I am under no illusions about whose fault it is that I had such trouble choosing a blog name.
Most of the good names are taken? You don't say! It's only 2009, and Blogspot has been around for years. How could no one have reserved invisiblog, or onehandclapping, or radiostar, specifically for me? I take full responsibility.
So the criteria were a name that wasn't taken, that wasn't too long, that didn't only cover one of my interests, and that was somewhat easy to remember. I probably failed on the last one because Notably However isn't terribly catchy. But it's MINE, so back off.
I chose it, and I like it, for two reasons.
Reason the first:
I love language, which is why I'm a copy editor. Also, I love language, which is why being a copy editor makes me despair for humankind sometimes. The phrase "Notably, however," suggests that what follows is a notable counterpoint to the previous statement. The phrase "Notably however" suggests the quality of being "however" — which in itself is nonsense — but not just regularly however, nay, exceptionally so! I've edited that phrase more than once in my career, and each time I marveled that someone was stupid enough to write it. I'm sure Blogspot is marveling that someone was stupid enough to name their blog that, so…touché.
Reason the second:
My brother is famous in some circles. He's a triple-A baseball player with a popular blog. Last week, my roommate excitedly showed me a link to the most recent interview my brother had done. "Sending it to you not because it is well written or anything like that, but [he] mentions you. Not by name or anything…"
I thought: "How sweet, a shout-out!" Then I read what was actually said about me.
It's fun to write witty stuff. My sister was a creative writing and poetry major…of the two kids who would have expected that I'm the one with the blog that people read?
It’s brilliant how I could not stop finding this injurious. At first, I was like, “tough nuggets, kid, I don’t even have a blog,” but then it’s like, I went to school for writing and I don’t even have a blog, loser. And then I read it again and there’s that little extra stab at the end: “that people read.” Even if you had a blog, sis, nobody would read it. It’s a conditional statement that will never stop being relevant! Don’t I give great, witty interviews? It’s like working all your life to be an astronaut, and then watching your little sibling — whose primary interest, as far as you knew, was skateboarding — broadcast live from the moon, being all, “This is awesome! I didn’t even go to school for this!”
Of course, after I posted a semihumorous Tweet about finding a building sufficiently tall to jump from, I got a bunch of overly sentimental hooey in response from a few people who thought I needed cheering up. They said, essentially, that just because I wasn’t famous, didn’t mean I wasn’t accomplished. I'm the lesser sibling, but successful in my own right: a quality I thought was aptly summed up by notably however.
It seemed high time to start writing a blog that nobody reads.