So What the Heck is My Name?
After several years of confusion and questions about my names, I thought of creating this page to ramble on about the story behind my name. It all started on December 7th, 1979 when my parents named me "Seyed Jaffar" after my late grand father. If it looks like a long first name, consider my last name "Khoshgozaran Haghighi"! So far we got "Seyed Jaffar Khoshgozaran Haghighi". If it doesn't look interesting/strange enough yet, let me add that "Khoshgozaran" in Farsi means party animal and "Haghighi" means truly! "Seyed" in middle-eastern languages is merely a title like "Jr." and basically means sir. Putting it all together we got "Sir Truly Party Animal"!
However, since then and for the past thirty something years people have called me "Ali", which is my nickname. The problems started where I had to use my names in formal situations. People were used to calling me "Ali" and this name was nowhere found on any of my legal documents. This caused me rejection from schools, missing flights, flight delays, credit card issues and countless other problems!
So I thought of finding a nickname which relates more easily to my long first name and thus I go by "Jeff". Everything was going on smoothly until USC didn't accept this nickname and only allowed me to shorten my "Seyed Jaffar Khoshgozaran Haghighi" name a bit! So I had no choice but to prune it a bit to have "Jaffar Khoshgozaran"! By now you should really be sympathizing with me. If not, scorll down and enjoy a lengthly list of various name combinations I have received so far in mail or been called by others who have not read this page yet.
