Why Lunchbox?

One of the most frequent questions I get when meeting new people is how I got the nickname, Lunchbox. Well it's not really that great of a story, but I might as well write it down for posterity.

When I was in middle school, and for most of high school, really, I was fat. It's safe to use the word heifer, I think. I probably wasn't 6' yet, and weighed over 2 bills, very little of which was muscle since I didn't work out. Despite my heft, I played lacrosse on my high school's club team. One of my lax buddies gave me the name my freshman year of high school. At the time he was obsessed with Kevin Smith's movie "Mallrats." I would assume most people are at least somewhat familiar with Kevin Smith's work, and know of the characters Jay and Silent Bob. Well, at one point in "Mallrats" Jay calls Silent Bob "lunchbox." One can presume this was the case because Silent Bob was a fat guy (there might be some sort of New Jersey idiom behind this, too. With Kevin Smith you never know). Since Silent Bob was a fat guy, and I was a fat kid my buddy, Brennan, decided that I too would be known as "Lunchbox." Suffice it to say the name stuck. By the time I got to college very few people knew my real name. I even had a little Indian professor for a computer class in undergrad that called me "Mr. Lunchbox." It was great. It got to the point where it was weird when I was addressed by my given name. (It's still a bit weird to me, actually). A lot of my friends still call me Lunchbox, or any of the variations picked up over the years (most commonly Box, but also, LB, and Lunch).

So that's the story. It wasn't because I carried a lunchbox to school (although I did afterward) or anything else. A unique nickname tended to ensure that people wouldn't forget who I was even if I forgot them.