random incoherencies

status check - tired
background ambiance - television

when i was little, my grandmother used to tell me about how i was almost nicknamed tori. when i was born, my great-grandmother (the only great-grandparent left on either side and, to boot, one of the few grands of any form left by that point) told my mother that i was definitely a tori. it suited me, she said.

at the time, what the potential nickname suited was a squirmy mass of red face and blankets, as great-grams died when i was still in swaddling and booties. my mother was, for whatever reason, not enamored with the whole tori thing and had already decided on vickie for a nickname. v-i-c-k-i-e. so a vickie i became.

growing up, i always liked the idea of playing around with my nickname, coming up with as many variations upon the name that i could. the beginning of each new school year marked a new spelling, which always perplexed my teachers and classmates. i started school as vicky and switched the next year to vicki. i even tried vikki for a bit, but even i wasn't crazy about that one. so i'd alternate between the -ie, -y and -i until seventh grade, at which point i adopted vickie and just stuck with it. i have signatures in my various high school yearbooks in which classmates just wrote out my name any which way they possibly could - either to be on the safe side or to be appropriately wiseass.

as i approached college, i played around with the idea of going to tori route. well, it was actually prompted by my social circle at the time. they started calling me tori. i liked them, therefore i liked tori. while i introduced myself to people in school as tori, i seriously considered recreating myself as tori. new start, new nickname. so, from time to time, people would refer to me as tori and i liked it.

after the first months of school, though, the social circle fell apart (pretty much spontaneously combusted, actually) and i realized that the tori they'd refer to really wasn't the me i wanted to be. hell, they also called me "drew" (because at the time, i thought drew barrymore was an idiot and waste of oxygen), so i really should have picked up on the fact that any new nicknames from them was a bad idea. tori was too perky, overly trusting, even a bit overly dependent. tori sucked, vickie was much better. end of that saga.

last week, someone commented on my name and mentioned that she knew a victoria who went by rory. and i started to wonder if i could adapt to the name - if i didn't have the whole 23 years' worth of connections to the vickie thing. let's say i'd been called rory for as long as i could remember. or tori. or vix. whatever.

the point is, would it make a difference? would i be different than i am now? would i feel more outgoing or confident when it counts? would i even be a writer like i am now?

and would it be possible at this point to transform my name even if i wanted to?

it's another in the endless series of "what if"s - what if we hadn't moved to vermont when i was little, what if i'd gone to a different college. what if i'd gone out for college soccer instead of softball, what if i'd studied abroad and not gone the whole actf route junior year, what if i'd made a different decision about what to do after college. most of those what ifs fall on me - they were ultimately my decisions. but it's interesting to be able to pass the buck for once - to wonder about a decision made before i even knew what decisions were.

this is what happens when i SHOULD be writing in the notebook ...