What's in a name?

I really do like to indulge in self psychoanalysis at times, I must admit. This is something that I've come across many times in my life and I wonder if it's a female thing, or a me thing, or an all encompassing theme for humanity: the necessity of naming. Obviously I'm studying languages. It seems to make sense, psycho-analytically speaking, and is slightly ironic that I would end up here.

I've always thought that one's academic pursuits truly reflect more than just their interest in a given subject but perhaps bare witness to their entire life philosophy. After all, with all of the different possible majors, what makes one want to choose just one? With subjects that are very closely related, why do we make the choices we do? I always ask the engineer types, "why this field, or this field, or this field? You mean they aren't all the same?" Of course they're not and only the ignorant (guilty as charged) would fail to make the differentiation among them.

And so, as this applies to my life in general, why me? why here? what is this? what do we call this? what does this mean? what does this (the non-presence of the previous question's "this") mean? Interestingly, I, the Annie Hall obsessive compulsive type, has ended up in a field where what we say is as important as what we don't. Imagine this: I once wrote a term paper arguing why what the characters in Othello choose not to say was equally important as what they do. A whole paper on what isn't said. Oh the dreary, grey world of the implied and implicit.

This is the world of the everyday. Not just of Shakespeare or Donne. It's the world of you and me and it's where we dabble the most of our days awaiting the rare occurrence where we allow ourselves to be vulnerable, if only for a moment, to call a rose a rose and to bask in its' sweet fragrance.

And the show must go on.