november 2025
pronunciation 🗣️ and birds 🐦⬛
.⠀🤠
🫲👖🫱 welcome
⠀👢👢
“Kahvi”
The nature of my name is that no one will pronounce it correctly on the first try — unless they’ve practiced beforehand.
Someone pronouncing my name confidently and correctly when they haven’t said it in a while makes me feel good. The act of caring to remember the pronunciation is very meaningful to me.
I appreciate when people ask me about the pronunciation too. I think it’s a decent conversation starter! And it gives me a chance to try one of my many phonetic devices:
- kahvi as in covenant
- kahvi as in a covey of quails
- kahvi as in kahvi-lovey-dovey
I’ll usually follow up with:
Emphasis on the uh sound instead of ah. Kuhv as in dove.
As I’ve gotten older, mispronunciations bother me less. I’ve mellowed out about it.
In a short, fleeting interaction, I’ll use my easy name — Roger. This usually applies at Starbucks. I don’t feel at all like a Roger, but no one has mispronounced it so far.
I think everyone deals with this to a certain degree. There’s always going to be a gap between how you’d like to be addressed and how you are addressed. Nickname, middle name, emphasis here, ‘I go by Dave not David’, etc.
I feel grateful for my name because it sets me apart.
(this is a pseudo-continuation of this post)
hawaii
Ashley and I went to O’ahu from November 6-10 for our four-year anniversary! It was one of the best trips we’ve ever been on. Here are some pictures we took!
how to not be tracked
Recently, I participated in a talent show and gave a quick presentation on how not to be tracked online. It’s linked below and I’ve also posted the slides here!
LISTERS: A Glimpse Into Extreme Birdwatching
While in Hawaii, we started watching this documentary. I love this documentary.
It’s about two boys around my age who decide to live in a van and see as many birds as they can see in a calendar year. Charming and educational and hilarious.
It’s the type of adventure that makes me optimistic about our generation, y’know?
Landman
Essentially it’s:
Billy Bob Thornton slinging insults into an iPhone 17 in the middle of the Texas desert surrounded by pumpjacks while the sun sets in the background
Pretty entertaining! This show does a great job of filling out my worldview since I voted for the Green Party.
misc
- look at the Size of Life
- do rhetorical questions make someone’s writing more engaging?
That’s all - see you next month!!
The name thing. If it weren’t for a kind of implicit western cultural training, my name - Michael - should be impossible to pronounce. If you had never seen it before, would you say Mitchayl? Mishaelle?
But it’s pronounced “My-kle” and owes its crazy spelling to a Hebrew derivation.
I am the beneficiary of a mass international education campaign.
Unlike poor Kahvi, Siobhan, Saoirse, Joaquin…