Nicknames

I had originally planned on writing about all my adventures in Europe, but the task was so daunting that I gave up on blogging altogether. Now it's been six months since I went to Europe and blogging about Europe now would just be silly. So I'll just write about current events in my life instead.

I moved back to Utah in June to attend BYU yet again and it has been exactly as pleasant as I had suspected. I moved in with some random guys that I didn't know and much to my horror one of them is named Ben. What makes matters worse is that we get along and hang out! Having two Bens live together and hang out caused instant problems and confusion.

The other Ben is currently in a movie for which he had to grow a beard. To remedy the confusion caused by us having the same name we decided that he would go by Hairy Ben and I'd be Tall Ben. That's all well and good, but Tall Ben was promptly shortened to TB. This is the normal reaction when my roommates introduce me to people as TB: "TB? Doesn't that stand for tuberculosis?" to which I reply, "Yes, and it means Tall Ben too." I like being called TB.

I have a super awesome teacher from the Dominican Republic whose English isn't perfect. On the first day of class he was struggling trying to pronounce my last name and finally settled on guessing that it was pronounced "Swahili." Since then I've been known in that class as Swahili. One day in class we were discussing one of the many differences between English and Spanish and at the end of the discussion my teacher said, "In the end English and Spanish are both good languages...and Swahili too." It was very endearing.

The girls from the Relief Society in my ward recently had a Relief Society sleepover (a.k.a. gossipfest) at the Bishop's house. I was latter informed that at one point the girls were gossiping about me and decided that my last name reminded them of the song "Shipoopi" from The Music Man and they have now started calling me Shipoopi.

I've never had so many nicknames in my life. So if you randomly see me walking down the street feel free to shout TB, Swahili, or Shipoopi and I'll probably turn my head.