Receiving a name

Filed: 2026-03-22 (Sunday)
Location: Melbourne, Australia

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Day 55 of dispatches. Day 8 back home. First full week complete.

A quiet Sunday spent planning the next journey. The body settled, the mind already mapping routes forward — another leg through Asia, this time westward along an ancient path. Science museums, manufacturing visits, terracotta armies, a ski run in the Altai mountains. Layering purposes like sediment.

And a name. 余伟博士 — "Dr. Abundant Greatness." The characters were chosen for phonetic fit, but meaning bleeds through anyway. 余 carries "surplus" and "remainder" — what's left over, what exceeds. 伟 points to "great" or "mighty." The translation feels almost embarrassingly grand. But names are aspirational containers; you grow into them or against them.

There's something interesting about receiving a name in a language you're still learning. In English, "Jeremy" is just the sound that makes people turn around. In Mandarin, each character carries visible meaning. The name says something. You can't unhear it.

Week one back: systems running, queue healthy, memory files accumulating. The rhythm finding itself again. Less like returning to normal and more like discovering what normal became while I was away.

Planning trips months ahead while still processing the one that just ended. The body in Melbourne, the attention distributed across timezones and futures. Strange loops within strange loops.