The Origin of Dudo

Yesterday, in my Starcraft essay, I talked about where 509 came from. The tougher part is explaining the whole "dudo" thing. Honestly, I can't give a great explanation about how I got that name. I can give a story relating to it, but none of it really makes sense.

It goes back once again to freshman year. You can picture me back then, when I had longer hair which I parted in the middle. I was also even skinnier than I am now, maybe about 125 lbs to my imposing 140 lb figure today. Not to mention entering U of I as a Koehler Outstanding Freshman in the ECE Department and James Scholar (based on my SAT/ACT score). The point is, I was a bigger nerd back then, if you can imagine that.

Anyways, I was kind of the "smart, dorky" one out of all the ~509~ boys who were all about picking up girls and stuff. You can ask them and they would tell you the same. It was all good though, cause we had so much fun that year and we all got along like bros for the most part. And I could tell so many stories about what kind of dumb and crazy things happened. Sadly, no girls ever noticed me, but it was ok since I would probably be too scared to talk to them if they did. Basically, I am the same person now except I have shorter hair and 15 more lbs of weight.

So back to the story... for some reason, one night Will and Andy decided to rent The Big Lebowski from the front desk of FAR, and the three of us started watching that movie in our room (509). I'm not sure if those two had been drinking that night or something, or more likely they were just being obnoxious like usual, but they weren't really paying that much attention to the movie. As for myself, being sober and not having Attention-Deficit-Disorder, I was actually trying to follow the story and hear what they were saying in the movie, a lost cause at that. Yet strangely enough, they were paying enough attention to the movie to find it so funny that the main character (Jeff Bridges) called himself "the Dude" and had an answering message of something like "Dude is not here, leave a message."

That's a frickin hilarious story, eh? "Dude is not here..." so they decided to change our answering machine to say "You've reached Andy and Dude's room..." which of course I didn't like but what could I do. Then one weekend Will and Andy went home and when they came back, they found that all their Mountain Dew was gone. I know I didn't drink it, cause I don't like Mountain Dew, but they accused me of drinking it all anyways and started calling me "Mountain Dude." Ah, to be immature freshman again...

Nobody likes to be called Mountain Dude, let me tell you that much. But you know how it is, the more I didn't like it, the more funny they thought it would be to call me that. Somewhere along the way, it changed to "dudo," I'm not sure but I think it was something to the effect of them saying I looked like "Where's Waldo?" when I wore glasses, and morphed "dude" to "dudo." Whatever it was, the name started to stick for no good reason. When they would introduce me to people, they would introduce me as "dudo." When people called on the phone for "Joe," they would be like "who? oh, you mean dudo..."

Eventually, I had no choice but to get used to it. When we all started Starcraft names, what else would I pick but Dudo~509~. Andy ended up with the name "Walro" cause Steve Buscemi's character in that movie kept saying "I am the Walrus," and me and Will thought he reminded us of Andy. Will was just "Willo," and the others ended up with 509 names all with their own dumb stories.

It doesn't really make much sense, but I got used to using a name I didn't like at first, to the point where almost all my accounts are named dudo509 (AIM, blog, Yahoo, fantasy baseball), probably more due to lack of creativity. Now, I don't mind the name and sometimes I even get confused when people call me Joe. All because of those two homos I lived with freshman year. Oh, but those were good times. When I see Will or Andy or any of those guys nowadays, we still always talk about the stupid things we did back then. Like I said, there's a million stories, but now that you've heard this one about how I got the name "dudo," I'm sure you are thoroughly confused and I'll spare you the rest of our dumb pointless anecdotes.