Kim

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To me, having an innate aversion to a name is irrational and illogical. Yet I have it.  In my early days the name was Felicity. But at least I could explain why I disliked Felicity—I disliked Felicity. Felicity Smith was a girl who followed me in every primary class we attended. She latched on to me like a limpet and it was only when we went to separate secondary schools that she stopped. Felicity was never popular and was as a consequence lonely and morose—which only added to her problem and in retrospect my own: the guilt I now feel for the way I treated her which ran along the lines of I don’t want to be associated with you because you are bad for my image.

That said, I still have an aversion to the name Felicity. But at least I have an explanation as well.

But how do I explain Kim? Why do I not like the name Kim? Is it again that I associate it with the traits of some people I do know of that name though not intimately—Kim Kardashian, Kim Dotcom and Kim Jong-un? Maybe.

I am such an evil devious bugger that I even went on the Internet to find other people named Kim whom I could dislike. What I found surprised me—not the number of people, but the number of sites devoted to the name Kim. There is of course the omnipresent Wikipedia listing, but there also any number of sites listing famous people named Kim (they all seem to come up with the same three I did) and one site for “Men named Kim”.  There is even a site for people who wished they were named Kim. For those of a scientific bent there is a Web-thesis on the gender-neutrality of Kim.

None of these sites adds much to the store of common knowledge but they perhaps illustrate the fact that you can find anything about anything on the Internet, and that there are too many people with too much time on their hands. Like me.

I will now go and do something useful.  Before I go, however, there are some riders to this Fryday. They are:

1.     I know very few people named Kim.

2.     The only Kim with whom I have a close acquaintance is one of the loveliest people I have met and of whom I have the greatest admiration and adoration.

3.     None of the other Kims I have mentioned have invited me to any of their parties (in the case of Kim Dotcom he seems to have invited everybody else) and thus allowed Fryday to form a different opinion of them. Until they do…

And finally...Felicity. My hope there is that she has grown to live a full and happy life.  That won’t assuage my guilt, but it will at least allow me to think she has the strength and the depth to smile benignly and knowingly on my apology.
Happy Valentine’s Day Felicity, wherever you are.