Wichita Kansas and Other Rejected Kids Names

In life, it is important to find something that you are good at and continue to do that one thing until all joy and creativity have been completely beaten out of the process and the only thing that remains is a profitable, tangible, homogenized product.

Think of the great bands of our time who started playing for love of the music but have now mastered their particular brand of rock and roll to the point where we all know that we are being manipulated before we even open the cellophane packaging. All you have to do is see the monochrome cover of the latest Weezer CD and you know what you're going to get and how it's going to make you feel.

Or how about your typical dining experience at any restaurant that has more than one location? I haven't been surprised by a single thing at McDonald's since I was three (unless you count the occasional joy I feel when I see that someone has cleaned the restroom in the past year). But I've eaten a ton of those little apple pies.

I know this seems backwards, I know it flies in the face of what any of us would want to do for our life's work, but this is how you make money in the real world. You find something that interests you, you master that skill until it no longer interests you, then you do that skill for as long as someone will pay you to do it.

The payoff is the paycheck. Nobody, (nobody I know anyway) actually does any job for any other reason. And this, I believe, is why most people fail at doing the things they love. Many people fail in the attempt to achieve. But there are also a great number of people who achieve but fail in the process of achievement to enjoy whatever it is they have chosen to do. It is very rare to find someone who achieves his goal and is satisfied by his achievement.

So what am I good at? What can I do really well? I can come up with baby names that will most certainly be rejected by my wife. Boston, Baltimore, Courage and Kitterman are all names that have landed with a resounding thud on the cutting room floor of my wife's editing room. She does get final cut after all.

One might say I've failed to achieve my goal of naming my kid something offbeat. On the other hand I may have achieved my goal of sounding comically pretentious and self involved to a large number of my friends and family in order to illustrate my opinion that a kid's name is important but it's not that important and somehow in the meantime just stopped thinking it was as funny as I once did. Either way, My child is not going to be answering to the name "Jedediah Durante," any time soon.

One other small point is that the pay for coming up with original baby names really isn't that good. It would seem I've managed to get the formula backward: First you make an unbelievable amount of money for doing something mildly entertaining or useful to others then you name your child after your favorite mode of transportation. And here I thought all it took to become a big time celebrity was the willingness to burden your child with a socially awkward handle for the rest of their life.

I turns out you have to be willing to drive whatever creativity and ingenuity you might have left in your soul into the ground by releasing "Home Alone 12, the Director's Cut," or whatever the equivalent of "Home Alone 12, the Director's Cut," is in your particular industry. And all the while you've got to pretend to like it or they won't let you make "Home Alone 13."

Maybe I'll end up naming my next kid Kevin.