Hazzardous Name

Andy & I went to see this movie last night. It was cute. Certainly not good acting, but made me want to go drive fast & crazy. Of course in our cars we would kill ourselves.

When I was a kid my brother & cousin Jeremy always wanted to play Dukes of Hazzard. Of course they were Bo & Luke and cam to an agreement pretty fast as to who was who because one had brown hair and the other had blond hair. Hair color was the deciding factor here. You might think I got to be Daisy Duke, but there was a different determining factor for deciding who I would play. My middle sister got to play Daisy since she was the only girl left after the boys decided that I would play Uncle Jesse, since that was my name. I had to be an old man because our names were the same. What a crock of shit! I was pissed and refused to play and would try to convince them I should be Daisy, but they kept on playing and calling me Uncle Jesse.

It was then that I HATED the name Jesse. I was not a boy! and Jesse is a boys name and I was going to be called by my real name, Jessica. That's it! No more calling me Jessie.

That's easier said than done since I have A LOT of uncles & aunts that had been calling me Jessie all the time and now I had to get them to stop. At first asking them was just not cutting it. Because they all think they are funny, they then saw the humor in calling me a name I now hated. I would become livid and yell, "MY NAME IS NOT JESSIE!" This almost seemed to encourage them, because now making me mad was funny.

As I got older I would just not answer to the name Jessie, and then it was them getting mad because I was not listening to them. Eventually I would turn to them and say, if you would like me to listen you should call me by my real name. That was pretty effective, but I had to be persistent.

To this day, there are uncles & aunts that still call me Jessie. My brother is amazed that I don't start whipping out some kung-fu moves or something to retaliate. I like to think of it as I am older and wiser and it is just not worth my energy. I don't get the sense that they are trying to do it to be hurtful or see what they can get away with. I just think you can't teach an old dog new tricks. You can, but in the grand scheme of life, do you really have the time and will it be worth it in the end. I see my extended family so infrequently (usually once, maybe twice a year) and I don't need to get upset because they can't get it.

My immediate family is different, they try to pull that shit and they better bring it! I think they know better though.

So, now you know my first name, after just after a year of blogging. Although many of my readers are family members or friends(many of who never post anything, but send me emails later on) who already know my name.