Namesake: The Birthday Blog

My name has been a bigger part of my life than I imagine it would have been if I was named, say, Michael, or Justin.  Those are names that you hear often and therefore do not provide any kind of automatic distinction just by being named them.   I will tell you that for many years, I have caught all kinds of shit for 3 famous neils, because there are only really 3: Armstrong, Diamond, and Young.  People feel a need to point out when something is eccentric but still recognizable, younger kids usually do this by insulting one another, adults make lame jokes or talk to you in a really boring way (e.g. 'Oh like Neil Armstrong, eh?  How's that?' and I'm like 'I don't have any basis for comparison I suppose because my name has always been Neil, but I guess it's fine, you boring fuckwit').

But through all the comments, I've never actually been curious which one of the three neils I was named for.  I more or less assumed it had to be one of them, because I don't believe there are any neils in my known heritage, and I assumed there had to have been somewhere that my parents heard my name.  Of late I had hoped it was Young. 

There were babies around the table this thanksgiving in Petoskey, where I saw my mother and stepfather after some months of not seeing them (as they live in florida and I in michigan) and my mother was having a conversation with a new mother about her son's birthing, which I guess is an appropriate thing to talk about when you're a mother but it seems a little invasive in my mind.  At any rate my interest was vaguely piqued and so I asked at what time was I born, and my mother answered almost instantly that it was shortly after 2 (which is right now actually).  And then she starts laughing a little to herself and she say that she remembers this because days of our lives had just ended.

And so my sister and I are ribbing her a bit for having been a fan of the lathery operas when she was younger, at which point I was devastated to discover that I am, in fact, named for the Days of our Lives character Dr. Neil Curtis.  "He was a serious hunk," apparently, and also a doctor, and I guess that's a relief, but today for the sake of this blog I looked up his character's history on a soaps website, and discover that he was also addicted to gambling, and like 5 different people tried to kill him, he had a stillborn son, two daughters from two different marriages (one of the two marriages occuring in prison [which by the way ended in a prison break that led to his new wife getting shot and having a bout of amnesia {again}]) and a third, illegitimate daughter to whom he relinquished all parental rights.

I guess he was some kind of super doctor, because at different points in his career, he performed brain surgery on the woman he loved (who is by the way also the girl he ended up marrying while she was in prison, and the surgery is what led to her first case of amnesia), artificially inseminated another friend's wife (but not with his bilk [that is to say, ball milk], which I think would have been a better plot twist than having it turn out to be some other handsome doctor from Chicago), and survived a bomb blowing up in his face, which apparently left no scars on his exceptional face.

The character apparently lasted some 20 years on the show, so I guess I should be relieved (should I?), and don't get me wrong, I like the name Neil, but fucking dammit, why didn't she just say she was really into After the Gold Rush at the time of my birth.  That would have worked for me.

My father doesn't actually know about this yet, but I think I'll tell him over dinner tonight, see if he's crushed or what.

-Neil.

as a side note, turns out people have been using my last name as slang for women masturbating somewhere in the world, or so says Urban Dictionary.  It's the "female equivalent of fap."