seen and heard

-- A friend and I have a hobby (compulsion? fetish?) that involves trading instances we spot of truly bizarre names. It generally also involves a discussion of what that person's parents were thinking/toking/snorting/drinking/etc to come up with said name.

Today I met a very nice woman whose first name is -- I kid you not -- Lo Jean. Pronounced like it looks, spelled just that way.

Perhaps I have spent too much of my adult life in or near da hood, but the first thing I thought of was "lo jack" -- those homing devices to keep said hoodrats from stealing your ride. (I once chased one across 3 lanes of traffic on 12th and State, the heart of cracktown in downtown Milwaukee, for a car that totally wasn't worth saving, but that's a story for another time.)

-- Lo Jean is a nurse for a very nice doctor who is, I believe, roughly 11 years old. Things like this always get me because, for such a long time, people always thought I was older than I was. (My late BIL's best friend tried to pick me up at BIL and sis's wedding reception -- at which I was 13 -- because he thought I was 19, but that too is a story for another time.)

Then for a while, people always thought I was younger than I was. One of my fondest memories is of a convenience store clerk carding me at age 36 and then going on and on about how there is NO. WAY. I really could have been 36. (Alas, those days are gone, perhaps until I start coloring my hair again, anyway.)

And now, irretrievably middle-aged, I look at the young pups like this resident, who I'm guessing (realistically now) probably isn't 30 yet ... and DAMN I feel old. Also a little depressed because he's already achieved a helluva lot more than I ever will, but that is an old whine NOT for another time. (I need to get over it already.)

-- While I was waiting for Dr. Doogie, I had nothing better to do than read the posters on the wall. One of them was provided courtesy of the "Barbara Woodward Lips Patient Education Foundation."

I suspect Ms. Lips or her parents or husband or whoever shaved some syllables off that name (I'm lookin' at YOU, Bernie MiklaszEWSKI of the Post-Dispatch), but how much worse could the original have been? You gotta hope she came into it as an adult, because kids would be absolutely horrible with that and scar her for life.

-- Wigger overheard this afternoon while I was attempting to eat lunch:

"Yeah, that's my word for the day, reh-TEE-cent. I gotta use it in a sentence."

Wigger 2: "reh-TEE-cent? What the hell is that?"

Wigger 1: "I dunno, man. I think it means, like, hesitant."

Why yes, he DID mean "reticent." Which native English speakers with two brain cells to rub together pronounce "REH-tih-cent."

BTW, for those on the East Coast, wiggers are a variant of guidos, but without the 14 layers of orange spray tan and the 4 popped collars.

-- Sign outside Great Harvest Bread Co: "Every day is a challah day here!" :-) (I had to close on a nice bit of intelligent wordplay. :-)

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