Laziness, as defined in the dictionary is, having an aversion to work or effort.
When I was growing up, one of the first things my mother ever told me was, “Before you can go out, you must clean up your room, finish your homework and do the chores we’ve assigned you.” After those obstacles were completed, I, along with all my friends from the neighborhood, ran frantically around the city playing baseball in the park, two hand touch football in the streets, all of this and more until the street lights came on. Then it was sprint home as fast as I could for dinner. That was almost twenty years ago.
Today, as an adult with a 14 year old child, I tell my son the same thing. The only problem is, he doesn’t go outside. He stays in his room and turns on the video game machine/computer. A machine that has games such as baseball, basketball and football. It even has a game called Tony Hawk’s Underground, where these real life athletes are pixilized to do skateboard and X game stunts they’ve worked on for years in real life.
I remember telling my son one time, “Ryan, why don’t you and your cousin go outside and play baseball with the other kids.” His reply was, “Can they come in here and play with us?”
When I heard this I thought, am I not doing my part as a father? Is he just lazy? Or, is there something more here?
I called my dad and he said, “There’s something more.” I was surprised. No, I was shocked.
My last name, which is Tanamor, was apparently shortened when my parents came to the United States from the Philippines. My actual surname is Tanamore, with a tilde on the ‘n’ and an accent over the ‘e’. I can’t show it to you because there are no keys on my keyboard to demonstrate.
When my father was looking for jobs, he would type out Tanamore and then manually fill in the tilde and accent with a pen. He did this until he found a job. But he didn’t find one right away. After being rejected by numerous companies, he dropped the tilde and accent, leaving it as Tanamore.
But he didn’t stop there. People would come up to him and ask if his last name was pronounced, Tanamore, with the ‘e’ sounding like an ‘A’ (tan uh more ay). Unfortunately, my father didn’t have a Teleprompter with him so he couldn’t show people. He would respond by saying, “No, it’s Tanamore (tan uh more).”
People would nod and my father would move on. This would occur more often than not, further decreasing my father’s ability to land a job because he was always stuck correcting the pronunciation.
When he returned home, he looked at his resume and decided to drop the ‘e’ from Tanamore, making it Tanamor (tan uh more). After I heard this story, I realized something.
What I realized was, my father didn’t drop the tilde, accent and letter ‘e’ to Americanize our last name, rather it was because my father was lazy. He had an aversion to work or effort, according to the definition in the dictionary. We were Americanized due to laziness.
That explains my son. To avoid putting the blame on myself as a parent, I chalk it up as being hereditary.
But what I’m afraid of is, with my father dropping letters and symbols from our surname, eventually it may continue, and pretty soon my name will go from Jason Tanamor to Jason T. If I have grandchildren, their last name may go from T. to some sort of weird symbol such as @ or *. Kind of like ‘The Artist known as Prince’ did when he went to the symbol. His grandfather’s name was probably ‘The Artist who works the corner of Fourth and Main just to make ends meet Prince,’ which eventually was shortened to ‘The Artist working two part time jobs Prince,’ down to ‘The Artist known as Prince.’ By the 1980s, he became just Prince. In the 1990s, he changed to ‘The Artist’ and then to the symbol.
So if your son appears to be lazy, look into your family tree to see if there were family members with names as long as proverbs. It may just be hereditary.
BYLINE:
Jason Tanamor is the Editor of Zoiks! Online. He is also the author of the novels, "Hello Lesbian!" and "Anonymous."
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