Karma

If you sing that song by Boy George, I might want to harm you. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEhXcEpajN0 That part where the audience screams when he gets to the chorus? I want to scream like that when someone makes a crack about my name.
I will address some of the more common questions here to save you to trouble of voicing them:
"Is that your real name?" Yes.
"Were your parents hippies?" No. They were corn farmers. And no, they didn't grow pot between the corn rows, either. They were Lutherans.
"Did your parents know what it meant?" Okay, you got me there. No, they did not. My mother made it up. From Carmen. And when my sister and I, nerd children that we were, were each reading one of the free volumes of the two-volume dictionary that came with our new World Book encyclopedia set, learning new words, I remember quite vividly when she shouted out "Mom, Dad, 'Karma' is a word. It's in the dictionary!" (She must have had the A-M volume and I, the N-Z.) My parents had been conversing in the kitchen and responded to the news with a dead silence as they waited for her to read the definition to see if it was a good thing or a bad thing they had named me.
"Did you like it when you were a kid?" No. I hated it. Because kids would tease me with things like "Karma Cockroach". But later I realized kids can pretty much crap on any name, so I got over it. And when I realized the philosophy behind it, basically that you get out of life what you put into it and that good leads to more good, I tried to apply that and the name began to hold meaning and inspiration to me. And now that I am making art and operating a tiny art gallery, the question "Is that your real name?" is usually more asked in admiration or envy than in curiosity at an oddity, and that sort of thing being behind the question makes it much more welcome that it used to be.