Names for the Blog

Right now Bloggie's name is Schooled- but that is just a little too cliched.  I'm very sensitive to things that are cliches and I would hazard a guess that 85% of the things that I write but I delete almost immediately are banished because they are really super typical and overdone.  The other 15% that I delete is super original but really sucks.

Anything about being a first year teacher and being crazy stressed about it is out for the same reason.  And also because I'm less stressed about it now, so I'm not in the mood for any title that reckons a Cathy cartoon Aak!  Even as played by Liz Lemon as played by Tina Fey.

Also out are the multitude of simple, straightforward and generally perfect titles that have already been claimed because I am really, really late to Blogger.

Let's think.  I usually like to turn to authors more accomplished than myself.  I read this essay by Mark Doty years ago about composing one of his poems (A Display of Mackerel) that always stuck with me because he described the experience of writing something and only coming to understand what it was you were writing when you finish it- that your metaphor knew more than you.  Could that work as a title?  MymetaphorknowsmorethanI.blogspot?  Oh man.  It's trying too hard, and also- there is a phork and a smore in there and they are hogging the stage.

I'm back to thinking about titles that involve rulers and apples and lessons learned.  Gag, gag, gag.

My dad had this quote on the wall of his office- the office he moved into after taking a hiatus from his established law career to pursue a more creative one in development- and I remember this conviction in him: "Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it.  Boldness has genius, power and magic in it."  I remember him signing his emails "Be bold," even though my mom has no such recollection and so like so many things it is forever unknown.  But maybe that- being bold.  Beginning Bold.

In Faerie Queene there is this too: Be bolde, Be bolde, and everywhere,  Be bold.

Even Shakespeare: Virtue is bold, and goodness never fearful.


I seem to have found a preoccupation, at the very least.

I could always name her Jane.

That was a little joke.

In the cellars of the night, when the mind starts moving around old trunks of bad times, the pain of this and the shame of that, the memory of a small boldness is a hand to hold.
John Leonard