GODDESS

When I first came to UCSC [Fall 1991], I went with Carrie/yertle to a Unitarian conference in Oakland. Out of the hundred or so kids there, there were five Heathers... it got very confusing. People starting dubbing them all with different nicknames... I was wearing a long white flowy crepe dress, which I guess reminded someone of the stereotypical 'greek god/dess' dress, because they started referring to me as "Heather the goddess from Santa Cruz" which got progressively shortened over the weekend to just be 'goddess'. I'd never had anything approaching a nickname before. I thought it was incredibly funny.

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About a month later, my hallmate [this jock guy] was telling me how he kept in touch with his girlfriend at Stanford, by 'talking to her on the computer' and how there was all this cool stuff you could read about that people were posting to 'newsgroups' from Russia, where not even reporters were getting info! [this was 1991] He got so excited, he took me and another friend down to the Porter lab, and signed us both up for accounts. He told us to use a 'nickname'. I'd never had another nickname, and I figured I would be able to use the account to talk to Unitarian friends, so I picked 'goddess'.

I had NO idea how much trouble that was going to get me into.

I was completely unaware that people used logins as NAMES and that picking a female was a bad idea.

When Peter Lasell finally showed me fnet, there was another girl using 'goddess' there, so I had to find another nick. I wanted something that sounded similar, so I picked 'Godiva' since my hair was the thing people most often remarked upon, and it shared the first three letters with my login. I used that for ages, until I was suddenly one day overwhelmed by the beautiful simplicity of Q's nick. I started using 'G' which would occassionally confuse people [since the G character looks a lot like a Q] and I'd get the wrong /ms and be all amused. I started using a lot more G nicknames at that point, everything I could think of.

Meanwhile, I also got constant random writes and chats from people: "Are you REALLY a goddess?" People with inane logins themselves, and I always had a fun time fucking with them. I started piping

 

Eliza through the talks, so I could leave them and let them chat with her for a bit ;)

After we got wonderland.com, I switched my login to be 'alice' to go with the domain name. I was rather bored with the 'goddess' attitude and constant haranging I got. [not that it wasn't deseved, I just felt like toning everything down, then.] So I just started using 'heather' when I was online, for a few years. After a while that got to be TOO boring for me... and my current boyfriend, Tim, observed in a tender moment that 'heaven' sounded a lot like heather. I thought it was a nice meld of 'goddess' and 'heather' and rather ironic.

So *curtsy* that's my story I guess.