can be making a decision which affects the rest of someone’s life – you can tell distance is not on a globe when it’s measured in miles of separation and loneliness and missing, even (maybe especially) the potential kind.

About me more, in a questionless, unorganized semi-surveyish way:
19, male (one might suppose), attached, atheistically inclined, Family Guy, curry (sweaty, eyewatering, sinusclearing strong but no jalapenos please, I can’t handle them), Siddhartha, Joyce and Shakespeare, The Beach Boys’ "Pet Sounds" (nothing else comes remotely close), Wilco, Return of the King or maybe Adaptation, hookah and vodka (no other drugs need apply, really), HB but experimenting with softer sorts, Bristol, microns, V for Vendetta.

It’s a lame update, but it’s an update.

Dullwitted
Abhorrent
Vituperative
Ignorant
Disgraceful

I take it back, I think I did one of these before. But no-one ever does them honestly.