otoh

I started blogging more in a stumbling, bumbling manner than in any sort of planned excursion. I think a lot of us did. Then our blogs evolve over time. We give them new skins. We find our voice. Sometimes we gain an audience.

When I started my first blog just about a year ago, I wasn’t sure what I wanted it to be. I knew I did not want it to be like any of the celebrity blogs I had read. I didn’t feel comfortable publishing anything as personal as what I have often written in my paper journals. My daily life is way too boring to simply recount the day’s activities. But, with more ideas of what I didn’t want than what I did, I signed up for the Blogger account planning to jump in and see what happens.

And then I needed a name for the blog. A name? I have given my journal entries titles for years, but I never named my journals. A name… hmm, this could have long-term repercussions. I hadn’t even read a lot of different blogs, but I guessed that there were some great titles that must already be taken. (I was right.) After all, I wasn’t exactly on the bleeding edge of this phenomenon.

A name, a name, a name…. Think, think, think…. Several years ago I helped to edit the monthly newsletter for a local social group that I belonged to and I wrote a monthly column that was ostensibly about creativity. That really meant I could write about pretty much whatever I wanted to. Would it be too much of a cop-out to reuse the title of that column for my blog? Oh, how terribly uncreative to reuse the title of a column on creativity! Well, maybe just the initials.

I didn’t think anyone else would care, but I have always been a little embarrassed about it. For the first several months, I refused to tell anyone why I chose OTOH for the title. (Even when someone [Dawn] suggested it might be On Top Of Harold.) And for those first several months, the words On The Other Hand never appeared anywhere on the site. When I did put them in, it was in the sidebar without calling attention to them at all.

At least I didn’t choose IMHO or ROFL. That would be really embarrassing!

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