Called best friend for just over a half-hour. Some determined punning and a lot of comfortable silences later, I'm feeling much more myself. Could have done without the terrible static, however!
9:31 AM 4/12/2010
It was actually sort of uncanny. I was sitting there on the phone with him and I could feel the crippling depression sliding away. He resets me. Not a full, back-to-drawing-board reset, but back into balance.
4:18 PM 4/12/2010
I'm trying very hard to remain awake until a reasonable bedtime, so maybe I can be back at diurnal. It seems to take all my energy to push myself back into alignment.
6:55 PM 4/12/2010
Today MissKat had to reassure
8:25 AM 4/13/2010
A friend had a bit of a rant on the topic of a woman changing her name upon marriage -- in some cases, her whole previous identity goes up *poof*. The naming of people is serious business, especially in the internet age, where your name is not just what people call you, but where you are, how people recognize you as yourself, and of course your clan identity. On Facebook, if you don't include previous names of yours, people who knew you then may not be able to find you. (Note that this isn't always a *bad* thing.) But continuity of identity is an important thing that one doesn't generally brush aside lightly, and if the name is a major component of your identifiable self...
And I looked at that rant and realized that actually I was not as averse to changing my name upon marriage as I had been in 2000. If I got married to someone and I liked their surname and family, I would happily change mine. That shocked me to no end. Why? What had changed?
In the comments, there were stories about women who had changed their names at the beginnings of their careers, and women who had declined to change their names while their careers were in full swing: women whose names were their brands, women who would not and could not and chose not to weather the problems of changing a name, changing a brand, when they'd already invested so much time and energy into being and promoting that name.
I haven't invested that much identity and worth into my surname in the last decade. Since moving onto the internet, I have been fully inhabiting this name instead.
I tried on the idea. If I was planning to get married, and my spouse-to-be tried to insist that I had to change my username after getting married? My response was immediate and furious. "...first they'd see my middle finger, then they'd see my naked ring finger, then they'd see the outside of my door. This is my name and it is not negotiable."
5:01 PM 4/14/2010
Enjoyed a dip in the hot tub for the first time in far too long. Sadly, it was more of a swimming temperature than a hot-tubbing temperature. Embarking on Yet Another Dan Simmons Adventure: this time it's Ilium.
Cautiously thinking that diurnal may be back for a while.
Crossposted.
