Cosmolore: the universe has bestowed a good boy on us

I didn't know if I could track this down, since I don't have that Mastodon acount any more) but I did! So here's how I ended up with this name.

I'd forgotten that QueenMollyBones told me to use this name; listening to her is always a good idea! mxsiege is someone I only know from Mastodon; I don't even think she knows it's her offhand comment that meant I have this name!

I've had to strip the @ off the beginning of names used in replies, because DW's formatting fucks with that, but hopefully it still makes sense if anyone comes across this. It's mostly for me anyway.

mxsiege@octodon.social 5mo [five months ago; this conversatin happened on the second of August]
Watching a 30s movie, don't see enough people called Cosmo anymore.

hollyamory@mspsocial.net 5mo
mxsiege I'm SO TEMPTED to call myself this now...

hollyamory@mspsocial.net 5mo
brb, changing my name to Cosmo. ;)

QueenMollyBones@mastodon.social 5mo
hollyamory mxsiege Dooo it...

hollyamory@mspsocial.net 5mo
QueenMollyBones I think it suits me and my space obsession. :)

QueenMollyBones@mastodon.social 5mo
hollyamory mxsiege Is perfect for you.

mxsiege@octodon.social 5mo
QueenMollyBones hollyamory So my favourite Cosmo is Cosmo Brown from Singin' In The Rain. But i grew up thinking it was the coolest name.

mxsiege@octodon.social 5mo
QueenMollyBones hollyamory It's such a 30s hollywood star name.

hollyamory@mspsocial.net 5mo
I've been informed that Cosmo is the name of a dog in Questionable Content. It is apparently a Good Dog. This is yet more reason it seems like a good thing to change my name to. ;)

mxsiege@octodon.social 5mo
hollyamory Just in case: "Cosmo is the English form of Cosimo which was brought to England in the 18th century by the second Scottish Duke of Gordon, who named his son and successor after his friend Cosimo III de Medici. Means "order, decency" from the Greek Kosmo"

hollyamory@mspsocial.net 5mo
LB: if Cosmo means "decency" I can't change my name to that, my friends would laugh themselves to death. ;)

I was thinking of it like "cosmos" like "the universe" but of course that comes from the same meaning: "order" as opposed to chaos, as in everything that has rules we can come to understand about how the universe works.

[7/366] flowers and pronouns and Cosmo

7 In the U.S., each state has a “state flower.” If you’re in the U.S., what is your state flower?

Pink and white lady slipper, also known as the "showy lady slipper" apparently which is hilarious to me because nothing is less Minnesotan than a showy lady.



It just occurred to me that while I've known this fact since childhood in a pointless-trivia kind of way, I didn't think I'd ever seen one. The website tells me it's one of Minnesota's rarest wildflowers. So I guess that'd explain why! Also why I don't feel any attachment to it and it's just a trivia answer.

I realized this morning that I was doing so badly yesterday I didn't even answer the question.

6 Tell about an “Aha!” moment you’ve had.

I have little ones all the time. A couple days ago I was once again wondering if, despite my continuing lack of attachment to any pronouns, I should start telling people to use "they" about me because I am sad at how often I'm still ending up on friends' mental lists of women rather than the mental lists of people who aren't cis. But I was anxious about it because I really deeply feel like "they" is no better for me than any other pronoun, so it'd kind of be a lie, and it'd mean that everyone who defaults to "she" for me, which is everyone, would feel like they fucked up if they called me she and I dont think they have! But then I wondered if I was too worried about them at the expense of not being worried enough about myself.

So I got myself all tangled up.

So it's lucky I had a friend to say, basically, hey actually the default should be "they," like it should be for anyone for whom a specific gender isn't known. The default isn't "she," even for me.

It's a bit arcane and probably boring, but it was a genuine little "aha" for me and it made me feel better.

--

I think my brain is using gender noodling as a fairly harmless way to distract me from some more harmful habits of thought lately. Because today I also decided to change my name on social media...or rather, add to it.

I'm thinking of Cosmo as kind of like a middle name now, I'm not getting rid of Holly and it's still a perfectly good thing to call me. (My middle name, on the other hand, I've never liked and am delighted to replace.) But Cosmo is good too!

It started as a joke when someone said she was watching movies from the 1930s and more people should be called Cosmo (because of Singin' in the Rain) and I said now I wanted to change my name to Cosmo. Along the lines of "that'd be a good t-shirt/band name/etc." (and it isn't the first time I've found a name better than my name, including that of soeone who thinks my email is her email! also a trans friend of mine, when she was still an egg, adopted my non-existent married name Holly Hickey for a while in a similar "haha I'll just have this joke name!" way so I feel like this is totally one of my Things).

Because I'm always saying things like this on a whim I didn't think much of it. But this one didn't go away; since then it's been rattling around my head and today it suddenly really wanted to get out of my head into the real world.

Putting it on Facebook especially made it seem like the real world because most of the people I actually know are there (and it gets me away from my wallet name there, which is something I'd been wanting to do anyway). And the response has been really sweet and heartwarming. I'm delighted to hear people apparently think it's a name that suits me.

tl;dr: Hi you can call me Cosmo, but you can also still call me Holly. Both of them are my names.