💾 Archived View for juliette.zone › gemlog › naming.gmi captured on 2024-08-24 at 23:41:43. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Posted on 2024-08-10
The worst part of writing anything for this gemlog is coming up with the name of the post. I know that I don't strictly need a name, I'm perfectly free to just label these by date and go on with my life, but it feels like the right thing to do. I find, though, that no matter how much time I spend thinking about the name of a post, I look back on it a few days or weeks later and think to myself, "what in the world was I doing!?"
This isn't limited to gemlog names. I'm currently a grad student, and the same trend emerges with the papers I write. I won't be providing any examples, since I'm trying to keep this capsule at arm's length from my professional life for the time being, but those of you who know me IRL should be able to find papers fairly easily. The boring ones sound boring, even for technical writing, and the "fun" ones never seem to amuse me as much at the time of publication as they did upon submission.
My cat is named "Penny" after the coin, now defunct in Canada. It was a placeholder, intended to last for a few weeks while I settled on a better name that is more meaningful. That was 8 years ago.
I agonized over my name. I'm trans and "Juliette" is something I picked for myself. It took a couple of years going back and forth between different options, and I only settled on it after making a list of practical requirements that narrowed down the field to about three names. I'm quite happy with my name now, but I did just completely ignore middle names in the process and am pretty dissatisfied with where I landed there.
There's no insightful conclusion to this, I don't think "perfect names" exist in most situations. As long as a name isn't an active impediment, it really doesn't matter all that much. None of the titles in my writing are so horrifically bad that it stops a prospective reader (that's the content's job). Penny is my best friend and does not care if her name is thoroughly uninspired, largely because she does not speak English. And I like my name, even if I definitely overthought it and would make some changes if far less effort was required. I just need to be chill, even when I don't particularly like doing a mediocre job.