MMMiii!

A lot of people have asked me, why Mi? (Pun not intended.)

Sarah’s asking for Name stories for her collaborative group blog project, so here it is.

I’ve blogged about this …. oh. that reminds me. Hardly anyone replied to that. Might as well give the answer now. It is important, however, to read the link I just linked.

I started using Mi around 2004 I think. But before that. .. I was using michan.

Well… I’d better just make a timeline or something. This is just mainly for IRC Nicks though except for the nick midori because that goes a long way back. I still use some of the, until now like for my pen name and artist name for singing karaoke.

1993 ~ 1999: midori / midori-chan
1999 ~ 2004: misanthrope
2001 ~ 2003: misan
2003 ~ 2004: michan
2004 ~ present: Mi
2005 ~ present: Mi* (Miz, Mizu, etc)

To explain each nick…

midori
Midori (みどり、緑) is the Japanese word for Green or Blue. Green is my favorite color even if it’s not very obvious. I think my aunt just came back from a business trip or something in Japan and she had these Learning Basic Japanese books and travel guides and stuff. It got the whole family (not really. just us 6 kids who live in this house I live in now–Me, my 2 brothers, and 3 cousins) interested in it. Another reason we got interested in it is we were anime otakus already by then. Well… maybe not otakus… But we were really fans of anime. My brothers and cousins drew anime-style. We rented VHS and BetaMax tapes from the video rental store (It was called HBO back then) of anime and stuff.

[Trivia: I watched my first Hentai when I was 8. It was La Blue Girl. Just don’t ask me which one or which episode or what happened. My brothers found me in my hiding place and kicked me out of the room.]

I only started acknowledging green as my favorite color in Grade 3. We got asked in class what our favorite color was. I never had thought of it before then. Green seemed to be the most unpopular color in the class, so I said Green. In the end, only 2 out of 40 in the class had Green as their favorite color. I still remember the other girl. Her name was Valerie Cruz. We ended up joining Girl Scouts together.

midori-chan
The -chan is like an affectionate … umm.. extension. I can never explain what to call it. But yeah, it’s like an affectionate thing. Since I wasn’t really THAT good in Japanese or didn’t understand -chan, and just heard it from anime a lot, I just thought that it sounded cute, so I called myself that.

[Trivia: Sara’s cousin still calls me midori-chan I think. He called me that on Sara’s 18th birthday party. This was years after I’ve stopped using it.]

misanthrope
I was reading Reader’s Digest and it was one of the words in that … word thing. I thought the word Misanthrope sounded nice and fitting. I was going through an emo phase in my life. I still use it until now as my pen name when I write something.

misan
This is just a shortened form of misanthrope. On IRC, people get lazy and start calling people by their initials or shortened form.

michan
Well…. Some people got even lazier but wanted to be cute, so they started calling me mi-chan. I took the nick michan because I didn’t want the -chan as the cutesy -chan but like just a plain nick michan.

By this time I’ve started on my Basic Japanese at school… and learned more about -chan. I’ve also I started going to #Japan and started knowing more about the Japanese culture even better. I learned that Japanese people don’t refer to themselves with a -chan so I stopped using it.

Hence,

Mi.
From Mi, Ideas Are Born. :D (Parody to “What we need is hatred. From it, ideas are born.“)
I like the letter M. I like Mi too.I thought about Mi = E in music long after I’ve been using Mi. That’s cool though.So I can sing “Mi, the name I call myself.”

Online, people have been calling me Mi, Mimi, miii, and so on. I have this >10-second voice clip of my friend Oscar screaming MIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIiii and it’s my nick alert on irc. bwahahaha…
Ok… that’s all for now.

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