2:38PM: mom has been filling a pitcher of water and taking it to the balcony to water plants. she said ‘you could be like fred astaire and gene kelly: ‘on the town.”

2:40PM: mom said ‘you want a half a bagel?’ i said ‘no thank you.’

2:58PM: mom said ‘you know what else? you might be going to mars in your lifetime.’ i said ‘y-eah’ unfocusedly while typing ‘yeah’ in a tweet response. mom said ‘or other cool places. as-yet-undefined.’

4:10PM: paid all my parking tickets. i had five. bad news. mom just said ‘plus! you’re so good with a gun! you could be a sniper,’ laughing like ‘just kidding.’ tried to pay ticket online from april 22, for using cell phone while driving, but website isn’t letting me, i think because the ticket looks like ‘LAST NAME: Matlock FIRST NAME: Margaret MIDDLE INITIAL: Megan Boyle [‘Boyle’ is ‘scrunched’ above box that says ‘LOCAL POLICE CODE 088’].

tried all combinations/variations of my name that i could think of. seems like they either didn’t enter the ticket yet or she…i don’t know what they could’ve thought my name was. my PA license says ‘MARGARETMEGAN MATLOCK BOYLE’ because there wasn’t enough space to write ‘MARGARET MEGAN.’ i also tried ‘MARGARETMEGAN.’ i don’t know why the cop wrote ‘MATLOCK’ for my last name. i simply. don’t. know. can’t believe my parents named me ‘margaret megan.’ that’s like naming someone ‘william bill’ or ‘richard dick.’ but they always called me ‘megan.’

here’s a story about my name: somehow i didn’t end up with a social security card until i was eight or nine years old. at that time i had been spelling my name ‘meghan.’ that’s how my parents showed me it was spelled. my birth certificate says ‘margaret megan matlock boyle,’ though. i think i didn’t like it that my middle name was ‘matlock’ and nobody was paying attention or…i don’t know. they let me write ‘margaret megan (no ‘h’ for some reason) boyle’ on the social security card and i ended up with a social security number that didn’t correspond with the name on my birth certificate. it was 1993 or 1994 so things like that mattered less, i guess. pre-9/11 style. in 1997 my family went on a carribean cruise and i needed a passport. i went with my dad to a place where they took passport photos. i’m assuming he brought my birth certificate, and maybe there was some kind of conversation between the photographer and my dad about how ‘margaret’ and ‘megan’ are essentially the same name, so i ended up with a passport that said ‘megan matlock boyle,’

when i got my driver’s license in 2004, the maryland DMV required the name on the license to say the same thing as my social security card.

so the names on my forms of identification as of 2004 are:

•  birth certificate: margaret megan matlock boyle

•  baptismal certificate: margaret meghan matlock boyle (this one doesn’t really matter but why the ‘h’)