Here we go: another attempt at a website for me. I’ve had brief flirts with sundry websites in the past, but I think this one is The One. I’m committed.
There’s a couple of reasons that I think this one will be it. The biggest one is easily that I finally have a reason to have a website. I went ahead and accidentally became tolerable at what I do, and I thus have a pile of things that other people might actually be interested in. In addition to some of my pontificating, I’ll be posting those useful tidbits. When I have enough content, I’ll even add some fancy menus and whatnot, and maybe even a tab or two. For the record, web design is not my deal.
The second reason this site might be here to stay might stick is the name. I’ve gone through a long string of internet aliases in my time, as have most folks my age. Most of us had a period of paranoia about our real names being leaked to the internet, but such days are over for me, and it’s time to skip all of that. The problem with said thing is that while I’m not ashamed of my name, Lavender, it doesn’t make a great URL (although my dad’s own LavenderInk site for his publishing stuff works out. There’s a story here about bad experiences with folks misconstruing computer-assigned usernames of ‘lavenderben’ as a username that was chosen as opposed to assigned, a misconception which can, and has, led to significant misunderstandings for native speakers of English. As a small comfort, such connotations are almost always lost on my sundry European friends.
Forgoing Lavender, and being lost in the noise on the ‘Ben’ front, I needed a username one day and came up with bhuga, which is properly understood of as the first half of ‘booga wooga’, but with a more civilized spelling. Rarely capitalized, it captures the savage quickness with which I always make decisions that come back to haunt me, such as self-identification. Fortunately, the other such savages on the web are few and far between. For reference: me, me , me, not me,and not me. The final form of my name is not yet decided. Ben? Bhuga? Ben Bhuga? All of them work. It’s hard to say. I’ll figure something out.
