What's in a name?

A friend of mine just posted a blog entry (http://chocomnms.blogspot.com/2009/03/paucity-of-names.html) about people looking to create e-mail accounts and online aliases that match their names. It got me thinking.
You could call me an avid internet user. I spend roughly 25 hours a week on the internet for non-work activities. Yes, you read that right. Yes, I know that's a lot. And yes, I also know it's probably bad for my eyes. And my wrist. Can we get back to my story now?
Over the course of time, I've had about 15-20 e-mail accounts, and I'm a member of atleast 30 online forums or websites.
I opened my first e-mail account in 1997 or 1998. At the time, in India, the internet was this cool new thing that everyone wanted a piece of, and people all around me were scrambling to create e-mail accounts. I got the whole part about everyone wanting to be part of this new revolution, but what I did not get, was this obsession they all had with their names. Everyone wanted IDs that contained their names. Don't get me wrong - I love my name. But is that the only entity we can think of that establishes our identity? Sure it's the easiest one. But it's just something our parents assigned us when we were barely days old. Maybe not even that much.
Here's our chance to create something unique, something creative, something that really defines us, and there we go appending numbers to our names, because the names itself weren't available.
Why do we do this? My theory is that the human brain is wired to go back to the comfort of something it's familiar with, instead of creating something new and innovative. It's also that much less work memorizing and remembering it. As the internet expanded, and became all-pervasive, this probably became more important.
As much as I'd love to maintain a single identity all over the web, the dreamer in me usually wins when I'm looking to create an online alias. Except for a couple that I use for work purposes, all my IDs are the work of my overly active imagination. Some are cute, some are smart (or so I'd like to think :P), some are downright weird. But each of them defines me, or something that mattered to me in that moment. And although I probably don't use aliases I created a few years ago anymore, when I look back and think about them, they never fail to put a smile on my face. Sometimes even a laugh. Some of them make me wonder how stupid I was back then; still I'd pick them anyday over something as predictable as my name.