preposition

around: No, my son's name is also Tiler.

My name really isn't that difficult: ty-ler. Two syllables. No silent letters. True, it relies on that "sometimes" vowel 'y', but frankly, if you substitute the more common vowel 'i', i won't be too upset, and you even get a common english noun out of it: tiler.

In fact, i once looked my name up in one of those "here's what your name means!" books that exist to reassure people with common, boring names like "Chris" or "Steve" that their names really mean fanciful, grandiose things like "descended from Christ" or "apple of the Pope's eye" or "Queen Elizabeth's G-spot". These very same books reveal that my name, "Tyler", means "Tiler; one who tiles."

Fanciful![0]

My name was uncommon when i was a lad; i didn't meet another tyler until Tyler DeWitt in fourth grade. But as i've gotten older, there are more and more tylers, most of them quite a bit smaller than me. In fact, tyler is the 9th most popular baby name of the 1990s[1], ascending with a bullet from 50th in the 1980s and a dismal 214th in the 1970s[3].

In spite of my growing popularity, i have long known that any cashier, waiter, or other order taker who wants to know my name for the purposes of getting foodstuffs back to me at a later time is certain to be thrown off. This leads to this exchange, every single time:

order taker: "Ok, and will that be for here or to go?"
tyler: "[whatever]"
ot: "Ok, and what's your name?"
t: "Tyler."
ot: "What?"
t: "Tyler."
ot: "... How do you spell that?"
t: "T-y-l-e-r."
ot: "Ok, your total is..."

I don't really gain anything out of these exchanges, and in the name of Most Holy Efficiency, i try to communicate my foodstuff ordering as straightforwardly as possible. Word games are for conversation; getting the fuck out of the way so the next person in line can go is what the rest of our lives are for. Hence, by a simple white lie, the gears of progress are lubricated, and the whole nasty business is reduced to this:

order taker: "Ok, and will that be for here or to go?"
tyler: "[whatever]"
ot: "Ok, and what's your name?"
t: "Joe."
ot: "Ok, joe, your total is..."

Nearly a 50% reduction. People become executive vice presidents over smaller optimizations in workflow.

This strategy has its shortcomings, however. Once, i visited a Jamba Juice in aptly-named SOMA with Chris "Hoss "The Hoss Man"" Hostetter (whose various name-related problems would require further volumes to explore). The ordering exchange went as normal, except that the cashier misheard my name:

ot: "Ok, and what's your name?"
t: "Joe."
ot: "John?"
t: [very, very stupidly] "No. Joe."

The hiccup was introduced through no one's fault in particular, except that we were both standing in a Jamba Juice, an establishment characterized by its echo chamber-like acoustics -- created largely by its everpresent wooden floors -- which is also filled with whirring, ice-chopping blenders ALL THE TIME. So actually, the exchange probably went more like this (it happened over a year ago, so i'm reconstructing):

ot: "Ok, and what's your name?"
t: "Joe."
ot: "What?"
t: "Joe."
ot: "WHAT?!" t: "JOOOOOOOOOOE!!!"
ot: "John?"
t: [very, very stupidly] "No. Joe."
ot: [suddenly high-pitched] "OOOOO-KAAAAAAY!"

The problem is that i've been using my psuedonym for so long that it's habitual. Correcting someone's misapprehension of my psuedonym is as automatic as correcting a garbling of my actual name. But obviously, the name itself doesn't matter; it's just a placeholder. And frankly, i can track the making of my Citrus Squeeze With Vita Boost from freezer to blender to styrofoam cup all by myself, without any words being exchanged at all, thanks.

Another problem with my psuedonym is that it's ethnocentric, and my habitual usage of it isn't sensitive to context switches.

On an otherwise pleasant, mild day in Santiago de Chile, i was fighting a nasty sore throat/cough/fever situation that i would smuggle back to the States in a week or so. I was travelling alone, since Mike had gone back home from Buenos Aires a few days before.

I was still getting the hang of travelling solo, and was having a really hard time getting a grasp on what to do with all this time to myself. I have never been good at meeting others without some pretense of conversation (and, besides, i am terrible at small talk in english, to say nothing of my functional but un-nuanced spanish). I was still unclear on what to do in a city i had already explored for over a week.

So i took to walking. I walked like a motherfucker. It filled up my overabundant free time, and fit with my romantic idea of travel. I felt like as long as i was walking, something could happen at any moment. I felt like i was soaking in a foreign country, a foreign culture, smelling roses, appreciating unusual architecture, setting myself up to stumble across a fantastic surprise in the form of a hidden graffito or a new friend or a prostitution ring.

Usually, i felt like this. On this particular day, i felt like i was sick, i was tired of fucking walking, and i was hungry. And yet, i was walking in a broad patch of grassy park next to a residential area. My target was the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, which i found, but which still yielded no dining opportunities. So i kept walking. Consulting my map, i found that i was within a few[5] blocks of a Telepizza.

Telepizza is a local chain of fast food pizza restaurants (complete with television commercials and delivery scooters). It isn't actually on the map; i knew where it was because we had eaten there before, during the skiing phase of the trip. Since i'd eaten there before, i was hesitant to return (generally preferring something new), but a comfortable, known-good meal of greasy, america-derived food was exactly what my ailing body craved. Besides, they serve the pizza with little pizza-slice-shaped cardboard things tha are, i guess, supposed to serve as pizza eating utensils. I had never seen these before, and perhaps more importantly, neither had anyone else in the group -- even the actual Italian, Federico. Perhaps the reason for this is because they are utterly useless.

I stumbled into the Telepizza and ordered exactly the same pizza that we'd had before (peporoni y tocino -- my recent love affair with bacon on pizza seems to stem from these two seminal Telepizza experiences), when i was broadsided by an exchange that you have surely seen coming:

tomador de orden: "¿Bueno, y e'eso pa' lleva' o pa'qui?"[6]
tyler: "Pa'qui."
tdo: "Bueno, ¿y cómo se llama?"
t: [muy, muy estupidamente] "Joe."

As soon as it escaped my mouth, i knew i had committed a potentially fatal error. However, the cashier merely paused for a moment, drank in my overwhelming gringuidad, and (correctly, i would soon discover) entered my name: J-o-e.

I was lucky, though, because what was i going to do if she didn't understand? My meager spanish can only begin to tread upon the syntactic cartwheels needed to explain the idea of a fake name used for ordering purposes, to say nothing of plumbing the cultural depths of what having such a name would mean. But short of this explanation, what could i do?

t: "Digo, mi nombre es... uh... José."
tdo: "¿José? No se parece 'José'."

Even worse, on those occasions when i was meeting someone for real and wanted to tell them my real name, there were problems:

amigo nuevo: "¿Cómo te llamas?"
tyler: "Tyler."
an: "¿Tai... lair?"
t: "Tyler. Se escribe, te-i-... digo, i griega -ele-e-ere."

Even the spelling of my name is complicated in spanish. First, it relies on the inoft-used spanish letter 'y', which is actually pronounced in its letter form as 'i griega'. Until just now, i didn't even know that the word rendering of the letter 'y' doesn't even have the decency to include the letter 'y'. Second, the word 'y' in spanish means "and", which is obviously very common, but this is pronounced the same as the letter 'i'.

So when i go to spell my name, i think 't', which i translate to the letter 't', which is "te". So far so good. Then there's a 'y', which by itself, my brain insists, is pronounced "i". But now i've spelled my name "Tiler", which while interesting in rewinding us several paragraphs, seems unfair to me and dishonest to my amigo nuevo. Hence the corrections, the stuttering, the heartache.

None of this has any place in line to order a pizza. So, belatedly, god bless the cashier at the Telepizza for saving us all the trouble.

This crisis averted, i went upstairs to the dining area. The dining area was comfortable enough for a fast food place, but i was quickly reminded that it could be quickly rendered uncomfortable by the absurdly loud jukebox in the corner. I dug from my zippy-cargo-pants pocket the Agatha Christie novel i had picked up from a sparse collection of english language books in the Buenos Aires-equivalent of a Barnes and Noble and commenced to read. Pizzas arrived regularly from downstairs and were delivered to patrons at the various tables. Soon, i was the only one with no food, and my grumbly stomach urged my head to swing around at the sound of any steps on the stairs.

The next pizza that arrived was my order: i recognized the size and -- more importantly -- the bacon from fifteen paces. The pizza carrier approached hesitantly, stared down at the receipt, and with furrowed brow looked up at me:

pc: "¿Joe?"

Except that instead of the anglo "Joe", he produced the literal spanish reading of the name: "Ho-ay."

pc: "Ho-ay?"
t: "Si. Gracias."

Given the many potential language pitfalls, the situation could have been much worse. But as it was, i enjoyed the vast majority of a medium pepperoni and bacon pizza all to myself, plowed through some more of the continued mystery-solving adventures of M. Poirot, guarded my eardrums against whatever latin pop the jukebox had to offer, and left for my next adventure. Still walking, still sick, no longer hungry, but with a renewed sensitivity about and awe towards my place as an outsider.