30 Days of Me - Day 19

I'm going to try to keep this short because it's getting late and work looms large in the morning. All I have to do is stay on task and we'll get right through this. I can't go off on my usual tangents and expect to make this a quick post. I mean, you know how I get, I start with one subject and then hop to the next and pretty soon it's like we got on a train going to NYC and ended up in London. Don't even get me started about the parallels between my ramblings and train travel on the ocean - too much quantum physics and meteorological theorization to get into during this brief posting. Too much by far. :)

Today's topic is "nicknames you have and why you have them."

Family lore relates that my first (and to this day most pervasive) nickname was "Susie." Mom told me that my dad starting calling the baby-bump that was to become me "Susie" really early on in her pregnancy. I remained a "Susie" (with a few notable and upcoming exceptions) until college, where as all adults must I changed to the more serious-sounding "Susan." You can always tell how long someone has known me by whether I'm "Susie" or "Susan." I guess that's one of the perks of staying near the town that you grew up in. At some point Andrew started calling me "Susie" too, which I kinda like. It's better than "Evil Stepmother" anyway!

When I was about knee-high I apparently told my Uncle John that my name was "Susanbarrina" or something close to that. It's got a certain ring to it, that's for sure, and sometimes Uncle J or my dad still calls me that. I also get "Susanfrasser" on occasion.

I think that my coolest nickname ever is "Z". It sounds cool. Mysterious. It could be a secret agent name, even. I was dubbed "Z" by my friend Ang in high school. Being a "Susie" people often wanted to shorten my name even farther to "Sue." Problem being, of course, that I hate being called "Sue." It got to the point that everytime Ang was around when someone called me "Sue" she would say "Z," thus making Sue into Sue-zee. Soon I became "Z" and she was "G" and that was likely the coolest I've ever been, as far as nicknames go.

"Suz" is a pretty general handle for me, too, which I like. My high-school boyfriend's best friend (follow that?) called me "Suzzo" for a while, but honestly that sounds a little bit like one of the lost Marx brothers, does it not? Now that I think about it, we really didn't get along very well back then so maybe it was a slam. We're much better now (another perk of sticking close to home is that you grow old with mature with the same people you grew up with.)

That's it for the nicknames I can remember right now. So much for a short post, huh?