By any other name

I've always gone by nicknames. My family has one main one for me, and several derivatives thereof. I was so well known by one in high school that it's on my class ring, and I made sure it was on the ballot when I ran for student government (since name recognition and publicity are everything). Even now, years later, if I run into someone from high school and they don't recognize me right away, I reintroduce my self as "Jinxie. Or HighSchoolNickname." It's almost always immediately followed by "Oh yeah! That's right! Hi!" I have a handful of friends that probably don't even remember my real name, and instead call me by a nickname I've gone by since college.

To me, nicknames are usually a way of being friendly, a way of saying "I like you! Be my friend!", or a term of endearment.

One nickname I can't always wrap my head around is when someone calls me by my last name. It's weird sometimes because my brother always went by that in high school. Our sister was often called Lastname's Little Sister, and I always went by my own name or the aforementioned nickname. I'm getting used to it as my moniker, as I have a group of friends who have taken to calling me by it. Only one other person in our group is also called by her last name, but it's kind of out necessity as we have another person with her same first name.

Yesterday, a guy unaffiliated with this other group called my by a variation of my last name, and I quite liked it, even if just for its originality. However, it got me thinking that if a guy calls you by your last name, it is a friendly term of endearment, but is it also a way for saying that you're just one of the guys?

I like having guy friends, a lot, but I don't want to be "just one of the guys". I will always secretly hope they will realize that I'm also a girl, and quite a pretty one at that and that they should just ask me out already.