Morjes!

Welcome to my blog. I write about fitting in, sticking out, and missing the motherland as a serial foreigner.

Just call me Commando Coalfire Palin

Back in August, when Sarah Palin was announced as John McCain's running mate, my mom sent me an email with a link to her Wikipedia entry. I read through it quickly and noticed a lot of remarkable things about the woman. In a gutsy move, McCain had chosen for his VP candidate someone who was not only a woman, but a woman with children. And not only children, but FIVE of them. Young, still-at-home children. Still-at-home children, one of whom has Down Syndrome. Wow.

And yet, in all honesty, the piece of information in the article that jumped out at me the most was the names of her children.

I wrote back to my mom and said, "I don't know if I can, in good conscience, vote for a woman whose children are named Track, Bristol, Willow, Piper, and Trig, even if she IS from Alaska."

I thought I might have been the only one to notice the kids' names, because I'm a nerd like that, but I was wrong. As I'm sure you all know, that bit of trivia earned plenty of attention in the press in the weeks leading up to the election. The Baby Name Wizard even chose it as one of her top baby name moments of 2008. It also inspired a Sarah Palin Baby Name Generator - just call me Commando Coalfire Palin from now on.

Now there's another Palin baby name that is sure to be in the news in coming days, albiet on a smaller scale: Tripp. Yep, that's what Bristol Palin reportedly named her baby boy. He'll fit right in with his uncles and aunts.

The funny thing is that in some of the intelligent analysis on this pressing issue, these wacky names from Alaska have been grouped in with some of the naming trends seen in Utah. I lived for a few years in Utah and it's true, there are some frontier-bending first names being forged there these days. It is, after all, the place where a man named Bronco has three young sons named Cutter, Breaker, and Raeder.

I guess my time spent in Utah among the cutting-edge namers has affected me more than I think. It didn't take very long for Sarah Palin's kids' names to not seem so strange to me anymore. The girls' names, at least, have even grown on me a little.

Just don't look for a little baby Loin Falcon anytime soon (that's Magdalena in the name generator).

2008: Books I loved, and read

Christmas Eve in Tucson