Together Again

I haven't done so, officially, and I have yet to get a great picture of the three of us, but the long-time "Blue" family is now together again, living in harmony and hilarity. Cyprus, Johnny, and me, so I'd like to officially shout:

WELCOME HOME, JOHNNY!

At one point in our 15 years or so of friendship, we had decided to rename ourselves something that would reflect our being a "family," so we chose the last name of BLUE. We also chose new first names. Debra became Cyprus, Johnny became Basil, and I became Otterly. And to add to the creativity, our last names were not the same, but still the same, so as to represent our absolute differences while still being our bonding factor, so...

Cyprus Blu
Otterly Blue
Basil Bleu

This silly, yet important, rite of passage came as a result of reading LOST FUTURES, by Lisa Tuttle, wherein a woman suddenly wakes up in a parallel version of her own life. She struggles throughout the book to get back to her "own" parallel, all the while finding more and more bizarre versions of herself and her life being lived right alongside what she had always thought was the only life she had. At one point, she thought she was "home," but found that her best friend called her by a strange name. The character discreetly discovered why she was called this other name. It seems that in THAT parallel version of her life, there was a common rite of passage around the age of 13 - 18 that had all children choose their OWN first names. This rite of passage was important as a process to free them from the ideas of their parents and family and to allow the children to grow up as their own idea of Self.

I loved that idea SO MUCH that we actually did it, ourselves! So, some people still call me Otterly, and if you are reading this, you can, too! I go by Otterly, Troy, CocteauBoy... no matter what you call me, it seems a cartoon character still comes to mind!