Nicknames

While nicknames are a fun thing you might be privileged or cursed (depending on the name) to receive in the U.S. because of your goofy family or “creative” friends, they are nearly mandatory here. Almost no one is called by their own name. On my second or third day of work my supervisor asked me what my nickname was and I felt a little lame to say, “I don’t have one.”

This whole custom of nicknaming is a little out of the ordinary to me. My parents told me multiple times when I was growing up that they picked the names they did for my sister and me in part because the names were unlikely to be turned into nicknames. My parents wanted people to call us by the names they gave us! And they were pretty much successful; I’ve never had a nickname that really stuck.

This of course has changed in Mindanao. Believe it or not, my name has been shortened to “Anns.” This came about because I started calling my roommate, whose name is Chernor, but his friends call him Ceebah, and I would call him Ceebs, for short. So in turn he called me Anns. This evolved during Orientation, which was led by Ate Myla and Ate Cora, who joined in on the nicknaming. From there our nicknames quickly spread.

Also, when I meet new people I sometimes feel as though it is verbally impossible for them to say all two syllables of my name. They usually call me Ann….and then it trails off. And I’m pretty sure they most often know my full name, but of course no one would say your full name – only nicknames! In the U.S. when people call me Ann I hate it – I want people to get my name right! But please see previous post about learning to be flexible and laidback…

Anyways, I’ve been teasing my parents (whom I love dearly!) a lot in the last two posts. So, in honor of my parents, I am posting a picture of me with an Asian pear. Jokingly they asked me last week if they have Asian pears in Asia. Well I recently learned they do, except they are called “Korean pears” in the Philippines, they are ridiculously expensive for the price of fruit here (they aren’t native), and the Filipinos I was with didn’t know what it was. But they took a picture of me with the Asian/Korean pear at SM grocery store in Cagayan de Oro anyway, just for the two lovely people who raised me: