It seems like this has been an exceptionally nostalgic summer, lots of seeing old friends and revisiting old places. I'm not sure how this happened, but I'm not complaining.
One of the things about seeing old friends is that some of them call me D. J. and some of them call me David. David is my first name, but most people know me by my initials. It's easier that way, because when you grow up in Brooklyn, there are just too many Davids to keep track of.
One day, and let's say this was about June 30th, 1989, I was on my way to sleepaway camp for the first time. My parents dropped me off at the bus stop, and I walked over to the first person I saw.
<i>"Hi,"</i> he said, <i>"my name's David, what's yours?"</i>
"D. J., call me D. J.," I said. I had been plotting this for months. Everyone I know from school knows me as David, because that's my name on the record books. My university doesn't even officially know my middle name. But let's face it, there were just going to be too many Davids at Jewish sleepaway camp. And when I was 9, I thought it was a really cool name. Now everybody knows me as D. J. (it took me about ten years to standardize on that name) and only some of my family members and the occasional government official call me David.
The problem now is that every time somebody calls me "D. J." (or "Deej," which is also acceptable) I have this faint feeling that I'm a strange nine-year old child again and people are just indulging me with my stupid self-given nickname. It doesn't help that there was a stupid sitcom with a female character named DJ (I am warning everyone now, stop making jokes about it), or that I've noticed that almost anyone else I see called "DJ" is probably a loser (see <i>Bowling for Columbine</i>).
It wasn't always this way. Elvis' drummer was named D. J. Fontana. There was a police captain in the NYPD in 1912 named D. J. Sullivan. Ernest Hemingway wrote a story about an old prospector named "D. J. Smith."
I put it to you people, should I start calling myself "Dave" or something?
