the idea: create my superheroine-alterego, ThunderDream

The strangest things come up in conversation when you’re eating dinner with a good group of people.  For example, tonight we went from the events in Boston to the education system to meta materials to fundraisers for South American countries to names.

I, once again, spun the story of how I got my name.  The same story that my father is oh-so fond of telling.  Here’s my version:

My father always loved the name Miranda.  When his first daughter, my older sister, came along he wanted her name to be Miranda.  However my mother, who had been teased as a child and was therefore very sensitive to teasing, didn’t want to name her daughter Miranda because it was possible she would be teased because of the Miranda Rights.  (You have the right to remain silent, everything you say…).

And so, while conversaing with some friends, they struck upon the Gaelic name Mairead for my older sister.  But when I came around 3 and a half years later, the matter came up again.  My father’s pick for my name, apart from Miranda, was Aisling.  (It means dream in Gaelic).  But after three and a half years of people butchering Mairead, my sister’s name, my mother couldn’t face a lifetime of correcting people saying Aisling phonetically instead of as it’s supposed to be pronounced: ash-leen.

Thanks to her theater background, my mother agreed to name me Miranda if I was born during a thunderstorm.  (Miranda was one of the main characters in Shakespeares play, the Tempest).  And as fate would have it, the night I was born was the biggest thunderstorm of the year which is how I ended up with the name Miranda Aisling.

My friend Allie was quick to point out, at the end of this story, that my name is basically Thunder Dream.  No one has ever come up with this and so of course as soon as I came home I had to spend a couple of hours banging our a drawing of myself as THUNDERDREAM because little things like working on my thesis can wait, ThunderDream can’t.