Sep 01 2010
Encyclopedia of Me - N is for Name
I’m finding that as I get further along in this series, all the obvious choices for certain letters have already been addressed in past posts. For K, I could have written about my name, but I have a post from 2006 titled K is for Kirsten (which really has nothing to do with my name), and as I was preparing for the next few posts in this series, I got stuck on the letter R when I realized that I had already written about me being a redhead, so I went over every entry in the R section of my dictionary to find something.
But for N, I figured that even though I already had a post with an obvious title, I have never really talked about my name. Here you go.
My name is Kirsten, and I’m a blogaholic.
Sorry, wrong group.
My name really is Kirsten. It’s pronounced “curse-tin” and not “keerstin”. It’s not Kristen, Kristine, Kristina, or Karsten. It’s KIRSTEN. Get it? Also, I don’t have any nicknames, so please don’t call me Kirsty or any other shortened version of my name. Only Melissa can get away with that, but she can also beat me up, despite being much smaller than I am.
I got this name because my mom wanted a Scandinavian name for me, since her grandparents came from Sweden. I was the only Kirsten I knew of, and just like my hair, I didn’t really like anything about me that stood out. I would rather have had a traditional name, like Elizabeth. I thought that would have suited me more.
My middle name, Linnea, is also Swedish. It’s my middle name, my mom’s first name, my Grandma’s middle name, and my great-grandma’s first name. Since I’m the 4th one in a row to have this name, it’s where the 4 comes in on my user name, KirstenL4W.
These days, I’m used to my name. I don’t have any feelings either way about my name, but I would prefer that people get it right. I do like knowing that if I hear my name in a crowd, there’s a pretty good chance that someone is calling me. There were 3 Jennifers in my 4th grade class, and I don’t think I would have liked having a name that common.
I do love my online name. I chose KirstenL4W in a flash of brilliance one day when trying to choose a username for Yahoo mail. My previous email, at excite.com, was getting wonky, and I didn’t really like kmylast1 as a username (mylast being my actual last name at the time). KirstenL4W seems to have a bit more oomph. Another bonus was that no matter where I went, I didn’t have any issues with it being taken already, so chances are if you are on a website and come across a user named KirstenL4W, it’s me. It hasn’t failed me yet.
Naturally, when I looked to getting my own domain name, I picked KirstenL4W. It’s my online identity. I love it for its personal meaning, and I love it because it’s unique. It’s not Kirsten12345 or some other random series of numbers because the other 2821865 name/number combinations were taken. It’s all me.















