Blog naming

by tamarjacobson

Thanks to everyone who participated in the blog stopping discussion:

Citizen of the Month, Jew Eat Yet?, Through the Attic Window, Funny the World, Listics: A Sandhill-Joint, This Too, A Breath of Air, Time Goes By, Shorty PJs, The Boomer Chronicles, Dandelion Days, Simply Wait, Richard Lawrence Cohen, Blaugustine, Older, but No Wiser, YBLOG ZA, nobody asked … BUT, INSITEVIEW — tom shugart’s weblog

It was good to have such an intellectual, emotional, and real taste of the blogging community. The last time I experienced such a discussion was when I wrote about being an atheist.

Yesterday I participated for a short while (as a shy, mostly silent bystander) in a phonecon thanks to Allied by Jeneane Sessum. There were names there I could not recognize although one or two I knew, like Kalilily Time. Hearing bloggers’ real names was interesting for me. It was almost as if each time I would feel as if I was coming out of a safe, private, intimate cocoon of fantastical, virtual names, and into the cold, world of reality.

It led me to think about how we name our blogs. For example, when I first started blogging, I titled my first site, In and Out of Confidence: Fear the Final Frontier, and as time went by I changed it according to how I was feeling about myself. It then became Tamarika, because that was a term of endearment my father used for me. I saw it as a sign that I was allowing myself to remember him with great love. It was a side that was hidden while I was a child and through blogging about that I came to terms with different pieces of myself. In fact, that name has a deep and complex meaning for me. Later, when I felt like I needed to create a different blog, Mining Nuggets: Writing it Down, I used a name that Jean of This Too had used in one of her comments to me, where she seemed to have gotten a lot out of a post I had written. I would love to link to that piece where she made her comment, but I deleted it in my panic to please angry family members. Out of confidence prevailed in those dark days, I regret to say!

Sometimes I am curious to know why people have chosen their blog site names. Therein lies a great little book of vignettes, or short tales of how each person came to choose titles (This is not new for me. I have thought about what is in a name before). After all, I feel as though I have almost become the name of my blog. Becoming Tamarika was a big deal for me. Each time I would see the name as representing me, I felt closer to the Sephardic side that had been mocked and shunned for so long as I grew up. I became whole and acceptable to myself, over and over again. Now, as I become Mining Nuggets, I sense the writer in me. It becomes a way for me to acknowledge the expressive and creative side of me, and realize that all my life, in fact, I have been writing things down: through journals, short stories when I was sixteen, as a child, newsletter columns, articles, a book, blogs … it strengthens my confidence as a writer.

But more than that.

I realize that I probably could not have survived without using writing as an expressive outlet.

All that … just in the name of my blog!

A year ago at Tamarika: Life in the Fast Lane