wedding road trip

Payback is a…

For five years, I made a living writing celebrity gossip and pop culture content. I earned a decent wage trashing the Britneys and the Mileys of the world without stopping to think about whether what I was writing was actually true.

And now… payback is a (fill in the blank).

Last week, an acquaintance on Facebook emailed me to saying he knew a writer who wrote a blog about our name change. The acquaintance went on to joke that maybe he’d considered taking the last name “Tesla.” It was a rude awakening to the sad fact that people who don’t know us well are going to make assumptions about our motivations for choosing the name Ford.

As a response, I’ve created an FAQ to answer some of the questions that have been circulating.

Q: Ford donated a car to your Wedding Road Trip. Did they bribe you to change your name?
A: Yes, Ford loaned us a car for our Wedding Road Trip. That being said, the name change was as much of a surprise to Ford as it was to our parents and friends. We haven’t discussed it extensively with anyone at Ford.

Q: But you get a free car, right?
A: Um, no. Roxy is being returned to the media fleet as promised. We might be able to purchase her at dealer auction in a few months- for those of you who are slow… purchase means that we’re going to buy Roxy.

Q: Oh come on. You totally changed your name to get a free car.
A: Pre-Roxy, both Chris and I went without cars for three years. Given the awesome public transportation system here in SF, we’ve never needed to own a car. By the way, if we wanted to capitalize on changing our name, we would have gone all out and taken Gates, Getty, Cyrus or Spears.

Q: Whatever. If you had driven a Hyundai on your Wedding Road Trip, you would have changed your name to that instead of Ford.
A: By your logic, it’s a good thing we weren’t given a SmartCar.

Q: It’s totally lame to name yourself after a product. I’m surprised you didn’t name yourself after Best Buy or Google, you’re that lame.
A: Ya, it was a real toss up between Ford and two other products we use quite often, Tampax and Trojan.

Q: I can’t believe Chris changed his name. If he were my brother, I would disown him.
A: He’d probably disown you too for being such a tool.

Q: What if you get divorced? Will you go back to your “normal” name?
A: We’ve been married all of two weeks and don’t plan on considering a divorce in the near or distant future. If we ever do, we’ll handle it in the same way that women have handled it for the last hundred years.

If you want to know why we really chose the name, you can always read about it here.