The seed of this piece came from my reaction to a piece from Salon.com called “Why I Hate White Belly Dancers”. It was a passionate article and I found a lot of it to be problematic (that’s PC code for I disagreed or found it offensive right?). One of the things I couldn’t help but agree with was the practice of renaming yourself something that “sounds” like it’s from another culture. From there my mind wandered to George Carlin’s pieces about guys with goofy names, then to a buzz feed article about athletes with unfortunate names.
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Guidelines For Living – Names
I’m writing this post on a three year-old MacBook Pro while waiting for the water in my friend’s electric tea kettle to finish boiling so we can have some Organic Fair-Trade Rooiboos tea. We’ve just finished a 15km bike ride to and from her anti-squat flat in Utrect, Netherlands (It’s like Amsterdam, but smaller, less tourists and feels like city where people live) to get coffee at the StayOkay café at the StayOkay youth hostel run by Hostelling International (It’s so obscure that until today it didn’t even have one review on Yelp!) on 20 year-old 3-speed bikes to get a cup of good coffee and get into “the only think like nature you can get around here.”
