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You get home after school and go straight up to your room. It's only one day left until it's finally your 13th birthday and that means the difficulty of getting to the first floor without stepping on cake has been increasing exponentially for a week, reaching stupidly hard levels today and heading towards impossibility for tomorrow. But you've had years of practice in dodging unexpected obstacles and flying pies intended to hit you in the face, so you're able to make it upstairs unscathed.
But this isn't what's got your metaphorical knickers in a twist; what's making you really anxious to get over this whole ordeal is that tomorrow you will be given a name!
That should be great, right? Well, it isn't. It isn't because you already have a name, since all your friends got theirs earlier and you kinda jumped on the name-choosing wagon. And now there's the very real possibility of it being changed to something that you're sure will be awful, not to mention that you've already gotten accustomed to the ring of this one.
I mean, what if you got stuck with something like Osmund, or Humphrey, or anything else equally embarrassing? It's not asking for the moon, you simply want to get something sensible, like your dad who got Dad, or Mr. Patel the neighbor, who got Mr.
You will not stand for this, you decide. No, you are John, and you like being John, and you want to continue being John, and you have no idea of what's going to happen tomorrow so after deciding you've been lying in bed thinking the same thoughts for long enough, you do the only thing that comes to your mind to try and calm yourself down and you pester one of your friends.
-- ectoBiologist [EB] began pestering turntechGodhead [TG] at 8:46 --
EB: hi dave!
TG: sup
EB: nothing! just, um.
EB: you know what day tomorrow is, right?
TG: fuck yeah the big thirteen
TG: youre all grown up now kiddo
TG: need me to give you the talk or youre already sorted up with that
EB: geez no, dave!
EB: i am not a child and i didn't want to talk about sex anyway!
TG: sex
TG: what no
EB: what.
TG: dude i meant the talk talk
TG: look im sorry to be the one telling you this
TG: cause its probably one of those milestones in the dad son relationship that make you egberts wet just thinking about them
TG: and dad egbert is going to kill me via the sweetest food poisoning i could get for stealing his darling boys innocence before he could do it himself
TG: in an absolutely non sexual way cause maybe this got a bit out of hand but i was actually talking about the fat man of the white beard
EB: dave.
TG: so i guess what i wanted to say and i really didnt want to be the one giving you the trauma
EB: i know santa isn't real.
TG: oh
EB: yeah.
TG : thank fuck
EB: okay, so.
EB: do you remember getting your name on your last birthday?
TG: sure what about it
EB: um, everything?
EB: i mean did it feel right? like, did it feel yours?
TG: dude name giving was a formality i already knew my name
TG: like you do too btw youve been calling yourself john since forever whats this all about
EB: but i don't know how i can be sure!
TG: not being any other name that fits you thats how
TG: why did you choose john anyway
EB: okay so i wanted a name because it was stupid not to call myself something at least in my head, so i thought about it for a while, and did the logical thing in the end.
EB: i chose the most usual name i could think of because then there'd be more probability of it being actually my name :)
EB: like a hash table, right?
TG: i dont think you know how hash tables work but
TG: thats a stupid way of choosing a name anyway
EB: it isn't! it uses logic! and it turned out right as well.
TG: dude no you just picked random
EB: so how did you know yours before the naming, then, smart pants?
TG: i took quizzes
You stare at the computer screen. You close your mouth because for some reason it's hanging open. Probably unattractively. You reread the last sentence.
TG: i took quizzes
Yup.
You can't believe this.
EB: err.
EB: like, online quizzes?
TG: yup
TG: girl magazines said i was clearly an elizabeth kind of guy but the high and mighty internet disagreed and who am i to question It
EB: oh i don't know, i think you would have made a great elizabeth.
TG: ikr
TG: dude talk to you later bros doing something weird in the living room i fear for the xbox
EB: okay, bye dave!
-- turntechGodhead [TG] ceased pestering ectoBiologist [EB] at 9:06 --
In an amazingly unsurprising turn of events, talking to Dave hasn't been at all useful, but at least it has been entertaining. And you still have approximately 3 hours to kill before it's an acceptable time to go to bed. You refuse to sleep before midnight of course, you're almost thirteen after all! And you're not a loser, duh.
You would never admit to anyone the thing you are about to do under threat of being made to burn your Con Air poster on the 4th of July, but you rationalize it to yourself the following way: you are still anxious about tomorrow and you've also finally succumbed to the allure of your Dad's fine baking skills and thus have been stuffing yourself with cake for the past hour. You need a distraction. And that's, of course, where the quizzes come in.
First you try taking it seriously; it can't hurt, right? But after taking five times the same test because you keep getting My Little Pony names, you start thinking that maybe this was just Dave's idea of one upping you in your never-ending pranking war, and not an actual reliable method for choosing names. You ponder for a whole minute if calling yourself Pinkie Pie would be an adequate answering prank before deciding that no, no it wouldn't.
Wouldn't it?
No, definitely not.
By the time you've finished going through all the name quizzes you can find, the more ridiculous the better, the only thing you're clear on is that, even though Spock Egbert has a nice ring to it, you are still going with John.
Since it's almost midnight, and you figure you'll have to stop at some point anyway, you turn your computer off and go get ready for the night. You are in fact about to flop down on the bed, already in your most comfy blue striped pajamas, when you see a green light blinking on your phone. It appears someone has been pestering you.
-- turntechGodhead [TG] began pestering ectoBiologist [EB] at 0:00 --
TG: ill save the sick rap for tomorrow when youre awake but
TG: happy birthday John
You can't keep the goofy smile off your face.