Self-Titled

I have a number of appellations, and I think the origins of all of them are interesting:

Khayah Delaine Brookes is the name given to me by my mother. She chose my forename years before I was born, when she read in article that mentioned some celebrity naming his daughter Chaya or something. She like the name and experimented with spellings until she found one she thought was aesthetically pleasing. It's a Hebrew name, derived from L'Chaim, which means "to life!" (Remember The Fiddler on the Roof? Yeah, like that.) My surname is constructed from my mother's first name: both my brother and I were named after her the same way Leif Erikson was named after Erik the Red. My middle name is my godmother's middle name. I like having a Hebrew first name, a French middle name, and a Welsh last name when I am probably none of these by descent!

repressed_genius was my first e-mail alias. It was inspired by the scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail in which the peasant, Dennis, shouts "Come and see the violence inherent in the system! Help, help, I'm being repressed!" It's self-deprecating, of course.

Zephyr Greene was the nom de plume I invented my freshman year of high school. I learned the word zephyr from a Dinotopia novel, and it began what has become an lifelong affection for interesting words for different kinds of wind: corrado, scirocco, passat, chinook...I collect them as I go along. Greene I chose because I wanted to use colour as well as maintain the same metre as my own name. My mother suggested the final e, which I like because I think it looks more ephemeral. For a few months I pretended to run an underground political group which I referred to as the ZGO, or Zephyr Greene Omission. I thought this was a great joke, because there was, after all, no such person as Zephyr Greene. The July before my sophomore year the ZGO organised one subversive, radical event: a Be-In at Belfair State Park which one other person attended. It didn't make even the localest of papers, even though I called them with a press release. We really showed The Man that day. I still have a couple of the flyers.

BloodyMuse was a name I used for a while, but have mostly abandoned lately. It's simply an anagram of "Moody Blues," a band I particularly liked in tenth grade.

Lastly, I occasionally refer to myself as The Rev. I was ordained by the Universal Life Church on 22 August 2002, and while I seldom invoke any of the rights due to me as a "man of the cloth," e.g. better parking spaces, I like to use the title now and again. When I get my PhD you can sure as hell bet I'll request to be addressed as the Reverend Doctor Khayah Delaine Brookes.