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By Dixie Chicks

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Inordinately, random entry # 372:
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I think I’m coming down with something. I started feeling a little feverish the other night while I was talking to Patrick, but Tylenol managed to work its magic on me and so the fever went away for a while. I was OK during dinner tonight, but now my back aches horribly and my arms feel like falling off. Bah.

I sometimes wish I had a longer, more interesting name. Even a tongue-twisting, unpronounceable-for-foreign-tongues, Thai name would be great.

Living in America would enlist my name in the roster of ordinary, schmordinary names that consists of other unfortunate peeps, like all the Marys, Jills, and Janes. Living in Thailand, however, always seems to garner the following response (as it did this evening while I was having dinner with my parents’ friends and their sons):

Parents’ friends’ son #1: I have a friend who’s doing his Masters at your uni. I’ll ask him if he knows you. What’s your name?
Me: Lynn
Parents’ friends’ son #2: What about your real name?
Me:  Lynn
Parents’ friends’ son #1: Not your nick name, your real name.
Me (arghh!): Er, Lynn
Parents’ friends’ son #2: Ohhh…okay.

After we settled over the name thing, we started talking and they turned out to be really nice guys… real funny, too.

Most people in Thailand have long, beautiful first names (with poignant meanings behind them, too) that are generally used for formal settings (classrooms, business meetings, etc.). So, as a result, they usually have cute, short nicknames - like Pook, Kay, or Jip - to use in more casual occasions. One of my mom's friends nicknamed both of her sons Big and Bird...so, well yeah, you can probably imagine the level of mockery they were faced with when they went off to college in the US.  Needless to say, they eventually changed their nicknames, hehehe.

Let’s see, my name rhymes with pin, fin, sin, kin, win, tin, shin, bin, chin, din, gin, in and vin. Making limericks in 7th grade was always traumatic for me, since, inevitably, all my limericks would always end up sounding rather stupid:

There once was a girl named Lynn,
Who’s head was like a trash bin,
Made completely out of tin,
A dump where junk would go in,
Wherever she went, she’d cause a din.

I guess some good came out of it since it is because of my name that I was able to learn that ‘din’ means clamor or racket.

I feel sorry for my future kids. As a result of my boring, blah, ho-hum name, I will most likely satisfy my needs by giving them extravagantly preposterous names like Livianapanapikeypoo. They could go by Pike, or Liv, or Ana, or hey, even Poo (laugh if you must, but I know some Thai people who actually do have that nickname!).

Earlier today I was reading Naeglerian’s entry for the day (which was, in turn, inspired by Hybrid_Girl's entry) and recalled that, coincidentally, I’d also been thinking about the whole soulmates thing the other day while driving home. Actually, I guess it isn’t much of a coincidence since soulmates is hardly a foreign topic for most girls, lol (at least I know that it isn’t anything new for me and my girlfriends - we have discussed it ad infinitum ). My friends and I usually end up debating about it and will toss back endless ‘what ifs’ and ‘what abouts’ that usually deter us from our original topic since we have an uncanny tendency to meander.

One of my favorite movies, Only You (a light, sweet chick flick), stars Marisa Tomei and Robert Downey Jr. (who, by the way, make an adorable couple) and revolves around soulmates, destiny, and fate. Because of a childhood prank her brother played on her when they were younger, Marisa Tomei’s character adamantly believes that she’s destined to marry a man named Damon Bradley. So, after a brief phone call with a guy who is coincidentally named Damon Bradley, she follows this guy (who she’s never even seen or met before in her life) to Italy. Upon arriving there, she literally runs into Robert Downey Jr.’s character, who, after hearing her story in a nutshell, spontaneously passes himself as Damon Bradley. A very Hollywood-esque, but equally sweet, Italian romance begins to bloom and, yadayadaya, Marisa Tomei’s character eventually finds out that Robert Downey Jr. in fact isn’t the real Damon Bradley, and thus refuses to have anything else to do with him. Surprise, surprise. SoOo a little cat and mouse chase ensues, and the point (yes, I have a point, lol) is that she later learns that her supposedly preordained soulmate, Damon Bradley, is in fact just some random name her brother casually came up with during a childhood Oijia board game. She finally comes to her senses and realizes that Robert Downey Jr. is the one for her, lalala, everyone’s happy, the end!

But imagine if she had gone on and actually pursued the real Damon Bradley simply because he was “supposed” to be her soulmate. And say they never actually clicked, and he instead turned out to be, oh say, the spawn of the devil? Would she still have gone on pursuing, simply for fate and destiny’s sake? Or, instead, would she have tossed the whole romantic notion of soulmates aside and gone back to Robert Downey Jr.? Is the name her brother came up with just as random a coincidence as the possibility of us eventually running into our special someone? And what about the unfortunate ones who aren’t quite so lucky? Will they have the ill-starred fate of “settling” for second-rate in fear that they will never come across their match? And even so, will they still feel the absence of their true soulmate, the one who they were never fortunate enough to meet, gnaw away at them for the rest of their days?

Well let’s say you finally do get to come across your match; how will you know it’s them? Will it be instantaneous? Was that eventual meeting another random collision of stars in this vast universe, or was it all destined from the very beginning? A myriad of questions, all with very different and equally sound answers. Of course, these thoughts aren’t addressed in the film, but it does provoke some pondering and reflection.

Do I believe in soulmates? I really don’t know. What I do know is that I believe it to be a beautiful notion. I can relate to what Naeglerian said, about how being a Science grad (or in my case, a science student) can cause you to be somewhat wary about such ideas. But, then again, before the science student, I am and always have been a dreamer and believer in better things...and, besides, what girl in the world wouldn’t want to believe that, somewhere out there, they have a single soulmate for them and them only?

I'm probably not making much sense since I’m just typing whatever random thought comes to mind and I’m too lazy right now to go back and fix any spelling and grammatical errors.

I ache. I feel sick. I’m burning up again. Boooo.



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