When I was doing my CIT training and during my first summer of counselling at a Girl Scout camp, my camp name was Leprechaun. I got it when I was 13 because I’m tiny, Irish, and a little on the feisty side. A lot of the international staff couldn’t pronounce it, so they called me “Lepi”.<\/p>\n
When I started college that fall, I needed an email ID and I didn’t want to use “jmccabe” because that would be boring. Most of the Jennifer derivatives had been taken and “leprechaun” was too long to use. The server at UCSC is “cats”, so a lot of people have cat-related email addresses. (The various servers are actually named for T.S. Eliot characters like “rumpleteazer” and “mungojerrie”.) I was going to do “lepi_jen” but that one was rejected, so I did “lepi_cat” instead.<\/p>\n
When I acquired my group of friends (many of whom I’d met the year before when I’d been visiting my friend Cougar at UCSC), there were about 8 Jen’s. So… they nicknamed us and my normal nickname was “Lepicat Jen”. Well… that soon evolved into just “Lepicat” (though Cougar still called me Leprechaun) and someone even created a special signature symbol for me. My other nickname was “Kitty Cat” because I can sleep almost anywhere and I had a habit of crashing on people’s beds in a ball while waiting for them to take me down to Long’s to get my antibiotics. (I had almost a constant case of bronchitis my first year of college.)<\/p>\n
So… that’s the story. My college friends still call me “Lepicat” and it’s happened where I answer the phone and the voice on the other line is screaming “Lepicat!!!!!!” (This would be my friend Brian Green, who I will be seeing for the first time in two years on the 18th while Jon is in his Approval interview.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When I was doing my CIT training and during my first summer of counselling at a Girl Scout camp, my camp name was Leprechaun. I got it when I was 13 because I’m tiny, Irish, and a little on the … Continue reading