I just had a cool moment with our dear friend Google. So, for my whole life, there have been a hell of a lot of "Amys" around. This went from being cool in kindergarten, to frustrating in third grade, to downright depressing by the time I hit college. I admit to often grilling my parents as to why they hadn't just walked through the hospital the day I was born and seen the 7000 other baby Amys in there and switched my name to Ernest Hemingway or Blondie. They both swear that they thought they were being incredibly original. Yeah, right...my best friend in junior high was Zoe Cecilia Hollywood - THAT'S original. Yet however greatly displeased I was with my name, I learned from a certain ex-boyfriend who shall not be named (but who changed his name to Marco Apollo, I kid you not...), that I could not change my name because, well, that is just admitting defeat. If you don't have enough spit and balls to rise above all the other people with your lame letter combination tag and make yours stand out and ring memorable, well, then you take the easy way out and name yourself Sting and hope for the best. Please. Thus, by the time I hit art school, the bastion of originality, I was finally like, okay, well, if I can't have an original first name, and if I can't change my name, maybe I can make my whole name something, er, more remarkable. So I started introducing myself using my full name. Amy Carpenter. This worked for a while. There were plenty of Amys still, but in my little universe, I was the only Amy Carpenter. That is until my best friend and my brother fell madly in love. It looks like they are probably going to be married someday, at which point, she will probably, most likely take his last name. Which means that she will then have my name. Because, you see, her name is Amy too. I recognize that this seems like a ridiculous farce, but you can ask several sources and they will confirm that it is, in fact, not. This would be my life. So, while I am for the loving relationship between my brother and friend, I must admit that I felt a bit defeated by the prospect of having my whole name become mass produced within my immediate family and then forever after confused within our similar circles of friends. Call me egotistical, but I bet that Jane Eyre and Frida Kahlo didn't have to deal with this problem. "Oh, dear brother, you are dating my best friend whose name is also Frida?...hmmm...but..." Yeah, no, that didn't happen. She might have been really sick, but at least she didn't have to worry about THAT. Thus, to this day no one gets mixed about about "which" Frida Kahlo. Mmmhmmm... So there I am, feeling privately, quite secretly dejected (it's pretty damn gauche to publically admit to coveting your own name. I know this...), that is, until I got a comment on my video blog today from an old friend from high school. He had somehow tracked me down and had found my vlog, and was then able to contact me. Yes, ME. Not some other Amy Carpenter in Idaho. Not the real estate Amy Carpenter who owns www.AmyCarpenter.com (bitch!), but me. He was able to reach me. I began to wonder how he did it - you know, how he found ME out of the billions of Amys and the majillions of AmyCarpenters. Alright, 691,000, to be exact. So I started Googling myself, beginning with abstract things like, "AmyCarpentervideo", and "AmyCarpenterart". That was all good, but I was like, "he wouldn't have known to put those adjectives after my name..." And I paused. And then I did it. I typed in just plain old "Amy Carpenter". All I can say is that there is some 13 year old Speedway Rider in the U.K. who had better soak up her last glory moments being the number one Amy Carpenter in the ENTIRE GOOGLE WORLD (which IS the world by the way, in case you didn't know), because I am NOT going to stay numero dos for long.