I'm someone who really believes in the importance of names and I spent a whole lot of time picking out the names for my boys. I think people really get an initial impression of you just from your name and if it's a bad name, it can really color their feelings about you.

I actually like my name - a lot, (well my first name anyway). Mainly because it's uncommon enough that there's almost never someone else in the room with my same name. And if there is, they almost never have the same spelling, because my Mom deliberately chose the masculine spelling. So I get a lot of mail addressed to Mr. Adrian. Kind of funny really.

The really strange thing is that it isn't really my name. I know you're like, what? Here we thought we knew you all this time and the blog name even says Adrian's Crazy Life, but my real first name is Elaine. It's Elaine Adrian, which is why my Mom chose the masculine spelling because it would have been a lot of E's and N's if she'd made it Elaine Adrienne. Boy, that looks weird to me now. What happens is that she let my grandmother choose my name and she named me after her best friend Elaine, but then my Mom didn't like it so she chose to call me Adrian instead. My Dad had the same thing with the backwards names, but he got smart and switched his while he was young. I don't think they had any idea what a big pain this was going to be in this world of pre-printed forms and official documents - ugh!

For a while, mainly in High School, I decide to make the switch and sort of "try on" Elaine. I thought it was a little more glamorous or something. So if you went to High School with me, you might actually know me by Elaine. But even after four years, it still didn't sound like "me", so I switched it back to Adrian when I started college. Mainly I realized that I might be meeting my future husband in High School and College and I just couldn't live with the idea of being married to someone who would call me Elaine for the rest of my life!

So, that's my big name story - what's yours?