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Names and shame
March 27th, 2006 at 21:32
I had a horrible realisation today. I don’t know some of my friends names.
There’s someone on my course who commutes into University on the train like I do- I usually see him once or twice a week and talk to him on the journey to and from Uni. I’ve known him for probably around six months now. The trouble is I don’t know what his name is. I’ve got a good idea of what it is, but I’m not certain enough to be able to say “Hello $name!” or shout him at a distance.
The horrible thing is, I think he knows my name- or at least my first name, and that’s already one-upped me.
At the risk of sounding borderline racist (for once, that’s not my intention), this may well be because he’s got an asian name- as the town I’ve lived and been educated in is essentially Daily Mail Land, and thus my internal database of potential names is about as diverse as an album of bland James Blunt songs. For the sake of context, in GCSE RE (Religious Education), to teach us about asian culture, we were shown East is East. Maybe I’m just a horrible racist?
This said, I thought my friend Mickey’s name was Mark for a good 48 hours, and Michael for a couple more after that. I havn’t even factored in that I’m friends with people called Jeroen, Typhlosion, UKDMBFan and Iceduck. I’m sure those names aren’t on their respective birth certificates.
Thinking about RE though, we were shown the Kiefer Sutherland film Flatliners, about bringing people back from the dead who can remember what it’s like being dead, to demonstrate the afterlife. At Christmas, arguably the most important time for Religious Education we were shown Aardman’s Robbie the Reindeer animation.
Anyway, this name thing is annoying- after discussing this with others, it turns out that I am also the only person who worries about whether or not I should admit knowing someone’s name or not. Back at school, if I was tasked with handing out everyone’s exercise books, I’d sometimes play ignorant and pretend not to know some of the names- mainly because there’s no reasonable explaination of why I know a person’s name. I think this is because I assumed the chavs wouldn’t know the name of the quiet kid who did his work (ie: me), and as such, I shouldn’t dignify them by knowing their name.
Am I the only person who thinks like this?
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