Hello! My name is Aria. I (unashamedly and probably inadvisably) use this name on the internet just as I do in real life, but then again, everyone who looks at my handle first before talking to me calls me "ari" instead. Plus, I chose the name. You won't be seeing it in legal writ unless I go ahead and legally change it. When will I legally change it? When I'm sure I can never talk to my parents again, or they die before I must resort to cutting them off. Hopefully they die first—I do not see myself being the confrontational type.
Well then, you might ask. What about what you were called? Before you chose your own name?
Apparently, I was named after my father's physics professor who died less than a year before I was born. I do wish I had a say in it, but I cannot blame my parents for this; it's not as if they could hold up some microphone to my mother's womb while I was inside and ask me what I would have liked to be named. From an acquisition standpoint, I doubt fetus me would have understood human speech. Maybe I would have recognized my parents speaking Mandarin, but that's about it. Personally, I was never particularly offended by this former name of mine (in the modern day it is called a deadname) on aesthetic grounds; it was my moral grounds that resisted it. At least my parents did not go forward with my mother's preference: "Henry". Now that is a name I am stylistically and morally offended by.
On another note, what does it mean to miss out on something? Personally, I am always scared to get judged for my lack of popular knowledge. Everyone tells me that it is alright that I don't know about these things, but I always subconsciously think that they may be judging me for not knowing X topic. In fact, tomorrow, I have to go drop off vitamins at my friend's relative's place in Taiwan (since I am in Taiwan for a short while). As for my friend, they want me to bring back Pokémon cards. Pokémon cards??? At the time, I had thought that Pokémon was an anime and a game that led some American kids across the border into Canada that one time. What do you mean, there are physical cards of these fictional creatures that people have so much fun with? More importantly, I thought it was just a fictional creature collection niche. No one informed me of just how many games associated with the topic there are. I get that that is a more light-hearted version of what I am trying to say, but it really does persist as a problem in almost all of my social life. Did you know that the Beatles (not the Beetles like I had previously assumed) had four people in it? Or that the weird song that goes "boom boom tss" is called "We Will Rock You"? Old habits die hard; I still call it the boom boom tss song out of habit. My French professor in freshman year even assigned me special homework at one point to watch The Matrix because I did not know what it was at all.
Unfortunately, for as long as I live, I don't think the theme of missing out is ever going to truly leave my side. I am but a flea in an open glass jar; the lid has been opened, but I cannot bounce higher than the lid that once impeded my path. No matter how much popular music I try to listen to, it never sticks. I find myself slowly forgetting everything about popular culture that I have learned in the past, and I am reduced back to my glass jar confines once I forget everything. In the future, maybe I may slowly chip away at this imaginary lid, and finally catch up to all the other fleas outside of the jar.
Or, perhaps, everyone is a flea in their own jar, and I have simply found myself in an absurdly small jar.