Trend Avoidance

We don't think of ourselves as trendy people. We don't watch American Idol, see Avatar, or buy iPhones. In fact, the more something becomes trendy, the less interested in it we often are. Of course, we're generally just not very interested in these type of things to begin with. Rush Limbaugh often states, wisely, I think, that when you see a media consensus forming, you should run the other way. That pertains to subjects as varied as "the Colts will easily win the Super Bowl" or "eggs are bad for you." We can be like that with trends.

For this reason, MacKenzie let out a cry of agony (maybe literally, maybe figuratively) when she saw this story in the paper over the weekend. It states that "owls are everywhere this season." Most aggravating is this example:

One of the stars from Bravo's "The Real Housewives of New York City," Kelly Killoren Bensimon, tinkered with the owl craze last year. She designed owl pendants decorated with Swarovski crystals.

(As you might guess, we don't watch that show.) Owls, of course, are MacKenzie's nursery theme. Of course, it could be that owls caught her eye because they're popular now. But we don't want to do what everyone else is doing. If she had seen this article before seeing owls everywhere, she might have gone with something else.

Another baby-related area where we fear trends is in baby names. We keep an eye on lists like this when weighing post-fetal names for Nigel. This is a more practical example of trend avoidance, though. We don't want several other kids to have the same name as our child. That creates difficulties in places where kids congregate. "Hey Bill! Oh no, not you, the other Bill."

We are not willing, however, to go to extremes to avoid this. We will not be selecting a "unique" name like Lemonjello or Bracken. Our avoidance of trends only goes so far, unless you consider odd kid names to be a trend of its own.