What's in a name? A whole lotta stress...

I'm in a bit of a pickle. No, I'm not talking about dealing with parental reactions to my impending aliyah (Mom's okay with it now, Dad's still pissed and bribing me to go anywhere else in the world.)

I am, of course, talking about the name-change issue. Well, it's not really an issue, but rather an option.

I was considering changing my name to some Israeli name that starts with a Samech or Sin, but I figured that that'd be disrespectful to my parents and also it'd be really embarrassing to not be able to pronounce my own name correctly.

If I change it to Sammy סמי I'm going to have the problem of my legal name being a boy's name. It's bad enough now when people see "Sam" on paper and assume I have a penis, but now I won't have the luxury of being able to point out, "Well, technically it's Samantha."
The other problem though is that Sammy, as pronounced by Israelis (at least the ones I've met), sounds almost exactly like "Semi." Which, of course, makes me think of trucks. I don't think Israelis will make the connection, but I don't want to think of myself as a type of truck trailer any time someone calls my name for the rest of my life.

What's wrong with keeping my legal name "Samantha," you ask? Well, the problem is that Israelis constantly spell it incorrectly, with a tet, because they don't understand that the "th" isn't pronounced TAH. So for the rest of my life people are going to be calling out my name, like if they're taking attendance or if I'm in a waiting room of some kind, and they're going to say, "SemenTAH?" Which would start to piss me off after a lifetime of that. And which, of course, brings up the other issue with remaining a legal Samantha, which is that when you transliterate how Israelis say your name, it looks like "Semen" is in your name, which is just gross.

Well, as I said once before in Israel, I really should just save myself a whole lot of trouble and change my name into a single letter, kind of like an extreme form of Cher's simple name.

More later,

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