This is incredibly stupid, but I happen to believe there's a lot of significance in a name.

I think it stems from the 5+ years I lived in Japan. You know how Japanese folks use Chinese characters to write their names? (They also use hiragana and katakana on occasion, but that's not the point here.) Well, when they were trying to make a chop or name stamp for me there was a bit of drama because my full name is stupid long. With my middle name we're talking 13 syllables. Nine without the middle name. Six if you use my nickname. That's six characters for one person when the average Japanese name is 4 max- 1 or 2 for the first and 1 or 2 for the second.

My co-worker, a nice Canadian lady who grew fangs when folks asked if Canada was part of North America, had just the right amount of syllables. And when they picked out characters, her name meant something like "Sky Castle" whereas mine was "Dirt Foundation." Which made me a little cranky. (Hey, everyone has petty moments.)

Everyone called me "Liz-chan", which sounded more like "Riz-chan" and was spelled "rizu-chan" but apparently there are a lot of those in DA, so I changed my entire DA profile, just so I could have a more distinctive name. And no, the fact that I'm doing this on April 1st doesn't reflect anything on my state of mind- I just happened to have a few minutes today to do it.

So if I added and then unadded and then added you again and messed up your stats, I apologize.

My excuse is this: I was not myself.