1 post tagged “pai”

having a name like Baks lends itself to weird situations most times. blessed with my gay-sounding phone voice, my girlfriends’ moms would think i was their daughter’s new boyfriend. when i moved here, i just got heckled about it a lot. “who’d name their daughter Box, anyway?” people would ask. Canadians couldn’t pronounce the Manila A (as in ampalaya), so i ended up being called Box. or (grimace) Becks. to make things even weirdler, the word box can be used to refer to girlie bits in North American slang. oh and btw, my best friend’s name is Pai (pie). we were driving to somewhere one day, and she suddenly burst out laffing at the realization that all we need is to make friends with a girl named Pussy, then we could be on our way to stardom as the Vagina Slang Trio.

I have to thank my mother, Luz (pronounced Loose, which she immediately changed to Lucy, else most people would think she had slutty tendencies), for my very unique name. Lucy was quite creative, she took the first two letters of my names, VAlerie CHristine and the first letter of my middle name (Sabido), and announced to everyone that my nickname from now on was Vachs. Which everybody promptly mispronounced as Baks. (Filipino are funny that way, with our P’s and F’s and V’s and B’s) And so the name stuck. My aunts,who had a soft spot in their hearts for me, called me Bakking (a type of sigay shell in the Philippines).

needless to say, i’d get teased a lot about my name from the beginning. my siblings would call me baks tabagaks (smelly, salted fish). the girl that lived next door called me bakukang, bakukak or sometimes, bakukek, all variations of the same word, meaning, leprosy lesions, of all things.

In high school, my classmates tried to make make name sound nicer - bakster, baksterrific, baksilaria (?), bakstos, bugsy, skab. (these were the ones i knew about. i'm sure there's funnier-sounding ones that they'd called me behind my back.)

I became Tita (Aunt) Baksi to my first nephew, Toby (who I called Toady when I was mad to get some revenge for all the name-calling I had to endure).

nowadays, I go by Baks. or Val. Val took a little getting used to. used to think they were calling my dad (Valeriano, who I got my name from).

these days, all i’m looking forward to is naming our first child. we’re thinking of lucas (boy or girl!). sounds like mucus. hahahaha. revenge is sweet.