Call me SMITTY
Wednesday, July 11th, 2007
This week’s question:
Scooter, Dubya, Brangelina-bet your nickname’s better. How’d you get it?
Next week’s question:
You may not have a crush on Obama, but what’s the most outrageous thing you ever did to impress a love interest?
Freshmen on the Columbia volleyball team are initiated with a bottle of vodka, a list of required embarrassing activities, and incessant chants of “Drink! Drink! Drink!” List items include: “flash your breasts at a freshman, kiss a football player, blow a baseball player,” and so on. Refuse to flash? Drink five. It gets worse from there. I chose to forgo most of the list items and became very, very, very drunk. So drunk that I made out with a non-required stranger in front of the whole wrestling team. For about half an hour. Henceforth I was known, from the fencing team to the boys on the lawn playing ultimate Frisbee, as “tonsil hockey.” The next day was my first day of college and I sat through my first class (Indian Civilizations) with my first hangover and a boy in my bed.
My nickname from the time I was five or so — until I got to college and didn’t want to introduce myself that way for fear as coming off as some sort of Jewish hick — was Al. Most people think it’s short for Alex (which, no, in my case is not short for Alexander, thank you very much). But the dirty, shameful secret is that in my case Al isn’t a contraction for Alex at all. It’s a reference to my favorite song back in the day, Paul Simon’s “You Can Call Me Al.” Actually, I’m not really that embarrassed. I still think it’s a great fucking song.
During my sophomore year of high school I gained what most peers considered a super power: the ability to grow facial hair. Not your pre-pubescent peach fuzz but full-blown ZZ Top-type facial hair. It was then that I began my long-running tradition of growing every type of beard and sideburns I could. I was as grunge as you could get in 1993, so my inaugural facial hair was mutton chop sideburns that got so long I had to actually comb them. After much good-natured ribbing I didn’t mind the nickname, as long as it didn’t refer to Fat Elvis.
As a cross country runner in high school, I had to go to the gym to lift weights. The football team used the gym at the same time, and I often felt inferior and small as most of them were much bigger than me and could lift outrageously heavy weights. Well, one day, as I hid near the back so nobody would see me pick up the 20 lb. weight, one of the guys who belonged to the “300 Club” (a title granted to people who could bench press 300 lbs.) saw me and called to his friends, “Uh oh, look out. Dick Diesel in the corner’s going to make us all look bad.” And from that day forward, I’ve been called Dick Diesel by people who never even knew who I was back then.
My nickname is “CD” which is just the initials for my first and middle names, Christen Diane. I was going through a big T.S. Eliot and ee cummings phase as a 13 year old, and when I wrote my first fan letter to a garage rock band called the Splatcats in my hometown of Buffalo, I didn’t want them to know I was a girl, so I signed off as “CD.” The next year I wound up dating one of their friends and they were like, “Oh, so *you’re* CD” and after that I was CD. Now all my mommy friends and their children call me CD. So now I have to explain to three year olds that “My name is CD. Umm..like the alphabet song? ABCD.”
My nickname from my early 20s was “Bear,” because I had a hairy chest that came out early. My sister still calls me Bear, and some of my friends from that period of my life. Now that a lot of gay men are calling themselves “bears,” it seems either kind of strange or prescient. However, since I’m still slender and not the husky bear type, it’s hard for me to think of myself as “Bear” inside.
Jason “Neumie” Neuman. I have had it since 3rd Grade, and I’ll be 30 this year. In elementary school, there was always more than one Jason in my classes. The other Jason was always called Jason and I was called Neuman. Jokingly a coach in school would call me twinkie head and eventually twinkie and Neuman merged into Neumie. Now everyone calls me Neumie, my friends, people I work with, girls I date, everyone. It’s even on my licence plate.
Reej. Started because this girl I sat next to in high school French class would say I was such a “reject” when I made stupid jokes in French. It got shortened to Reej–not to be confused with one morning talk show host.