What's In A Name?

The votes are in, the poll is closed, and all thirteen of you (including me!) have had your say about changing the name of my blog. As you know, it has been called "New York Minutes" because I was living in New York until just a few weeks ago. I started the blog when I went to the city in an attempt to capture the adventures I was having and share them with my friends and family. The name was a pun on keeping a log (minutes) and the fast-pace lifestyle of the big city. But now that I'm back in North Carolina, with no plans to return to NYC any time soon, and since I want to keep my blog, and since it's too much of a hassle to start a new one (and lose my 10 followers, half of you whom I don't even know?), I decided to just change the title name. The URL stays the same, and I'm still the same person I've always been, just closer to getting married and with slightly less interesting stories now that I don't have all of New York City to cull from.

But what sort of new name do I choose? Here are some ideas I had:

An anagram of "New York Minutes" was one idea that I had, so I went to the anagram server to see what it would come up with. But unfortunately names such as "Sky Mutineer Now," "Entwine So Murky," and (gasp) "Smoky Wiener Nut" are not names that I feel are appropriate to the spirit of this blog.

Next I turned to the name of the city in which I will be living, but Durham has little to offer in the way of blog-name inspiration, and my mom was horrified at my idea of calling it "The Durham Bull." Durham is also known as Tobacco City, the City of Medicine, and is a baseball town, but none of those things are particularly relevant to my life.

So then I started reading some poems that I like, and one by Sara Teasdale stuck out: Stars over snow, and in the west a planet. Look for a lovely thing and you will find it. It is not far, it never will be far. I really love that poem, and the idea that there are lovely things all around us just waiting to be found, so I though of calling my blog "A Lovely Thing." Other names inspired by poems I considered are "A Tiny Song" from Walter de la Mare's "The Warbler," because my blog is a little bit like the tiny song a bird sings to itself and its friends. Or, "Daring All Things" from an Edward Carpenter poem, but although that poem starts out really good, it is mostly about naked men and, while there is nothing necessarily wrong with that, I didn't really feel like aligning myself with it specifically.

But I also thought about just calling the blog "Holiday" because it relates to my name and the song that my mom named me after (the Beegees' "You're a Holiday"), and then that reminded me of a song by the Spongetones that C played for me the other night, as we danced together under the stars: "Every night is a holiday when I'm spending my time with you. Every night is a holiday..." So, if his nights are holidays and I am a holiday, and the blog is about my days, then "Holiday, Every Day" seems like a good thing to call it. We'll try it out for a while and see if it sticks.