(Note: As I write this, we’re 28 hours and 20 minutes into the Bush II era. How is everything so far? Planet Earth: check. United States: check. Me: check. Charismatic presidential speechifying: well, I guess we can’t have everything. Still, maybe this won’t be so bad after all. Oh, the soft bigotry of low expectations.)
Today I decided to separate my blog from my website and move it onto its own site. I did this because I’m getting more and more tempted by bloggery, and I’d like to get into more details of my life, but I’m afraid I’m going to write things that I won’t want to be read by people who know me well. I don’t think I’ve created a completely solid firewall yet, but it will do for now.
I didn’t want a Blogspot account, because I wanted to be able to upload jpegs. I wanted a Yahoo! Geocities account, but it was sort of a pain trying to find a name that was free. I wanted the name Tin Man, and I was born in 1973, although I wanted to avoid using numerals if at all possible, and I really hoped to avoid underscores. Yet all of the following names were taken:
tinman
tinman73
tinman1973
tin_man
tin_man73
thetinman
thetinman73
manoftin
tinmanofoz
oztinman
I was getting more and more frustrated, and then it hit me: tinmanblog. What do you know? It was free! So, here we are.
As for the name Tin Man: I’ve used this name, or permutations of it, for various accounts and aliases. Why? First of all, it has a gay reference (he’s a “friend of Dorothy”). Second, the Tin Man was way too hard on himself. He thought he had no heart — he thought he was too cold and uncaring — only to find out in the end that he’d had quite a big heart all along. I used to feel the same way about myself: I used to think I was too logical, too unemotional, with an impaired ability to feel. I eventually came to realize, however, that there is nothing wrong with being guided by my emotions, with following my heart. (Though ideally, there’s a left-brain/right-brain balance.) I know that deep down, I’ve always been creative, with a keen sense of emotions; but deep down, I also resort to logic when the emotions get too confusing. I still could do a better job of toning down my logical side, but I’ve come a long way.