Saturday, September 08, 2012
Just call me 牛腾然(niu teng ran)
I have had a few names in my life...
Started off with the most boring name of Terry Miller - how could I go through
life like that? So I got myself adopted by the time I was three by some
Christians in upstate New York who named me Terrell Adsit.
They tried to create me into some unnatural image of their beliefs but they
were not terribly successful so I went off and did the 1960s in Greenwich
Village, New Orleans and on to San Francisco, Eugene, Oregon and by 1969 I was
in Hawaii and somehow ended up in a cult group for about the next decade. They
changed my name to Brother Arthur so I trolled around in a cosmic fog with this
name. In 1980, when I was living in Towson, Maryland I took a trip to Auckland
then Sydney for an astrological convention. I met someone I didn’t like and she
ended up in Maryland a few months later and some stuff happened and we drove
across to San Francisco where I put her on a plane back to Adelaide, South
Australia and I went on to Honolulu. Well the stuff that happened back in
Maryland sort of started to manifest and soon she was in Hawaii and more stuff
happened then we needed to get married and I did not like nor was I able to
pronounce her Ukrainian name and she did not like the Adsit
name so we made up a new name. My mate Randy Dandurand
said “well you two think you are such new age people why don’t you call
yourselves new age?” We thought that was just dumb. I changed my name to Neuage and by getting married we both were Neuage. Needless to say we were not that new age and a few
months after son number one, Sacha, was born, whom I
helped deliver in a little hospital on the north shore of Hawaii, we were on
our way to Australia; Adelaide, South Australia. We had another son then got
divorced and I was a single parent for the next two decades stuck in a foreign
country with my Neuage name. I still have the Neuage
name but not to stop at name changes I now have a Chinese name.
What I have always like about neuage is that it is not too common. Can you imagine trying
to get any cred on Google or Bing or Yahoo and etc. with a name like Terry
Miller? I started making web pages in the early 1990s, soon after the World
Wide Web was invented and for decades there were no other neuage
in any search engine; just thousands of me. I loved it. Now there are some
wankers using the neuage name; there is a rapper,
someone hustling stuff on Amazon and a judge off in Nevada or Arizona – one of
those desert places. But there are still thousands of my pages coming up when
putting neuage on in a search. I just checked my new Chinese
name, “niu teng ran” – and there
are none in any search so perhaps I could start again – make thousands of new
webpages all under my new name. Damn I just remembered I have some work to do
for school – well maybe next weekend I will start…
Terrell:牛腾然(niu teng ran)."niu" sounds like Neuage, which means a family name in China."niu" also means
"ox". Ox presents diligent and dependable meanings in Chinese
culture. "teng
ran" sounds like "Terrell", which means the flying appearance. "teng" is a splendid
character in a Chinese name, which means 'up' or 'fly' as we wish our family, career,
money....everything goes up and up.
Not wanting to be the only one with
a new name Narda, who by the way did not become a Neuage or an Adsit and in fact
returned to her maiden-pre-last-married name, now too has a Chinese name.
Narda: 毕娜达(bi na da) "bi" sounds like
"Biemond", which is a family name in
China.na "means fascinating elegant, delicate and gentle. It is a good
word used in feminine names. "da" means
"super" and "fantastic".
(Thanks to Angelia Guam at our
school, Dalian American International School for our new names)
What I really wanted to share with
myself as a memory I could look at when I am unable to sleep, like this morning
when I was wide awake by 4 AM and decided to get up and go through my email I
did not have time to read this past week which took me until 7.30 to get
through and now it is 7:45 and I am writing this so either I am taking a break
from going through my in-box or I quit. I am too sleepy to keep track of what I
was doing. Anyway a silly memory… we were on the way back from Australia a
couple of months ago, flying China Southern, and I was looking out the little
round window in the back of the plane, taking pictures of something, probably
more clouds to add to my thousands of pictures of clouds form the past decades.
I suppose Narda was asleep leaning against our window
so no doubt that is why I had my camera with me peeping out the window. After
stretching and moving about; I had sat frozen in my seat for some dozen hours
and the muscles and bones were sticking, I went to the loo. Not to worry it all
seemed quite normal to me. After I had gotten myself settled back into my
nesting mode a stewardess quizzed me why I had taken my camera into the
bathroom. I couldn’t believe it. She said in her few English words that a
passenger had report me taking a camera into the toilet. It wasn’t my small
digital camera but my Nikon though why would it matter and what stupid human would
report such a thing? I just looked at the woman and turned away but low and
behold didn’t another twit come up to me and start asking why I took a camera
into the toilet. Then there was a third person with more English quizzing me. I
said I was taking pictures out the window then I needed to take a piss – they
left after that and no one asked any more questions. It was funny but I am
amazed at these people. I should have asked which passenger reported me and
then asked her, of course it would have been a female, and no male would be
that stupid, why she had such perverted thoughts.
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