The meaning of urunimi

On a summer day in 2004, I was thinking and playing with words, as usual, when I noticed that the letters u-r-u-n-i-m-i sounded like the phrase "you are you and I am I." I was 18 at the time, so I thought that was very clever—admittedly, I still do now but to not as great of an extent. The phrase appealed to me because my mom would often say the she doesn't do certain things, or dress a certain way, so why should I? I would answer "you are you, and I am I." Unfortunately, that didn't change her mindset that I should be like her, and I was discouraged from individuating.

All of my friends from high school had already been on Xanga for some time then, but since my family didn't have Internet access at home, I spent very little time online, so there was no time for a blog. Still, that summer, over our free dial-up, I finally decided to create a Xanga site. Instead of my usual handle, I wanted to use urunimi. To my disappointment, when I came around to create an account, someone else had already took urunimi, and they beat me by just four days! (There was no activity on the site ever.) I had already thought of "urunimi" about a month earlier, so if I had acted then, I would have gotten it. I had to resort to using underscores in some way that made sense, hence uru_n_imi.

In Fall of 2006, I was taking a course on the psychology of dreams. One of the articles in the reader introduced Fritz Perls's Gestalt approach to dream interpretation. (Now, I always thought Gestalt therapy was rather weird, with its role playing and all, but if you find it helpful, that's great.) On the first page there was a footnote mentioning the Gestalt prayer:

I do my thing and you do your thing.
I am not in this world to live up to your expectations,
And you are not in this world to live up to mine.
You are you, and I am I,
and if by chance we find each other, it's beautiful.
If not, it can't be helped.

Note: the Gestalt prayer is more of Perls's personal belief than Gestalt therapy.

At the time I saw "You are you, and I am I" and thought, Oh wow, someone else also came up with this and has given meaning to it. It's not just me being weird! After that, I kind of forgot about it.

It wasn't until last summer that I came across the Gestalt prayer again. I was facing the decision of moving across the country to pursue a degree that I didn't care about, because it would help prepare me for a career I didn't want, so its meaning was more significant to me than ever. Unfortunately, I succumbed to my father's pressure.

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Last week I read that the Hebrew transliteration úru means "wake up." I thought that was an ironic coincidence, since a few people and I sometimes refer to this site as "uru," and I'm usually sleepy. Nimi better not mean sleep, I thought. When I ran into a friend who knows Hebrew, and asked him about the meaning of uru. He said it is the plural command form of "wake up." The male command would be urah, and the female uri.

I asked "nimi doesn't happen to mean anything, does it?" It doesn't, but to my surprise, he said numi is the female command to go to sleep. (He mentioned the lullaby Numi Numi. A translation of it can be found here.)

Then he proceeded to switch some of the letters of urunimi to urinumi, which would then sound like telling a female to "wake up go to sleep." We both thought it was funny. So I guess the next time the username urunimi has already been taken on a site, I could use urinumi?

Originally posted on Xanga 7/6/2013 at 8:38 PM