Syaffolee. S. Y. Affolee. Sya. The name, Sya, has surprisingly spilled over into my real life. As I've mentioned before, my roommates can't pronounce the "th" sound in my name (they've told me it's way too difficult) and can only compensate with the "s". I can't complain. Some people have butchered the four letters in my name in far worse ways. At least when my roommates say it, it sort of sounds like my Chinese name in Cantonese, except without the "ng" sound--"See Nga". (In Mandarin, it sounds more like "Shu Ya" with "Shu" said with the tongue against the roof of the mouth.) My parents had attempted to do the Tiffany-Tyffani thing. Usually it's supposed to be "Nga See". But in a way, I'm glad they switched the words around, because Nga See makes me think of translucent soup noodles.
The Affolee part came later. During high school, I was the news editor for the paper. This may sound impressive, especially on a college application, but in reality, I was just doing the dirty work. The editor-in-chief got to call the shots and I ended up attending frivolous affairs like football games and homecoming festivities that stretched my boredom tolerance to its limits. Perhaps it would have been more interesting if I had been allowed into one of those student council meetings where hush-hush cat fights between the cheerleader types would erupt, but like wrestling, I suppose that would have grown boring too.
So with all this boring-ness going on, the paper needed extra stuff to fill leftover space. The editor-in-chief, in all her wisdom, suggested that the staff come up with something creative, like poems. For two days, I seriously contemplated on submitting a poem. Poetry is a totally different creature than a news article or an essay. It's deeply personal, in a way that an essay can never be, and so I needed a way to dissociate myself from that particular work. The initials were easy--after all, my name did mean "sea poem" but then I needed a last name. Submitting a poem to the school paper seemed like a foolish endeavor--so I looked up the word "fool" in the blue English-French/French-English dictionary I had bought at a dirt cheap discount store.
I ended up not submitting any poetry to the paper. I realized that even though what I wrote was primarily concerned with imagery, nature, and vague philosophical and spiritual questions (nothing personally embarrassing), I was like the other teenagers who wrote love/angst verses in one very important respect: I was prolific, and 99.9% of it was dreck. The paper did end up printing some poems, although not mine. The poet who had contributed was one of the news reporters that I edited. In his spare time, he was an aspiring country music writer. So what did he write?
Yep, mooning love poetry.
Of course, I can't complain. It would have probably resonated better with the student populace than my obscure scribblings.
