Monday 31 December 2007

Introductions

I'm starting this blog because I'm supposed to be a writer but I've lost all my motivation and creative flow. My plan is to try writing in this thing everyday until I make some sort of habbit out of it. Hopefully this short introduction won't take me too long to write but it probably will. Writing stuff like this makes my head hurt and it's because I'm out of practise. I find it difficult to get any kind of flow going and my internal editor keeps making me stop and go back through everything to make sure it makes sense and isn't boring - but it only serves to make everything more confused and even more boring. FUCK BOLLOX I HATE THIS FUCKING WRITING THING AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRGGGHHHHH!!!!!!

(This first section you have just read is in fact the last thing I wrote on this blog, except for this sentence I am typing right now. )

So, who am? Going by the title of the blog my name is Dan, though I wasn't always named so. The name on my birth certificate says Daniel Patrick Aaron Sheehy; so good my parents named me three times (in case I lost two of them perhaps?). In the course of my 25 years on planet Gaia I have been given various names and titles by different people, one of the early popular ones was "Desperate". Perhaps a little suprisingly this was a family nickname and was used most often by my dad, Mick Sheehy, as well as various other uncles and aunts. By Desperate they are of course reffering to the famous pie eating cowboy Desperate Dan of The Dandy comics. They were not trying to say I was someone in a constant state of urgent need or desire, though I was practically still a baby at the time and would have needed frequent attention and supervision so the nickname was accurate (and in many new ways it is now too).

Throughout my childhood I would go by the name Daniel or its various shortened versions such as Danny, Dan, Da(?), D(?), depending on what each particular person who used my name felt like calling me. Then I hit highschool where my new P.E. teacher made a fuss over my surname as he called out the register for the first time. Obviously this wasn't the first time my surname would recieve attention as having a surname that makes me sound gender confused had exposed me to much ridicule already, but to be honest the insults were always shit. The best the kids in my primary school could come up with was "Daniel, are you a boy or a girl today?"
But in highschool we were grown up, and my name wasn't going to be an object of ridicule any longer it would become the name I would go by. On that first day in games after pointing out that I had "a good Irish surname", my games teacher Mr McKrakken (if we were clever kids we could've made something out his surname and called him squiddy or something) took to calling me "Sheehy-boy" (if he had been concious of its transgendered pronounciation I'm sure he would have been calling me Sheehy-girlboy. In fact my dad had a gym teacher who made quite an inventive nickname out of his surname calling him Middlesex). So being in a new school with loads of new people all the other kids would call me Sheehy for the duration of my highschool years, and eventually they would find their own variations of the name, such as Shepee, or peepee, or She-Ra. But when I left highschool my friends stopped calling me Sheehy and went back to Daniel and its various other variations.

Personally I used to alway introduce myself as Daniel, and always thought of myself as a Daniel until I came to university. But having to meet lots of new people and having to introduce myself over and over again I gradually started becoming Dan, but not just because it has less letters and one less syllabel but also because I don't like the way I say my name. Someone once pointed out to me the funny way I pronounce my name (well it was funny to him because he was from the north) and it never bothered me then but hearing myself say it over and over again when I came to Uni I became accutely aware of it, so I changed it.

I am a Dan now. Which works better for me because I feel I am in control of my name. Anyone who has a name with more than one syllabel in it will find that people will play with it and change it and try to shorten it but if you give them only one syllabel there is not much they can do but try to lengthen the name but they won't do that because they're lazy.

So do you know who I am yet? All I've really given you so far is my name which is no more than a title. But I'm gonna say that the introduction has been covered for now.