Fortunately, there are quizzes to the rescue – I’m proud to say that I would absolutely suck at being at 1930′s housewife:

23 As a 1930s wife, I am Very Poor (Failure) Take the test!

Hilariously, though, as a 1930′s husband…:

116 As a 1930s husband, I am Very Superior Take the test!

I think I’m almost proud of that

1 – Go to Wikipedia’s “random article” link. The first random article you get is the name of your band.
2 – Go to Random quotations. The last four words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.
3 – Go to flickr’s “explore the last seven days“. Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover. (I extended mine to be proper album dimensions.)

I swear I didn’t doctor the results to get this – I’m highly amused (and, to be fair, the photo was taken by Federico Ferrari, and it, and all of its derivative works (including this one) are released under this CC license).

Anyway, here’s my apparent new band’s album, which I think I should make just because the name is so awesome:

I totally rock. And now, to go do stuff for my last lesson. Or sleep. Or something.

90

This one’s a combination of one from from November of last year and one from – good Lord – July, and it only gets worse from there.

Tagged from this post on Mrs. Mustard’s blog, Cheeze Whiz and Mustard, and this post on Caley’s blog, Sublime Bedlam:

What I was doing 10 years ago: Let’s see… I was 26 (damn, I’m old), and I’d been back in the U.S. for a few months after a year au pairing in Holland. I was back in college to finish up my B.S. after totally wasting a 4-year free ride years earlier. But what specifically was I doing? Studying like mad, and discovering I actually liked math. A lot. And more to the point, my annoying teachers in school were right – I was good at it. Also, I was busy lusting after all the wrong people, a lifelong hobby of mine before I met my husband, and basically ruing the fact that I’d moved back to Milwaukee, not because I hate Milwaukee, but because my parents are there and we all know you can never go home again… I think that specifically around this time 10 years ago, I had just moved into the dorms to have affordable space of my own away from the familial units, but you can’t quote me on that… So basically, I was busy being a geek, a dork, and a very bad daughter

What I was doing 5 years ago: Oooo… well, I was at Purdue in grad school. That I can say for sure. In March 2003, I would have already moved from computer science to linguistics, having taken what my pals Tom and Ben referred to as the “Golden Ejection Seat” option in the CS program (on the way to a PhD in CS at Purdue, you generally pick up an MS, and the Golden Ejection Seat refers to “ejecting” with the masters’…) to switch fields. I’d been dating my now-husband for about a year-and-a-half and was about to move in with him in our first joint apartment, since everyone was getting kicked out of the grad dorms to make room for offices, and was spending a lot of time doing syntax homework. Then again, in linguistics, everyone spends a lot of time doing syntax homework… That’s about all I remember So… still a geek and a dork.

One year ago: I’d just decided I didn’t want or need my PhD after passing my prelims, and more importantly, after a miscarriage, I’d just gotten pregnant with the baby now called Torsten I think I was also spending a great deal of time futilely pulling mallow out of the garden, but don’t quote me on that. Ah, and I played a whole lot of Oblivion. That’s my brother’s fault. Lots and lots of Oblivion. In fact, if I didn’t know it’d keep me up all night and I’d be sorry for it, I’d go play some Oblivion right now. Yup, still a geek and a dork.

Yesterday: Um… geez. I can remember what I was doing 10 years ago, but not yesterday… Mommy brain wins again!

I think… let me see. Woke up at five to smiley Torsten. Played with Mr. T until 8, doing various sit-ups, kicking of the evil musical lion, and walking all over Mama. Also, T and I had breakfast together, whereby I mean I ate and Torsten watched intently from the high chair, giving every indication that if I wasn’t going to eat that banana, it was so his. Then he went to Papa, and Mama slept for a couple of hours. The middle of the day is a blur now, but we put his new crib together, since the co-sleeper will be too small for His Royal Hugeness in a month and his parents are here with a car to transport things. Watched Olbermann, messed with my WordPress install, slept at some point. The days, they all run together now, but I assure you, I’m still both a geek and a dork. Fortunately, I’m also Mama, which makes me cool.

5 snacks I enjoy:

In no particular order…

1. Evil chocolate Riesen (damn you, Germans!)
2. x with guacamole, where x is any edible substance
3. string cheese (I’m part Wisconsinite, donchaknow – I can sing the Ernie von Schledorn jingle to prove it! (Whodoyaknow wants to buy a car?))
4. multi-grain Kashi crackers
5. cherry tomatoes (yum!)

5 things I would do if I had $100 Million:

1. Immediately convert it all to Euros, because I think the dollar is nowhere near done tanking
2. Stick it in savings somewhere stable
3. Live off the interest for the rest of my life in an undisclosed country
4. Never work again
5. See #4

5 Things You Would Do If You Were a Millionaire

Since this is considerably less money, I guess I can be more specific…

1. Pay off my student loans
2. Take a nice vacation with my family
3. Hire a German-speaking au pair so I didn’t have to speak German at home when I’m tired
4. Move into an energy-efficient house
5. Take my time job-hunting after Torsten’s older, if there were any money left

5 places I would run away to:

1. Amsterdam (at least until global warming gets Holland *sniff*), my favorite city anywhere
2. New Zealand
3. Melbourne, Australia (hey, it seemed a nice enough city)
4. Germany (hey, I can run away there legally as long as I’m not running from the evil husband )
5. Iceland, but only so I can say “Jeg heiti Utgarða-Loki!” (“My name is Utgarða-Loki!” – FYI, Utgarda-Loki is a giant who tricked my personal favorite god, Thor, into participating in a bunch of tests he can’t pass (like drinking an entire drinking horn which just happens to be connected to the sea)). I will say this at the airport and have people look at me like I’m on crack, and it will be good. This isn’t any different from normal – people always look at me like I’m on crack – but this time I’ll know why. Also, it’s the only way I can currently conceivably imagine using any Old Norse I recall in a present-day context.

5 TV shows I like:

I don’t watch enough TV to answer this question, to be honest, but…

1. Countdown with Keith Olbermann
2. The Daily Show
3. The Colbert Report
4. The 4400 (we’ve been watching this on DVD, only to find out it got cancelled. Boo!!!)
5. Battlestar Galactica (also watching from time-to-time on DVD – praise Netflix!)

5 things I hate doing:

1. Talking on the phone. Seriously. I hate hate hate it.
2. Doing dishes
3. Cleaning my study
4. Not cleaning my study
5. Talking politics with someone who assumes I agree with them when I don’t

5 biggest joys of the moment:

1. Torsten! Torsten, Torsten, Torsten. He could qualify for all five if it wouldn’t be cheating.
2. My wonderful evil husband, Christian, who is a fantastic partner and papa!
3. Sleep, glorious, sleep! Maybe that should be #1, but I’m not getting enough of it for it to rank higher.
4. My wonderful, wonderful friends.
5. The fantastic weather in Denver right now, which is tied for 5th place with the Peek-A-Boo Elmo playtime gym, which has the dubious distinction of allowing me to both use the bathroom in peace and finish half a cup of coffee from time to time.

5 Songs That You Know All The Lyrics To:

I could probably name dozens and dozens, so this is off the top of my head and will probably be partly related to popular songs I sing to the baby…

1. You Can Close Your Eyes – James Taylor
2. The Boxer – Simon and Garfunkel (also, the related and very naughty version my roommate and I made up in college which I will not name here for propriety’s sake)
3. Any Duran Duran song from before, say, 1986. Seriously. So sad…
4. The Remedy – Jason Mraz (chosen just to show that I’m not so old that I haven’t listened to the radio since 1990…)
5. Boogie in Your Butt – Eddie Murphy (I memorized this one in 6th grade and have never, ever forgotten it)

5 Bad Habits:

1. Constantly planning for hypothetical possibilities
2. Biting my nails – there’s nothing to see there
3. Obsessing over things I get irritated by
4. Not putting stuff away right away and then having it be piled up somewhere weeks later
5. Being a perfectionist when it’s totally unnecessary

5 Things You Like To Do:

1. Write in a coffeehouse without having to get home by a certain time
2. Play games/watch movies with good friends over a beer or three
3. Snuggle
4. Make music. Unfortunately, I haven’t seriously picked up an instrument in nearly 20 years. Must… get… back to it.
5. Travel to cool places

5 Things You Would Never Wear Again:

1. The bridesmaid’s dress I wore for my friend Julie’s wedding – she referred to me as “that blue thing” while they were taking pictures
2. Anything I wore in college. I think I really believed people couldn’t see me.
3. Cheap shoes. Blisters suck.
4. All of those clothes my mom sewed and made me wear, in spite of me telling her kids would make fun of me. They did, you know, and yes, I am an ungrateful prat.
5. A revealing swimsuit. Don’t want to blind anyone.

5 Favorite Toys:

1. I agree with Mrs. Mustard: Lego! I had the stupid discount “Loc-Blocs”, which sucked and broke
2. The wooden Fisher-Price Little People. None of this stupid plastic crap.
3. Those cool wooden trains and tracks. I never got any of that cool stuff – too expensive.
4. Hopping balls. Those freaking rocked.
5. The Sit-n-Spin. Round and round until ya puke!

Ok, so even though this is late, I’ll tag, hmmm… Karen, Aspen, Bewilde, Autographedcat, Jennifer, and Aiela!

Bow down to the Über Cool Nerd King! Although me being only 9% Dumb/Dork/Awkward is clearly off…

(Hey, wait a minute… King???)

I thought about writing about all of the ridiculous nicknames I gave my poor brother as a kid, or the fact that after having my cat for 9 years, she still had no stable name (most often, she was referred to as “Pumpkin”, in spite of being grey), but none of those really seemed like much fun to write. Then I realized there’s a quick story behind each of my own names, and some of them are vaguely amusing, so I thought “eh, what the Hell… I’ll write about that.”

So.

No one ever spells my first name right; either they decide I’m “Christa”, or “Krystal”, or, in the case of the cashier at Panera a few weeks ago, “Kkkkjjjjrijsta”. Um. Yeah. Annoying. But that’s not the interesting bit.

The interesting bit is who I’m named after. Every so often, I’ll get someone who says “Oh, that’s such a pretty name!”, or “Oh, my niece is named that!”, and I really, really want to tell them where it came from. Really. Especially conservative old ladies at the checkout counter.

You see, my namesake is… Miss September 1961. That’s right, I was named after a Playboy centerfold, Christa Speck. (That link is safe for work, and there’s a fully-clothed picture of her at the Playboy site; I don’t promise the other ladies on the page are fully-clothed, though, so if you’re squeamish, don’t bother.) See, even her name is spelled with a Ch.

And all I can say about naming me after a Playmate is that my parents were engaging in some extremely wishful thinking with that one.

My mom says they got my name from Playboy because they didn’t have the money to buy a baby book.

Um. Yeah. And you had the money to buy Playboy? Besides, whatever happened to the public library?

I make it sound like I resent where it came from, and I don’t – I think it’s funny, actually. I’m sure that went over well with the überreligious half of the family, which was probably part of why they did it, and it at least gives my name some character.

What’s funnier is what happened when I was about 12 or 13 and went over to a friend’s house. She came from a very, very conservative Irish Catholic family. Well, at least her mother was. One day, her father came up to me and said, “You know, whenever I hear your name, I think of a very beautiful woman I once saw.”

And me, with my big mouth, said, “Ah, was it in Playboy?”

The mother, as I recall, looked pretty annoyed. I suspect she always thought I was a bad influence on her daughter anyway. But anyhow.

Surprisingly, he answered that that was, in fact, where he had seen this woman. He looked rather shocked that I knew. And a little less embarrassed when I said I was named after her. I suspect, though, that he got a good ear-boxing from his wife once I was gone. My namesake must have made quite an impression – it had been a little over 20 years since she was Miss September by the time he met me.

But the name is alright, and it fits pretty well with my new and exciting German last name.

Ok, so that’s my first name. My middle name, well, is pretty common, and while it could be found via various search engines, I don’t really want to assist stupid identity thieves any more than I have to, so I’ll just tell the story. The name is generally not spelled with an ‘e’ on the end. My mother, apparently, also did not intend to put one there. However, I was born on a military base (this was during Vietnam, and my dad was drafted, so…). At that time, according to my mother, the way the military dealt with delivering babies was to drug the woman up as much as possible and get the baby out. My mom claims to have been so doped up on Demerol that she either put the ‘e’ on the end herself, or the nurses did because she was too drugged up to spell. I don’t remember which it was at the time, and I like it better with an ‘e’ (though in truth I hate the name), but it’s still sort of amusing.

And then… my last name. Before I got married, I was a Bennett. With 2 “t”s. I don’t care how many times you read Pride and Prejudice (or how great Colin Firth was as Mr. Darcy, which has no bearing on my story, but I just thought I’d state that for the record), my last name was still spelled with two “t”s. I have rarely, if ever (outside of Pride and Prejudice), seen it spelled with one “t”. Any other striking resemblances my immediate family has to the Bennet family are purely coincidental. I think. Maybe.

And yet people always, always managed to spell it incorrectly. I got used to saying “two ‘n’s and two ‘t’s” every time someone was writing my name down, and it was annoying. Given that it’s such a common English name, you’d think people would be familiar with it. But noooooo…

I didn’t like it much anyway. I never really liked it, and it seemed so incongruous with my first name. So when my husband and I started discussing marriage a few years ago, there was never much of a question – I didn’t want to keep my maiden name. In fact, I couldn’t get rid of it fast enough. And this fact apparently offended some of my feminist colleagues… first of all, I was getting married (?!?!!!) – how could I, as a liberated woman, get married??? There are a lot of answers to that one, but this one should have been the kicker – you try staying together long-term with your committed foreign national partner without the benefit of some legal partnership, regardless of where you’re living. Especially if you don’t know where you’ll be living. Oh, and by the way? I love the guy, and I chose to do it. It’s not like I checked the box for “barefoot and pregnant” (though in point of fact, I am currently both at this precise moment…) by getting married. And let’s not even get into my mother-in-law’s reaction to the whole marriage thing…

But the name? Wooo… that didn’t just cause uproar with some of my feminist friends/colleagues (what part of “I don’t like my maiden name” is confusing?). Getting married in Germany, where the feminist movement was/is rather hardcore, was real fun. I had to sign something like a 4-page document at City Hall saying that no, I really did understand that I really don’t have to take my husband’s name, and I know all my rights, and really, no one was holding a gun to my head and making me do this thing. I actually felt like that was more condescending than any pressure I might have gotten to change it (of which there was none). It was like… a big deal. And the German government wanted to make extra, extra sure that I really knew what I was doing

What’s funny is that once my name was legally changed in Germany, it was still “Bennett” at the border and on all of my legal documents for some time after that. It took me a long time to get all of that changed once I got back to the U.S., and I was surprised at what a pain in the arse it was. I think I still have some documents and customer loyalty cards in the wrong name. Oh well.

Ok… so that was my best impromptu shot at blathering about names. I tag… anyone who reads the feed of this blog (or is an otherwise regular reader), I think. (That way I avoid exposing any private journals *grin*)

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