Last weekend I did something very momentous and took another step closer to fully becoming me.

Now, before you think too much in the existential sense or that it involved some hallucinogenic-induced soul-searching, know that this step involved my Twitter name.

The fine people at Twitter actually make it really simple to change your username without affecting anything else about your account. All of your followers and the people you follow stay the same, and pretty much nobody notices.

So, with that knowledge, I subtly switched from chwilbur to cjhannas, a move that better integrates the “brand” that is my online presence. More importantly though, it should help reduce the chances that I will ever have to explain to another person how the heck I ended up with the name chwilbur.

My short answer for years has been something like, “It doesn’t mean anything now, and didn’t mean much when I first signed up, it’s just too much of a hassle to change.” Thanks to nobody using AOL Instant Messenger anymore, and my slow migration over to this site for the blog and a somewhat similar gmail address, I don’t have much use for the chwilbur moniker anymore.

And that’s good, because the true story — the long one — is a bit of an effort to tell, and like the short answer, really has no good substantive reason behind it. But in honor of retiring yet another chwilbur, here goes:

When I was in high school, let’s say freshman year, I actually started with usernames that were well grounded in my actual name. But back then, it was super lame and un-creative to do that, so I started trying to come up with something clever. After several failed attempts involving Pepsi (my favorite drink at the time) I gave up.

Then one day I was at my friend MR’s house, and the movie Contact was on TV. If you’re not familiar with Contact, it’s a sci-fi movie based on a book by Carl Sagan. As the credits rolled, MR said to nobody in particular, “For Earl.”

(confused silence)
(more confused silence)

He pointed at the television and again said, “For Earl,” and we waited. Finally, near the end of the credits a dedication to the author popped up: “For Carl.”

(pure delirious laughter)

A week or so later, I called MR’s house to see if he wanted to hang out. As the phone rang for the third and fourth times, I remembered he and his family had gone out of town and definitely were not going to answer the phone.

No matter. The answering machine picked up, and in whatever goofy accent I decided to try out that day I started with, “Hey Earl…this is…uhhh…Wilbur…” And so I accidentally became Wilbur, and thus chwilbur, a name that as I said clearly meant nothing then and means even less now.

Long live cjhannas.

I’d like to also take a second and note that this is the 400th post on the blog, a number that seems pretty staggering considering the first year only had 20 posts. It’s incredible to look back and see how much my writing has changed, and even the difference in the kinds of things I write about.

Last year I did sort of “best of” posts for 2010 and 2009. Tomorrow I’m going to dig up a list of the better ones from the early years, when things were slightly more, um, interesting.

I thought it would be neat to look at posts Nos. 100, 200, and 300 as a quick snapshot of the changes. But the first two ended up being about books I read, so it’s not as interesting an exercise as I thought it might be. I linked them for what it’s worth.

Hasta mañana.