With the wedding just over a week away, I just wrote my new name for the first time, recording it for a mailing list. And I'll admit, it was a little startling: Nathan Kloostra Bierma. (My wife's birth name will become her and my middle name.) The name I've had since I arrived as a pink raisin at the Duke U medical center, the name that was on my kindergarten desk, my high school trophies, my college transcript--now it's split up and transformed, the most familiar set of words I've known are strange and new. It's something of a metaphor of the meshing our two lives in general.

But of course, this cognitive dissonance is exactly what half the population--the female half--has dealt with for hundreds of years, and recent attempts to inject some balance into society, i.e. the women's lib movement, are still not as far advanced as to prevent the awkwardness a woman faces in the milestone of marriage: changing such a foundational symbol of your identity simply because women were second-class citizens for all of human history, and in many ways still are. As an article at the wedding site The Knot, in a useful treatment of this issue, says: "The evolution of women's roles aside, society still expects you and your husband to have the same last name." As I wrote recently in the Det. Free Press, my wife and I are facing a lot of weird old-fashioned ideas as we scrape out a more balanced view of family in the 21st Century. It can be disorienting for the man as well as the woman.

Reading to catch up on:

What 'Friends' has to offer lit professors, from the Chronicle of Higher Education:

http://chronicle.com/free/v46/i41/41b00401.htm

If magazines are any indication, masculinity is in crisis, says Andrew Sullivan in The New Republic:
http://www.tnr.com/062600/trb062600.html

Good stuff from one of my favorite political journals, The New Republic (injecting a modicum of levelheadedness into the ideological knee-jerk world of political writing): Diane Roberts says speech codes aren't, as conventional wisdom has it, about supressing a particular ideology, but rather about broadly preserving college adminisitrators' imperialism. And Jonathan Chait on an unsung Bush coverup, about the budget.

Media bias update: scandal trumps ideology, says William Powers in the National Journal. I agree.
http://nationaljournal.com/powers.htm

John Updike in a Writer's Digest interview (from January, actually--I've been behind on my reading pile):

We're past the age of heroes and kings. If we can't make up stories about ordinary people, who can we make them up about? ... Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it's up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting. It's a rare life so dull that no crisis ever intrudes.

He may come across as a quasi-pacifist at times, but columnist Mitch Albom's Memorial Day 2001 column is poignant one year later:

Fiske keeps up with several Japanese veterans. He has asked their forgiveness, and they have asked for his. Last week, at the Pearl Harbor Memorial, the 80-year-old bugler lifted the mouthpiece to his lips and blew taps one more time. "I believe in defending the United States," he says, "but if you think war is going to solve anything, it isn't." And he's right. Taking pride is good. But Fiske knows this: On Memorial Day, the best way to honor those who have died in wars is to scratch away at the hatred that starts them.
http://www.freep.com/sports/albom/mitch27_20010527.htm

The latest evidence of the lunacy of diets is the finding of a new gremlin--or, actually, ghrelin, says the Seattle Times:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/134459712_hungry23m.html

Dick Cheney's disconcerting second job as scooter salesman, from Reason magazine:
http://reason.com/links/links052002.shtml

And although it would be sure to make the veep grumpy, I'm tempted to go see Second City's latest gag when I move down to Chicago--it's a spoof on post-9/11 corporate greed, in an attempt to hail the return of irony.
http://www.secondcity.com/01_01.asp?pid=01_01_02

I've been avoiding the Dallas Morning News because of its conservative bias, but they put me to shame with a sensible editorial this morning on Cuba:

Despite its name, there is nothing especially original about President Bush's Initiative for a New Cuba,....Longtime Cuba watchers will recognize it as the old U.S. policy dressed up to look new....It is time for the United States to acknowledge that the embargo has failed to budge Mr. Castro and that it has little chance of doing so. It is way past time for the United States to seek to trade with Cuba as it does with other Communist countries, such as China and Vietnam, in the warranted belief that economic interchanges can foster political change.
http://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/editorials/stories/052102dnedinewcuba.a066d.html

Another useful editorial on a supposedly urban-conscious proposal for a Wal-Mart in Dallas, and one more on ill-fated Edison Schools Inc. in Dallas.

Latest gem from The Onion :
http://www.theonion.com/onion3818/mexi-canadian_overpass.html