Is your name really Aja?
"Aja" is, of course, a pseudonym. My real name is significantly longer and more interesting. I blog under the name Aja for a few reasons. For one thing, I think the internet gives people the prerogative to name themselves mostly as they please, to take on certain personas, etc, although I will not be adopting any persona in particular. For another thing, like any internet citizen I worry somewhat about privacy, and in my opinion it's just easier and perhaps slightly safer to adopt a pseudonym than it is to try to shorten my real name.
What or who is Aja then?
Aja is many things: according to a Google search, it's the name of a restaurant here in Chicago, a lounge/night club in Tampa, a bistro in NYC, an acronym for the American Journal of Archaeology, the name of a porn star, and many more. Perhaps mostly prominently, however, it is the title of (and second song on) the most famous studio album (from 1977) of Steely Dan, the 70s jazz/rock band that was the soundtrack to far too much of my adolescence. According to frontman Donald Fagen, "Aja" was the name of a friend's Korean girlfriend. It is a lovely but twisted song, album, and pseudonym.
Pronunciation? I'm stuck on the "j"
This is where I indulged the artsy/hipstery side of me a bit in picking the pseudonym: Fagen and his co-frontman Walter Becker pronounce it "Asia," like the continent.
