Josh ______ Folger

While I can find no good reason to go into any detail here about what happened yesterday(1), there is something of note for me to report. I changed my name today. Legally and everything.
Today being my 29th birthday, it is also the day my New York state driver's license expired, and so naturally I waited until today to get it renewed(2). I used this opportunity to enact the plan I decided on while waiting in the airport heading to my honeymoon: to change my middle name to Mallett, which is my new wife's maiden name. So now as far as the state of New York is concerned, I am Joshua Mallett Folger. And she is Sara Mallett Folger. Synchronicity.
In a previous generation, a wife assuming her husband's last name was relatively automatic, but over the years more and more womyn, for a variety of good and silly reasons, have made more and more choices to keep their given names into married life. I'm not going to pass any judgement on that, but I will say that it really meant a lot to me when Sara decided that she would take my name.
For something so ultimately arbitrary, it's a rather big life choice, and I don't take it lightly that she made it. For me (us), it's a commitment not just to each other, but to the new family that we have become. We are now the Folgers. Our kids will be Folgers. I know this might seem trifling to someone inexperienced in this way, but it's an amazing feeling.
So I got to thinking a little. Sara had a lot of identity in her previous name--Mallett--so what she did was drop her old middle name and keep Mallett as her new middle name. And if she was prepared to sacrifice part of that old identity in order to help make a new one with us, why shouldn't I? There is a family history in Mallett, a history that I am now also a part of. My middle name up until about 11am this morning was Ryan. Ryan is basically just a name(3), so why not drop it and embrace a piece of Sara's family history, even if mostly just symbolically?
I'm not the same person I was before I met and married Sara, so why not let my name reflect that? Sara doesn't have to be totally modernized with her name choices, but neither do I have to be old-fashioned.



1. After five weeks of rolling along at a reasonable pace of about five NFL bets per week, which were coming back at an exact 50% success rate, something unknown to me caused me to place 13 bets this week, just in time for a gigantic outlier of a 15% success rate performance. Of course. The gambling gods are still paying me back for one of the greatest days of my life: Friday, March 21, 2003, when as a college senior I watched from inside a couple of Las Vegas sportsbooks as my first eight bets of the day all won, and only the shot of the tournament by Drew Nicholas stopped me in the ninth game, which was UNC-Wilmington to win outright on a line of +390. I had my very own cheering section of degenerate gamblers who were actually pulling for me, and not simply the teams on the tv screens. Quite an experience. Sure beats looking down at a blackberry app as it refreshes with steadily worsening news of failure.
2. Did you know it costs $80 to get a license renewal? When the woman told me that, I asked if the name change caused the price to go up and she said no that was the basic cost. A license is valid for only five years. That's $16 per year. I think we ought to charge more to Jersey and Connecticut people who drive into the city, so people like me who only require a license for ID don't have to pay so damn much.
3. This isn't 100% forthright. Ryan was a normalization of Reinhart, which was my paternal grandmother's maiden name. So while it isn't technically devoid of meaning for me, it was a far far weaker bond that Sara had with hers. Anyway, I never ever used Ryan.