Like the empress from the NeverEnding Story, it’s time for a new name.

And that name will be………. Grab-Bag.

I will briefly explain the reason for this name, before going a bit into why I even choose the former name to begin with – “Grab-Bag” basically sums up my current approach to life which has best served me up until now, and may well yet serve me for some time. I’m even seriously considering changing my IRL name and the only thing really stopping me is not being able to decide upon an appropriate new one which I feel like I could actually stick with for the foreseeable future. Hopefully an idea for one will spring up into my mind almost as readily as the website one just has, and *that* took quite a while…

Due to myriad personal reasons, I’ve had rather more trouble kicking off a steady career (primarily in writing/editing as I’ve been aiming towards for a while now) than I ever thought I would, even in this increasingly hostile and unceasingly shitty economy. In fact I went through a rather short-lived phase of thinking that it might actually start getting easier for me. One might think that I would in fact have an edge over most other people having “worked from home” for several years by now, but apparently not… however, I seem to also have a rather pain-in-the-arse tendency to refuse to *completely* quit when faced with certain obstacles such as having little money at any given time and having steadily decreasing self-confidence the older I get with still little to no career stability to rise alongside said age. So if/when I ever get a chance to do certain things like, say, try out a new activity, learn a new skill, or even *gasp* travel to a new place… basically when the stars align and the fates allow, I tend to not want to fuck around too much and risk missing the opportunity – I tend to just grab a bag and go (hence, “Grab-Bag”) – preferably before I change my mind and allow enough time to pass (usually a few seconds to minutes will do) to convince myself of what a stupid idea it is and how I’ll inevitably end up getting something terribly and embarrassingly wrong.

It’s pretty much the only way I can really feel like I’m still properly living.

The site itself will remain for a while, at least until it makes more sense to “migrate” it elsewhere, or even to start a new site entirely. The latter seems like the better option if/when I manage to boost my writing/editing career a little bit more, but I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. I don’t want to change too much too soon in the off-chance that it might backfire. I’m going to make this post, then I’ll go about backing up the site more formally (I’ve already saved individual posts but somehow I feel like I’ll need to do more than that), then I’ll rename the site and set up one of those redirect thingymajigs if I somehow manage to figure it out… then that’ll be it. At least until such a time as I change my mind *again* about the site name. In the meantime, the site itself will remain, and it will remain somewhat similar in theme, with most of the sections remaining in place. But the name HAS to go. After nearly a decade, it’s well and truly time.

The primary reason for this is that I think that this site – and I, by extension – need, and more importantly, deserve, a better name. Dare I say it, a more… dignified name?

You see… once upon a time, I was, shall I say, “gifted” the name/title by an ex partner who used to call me a “silly goose” as a term of endearment. At least that’s what I’m hoping it was. He was around to witness (and to be honest, at least partly inspire) the birth of the website, so he gets some credit for that. And at the time, I was sufficiently enamoured with the gesture of giving me the name *and* the idea for the website (and also I had a sufficiently low self-image, I suppose) to allow the name to “stick” far beyond the point at which I should have “rebranded” – the relationship is long gone and we don’t even have contact anymore, a long and boring and far too personal story in and of itself – and yet here I still have a site that carries this particular “legacy” and very likely gives off the image of me being something of a nutcase… so why the hell would I keep it for so long?

I guess one thing I’ve learned about myself in recent times is that, any time I have a “sentimental” reason to hang onto something, I tend to have a hard time letting it go. This goes especially when little if anything comes along to fill the void take its place. I once liked the name, it suited me for a while, and by the time it didn’t exactly “fit” me anymore, I didn’t know what else to change the name to. Thus years would pass with this, erm, silly name. However, as people tend to do, I have changed a HUGE amount personally in the intervening time – quite a few of my values have changed, however frustratingly slow other aspects of my life have been to follow suit and keep up with this change. Even as I was making my very last post (before this one) I was already thinking that I was long overdue a change, not least because I was just BORED of posting, at least as much as I figured what few followers I had were of reading whatever self-involved drivel I came out with. I KNEW full well at the time that I needed to make things a lot more interesting if I was going to keep the site going, but unfortunately I had just entered what has turned out to be a pretty long-lasting “fog of meh” in which I had no real direction for the site, or indeed for much of anything.

In all honesty, I don’t really have much more of an overarching direction I want things to move in, but I do know two things: 1) I don’t want my work on this site to have been for nothing so I’m going to preserve what I once posted if only for posterity, and 2) I do want to keep writing about some things, namely the few things that I DO know now that I’d like to write about, which I figure might actually stand a chance of being of interest to some people. The thing is, for an embarrassingly long time, despite *knowing* full well, on some level, that the way I was going about the whole blogging thing (basically just posting personal thoughts and musings and stuff) was never exactly going to appeal to a wide range of people – I’ve had my self-involved moments but there’s a limit even to that – I really wasn’t sure how else to go about it as a complete beginner. I just assumed, hoped really, that the more I blogged, the more my blogging would “snowball” somehow, and end up accumulating interested people, and maybe *then* I could go about being a bit more adventurous about my subject matter. Pretty much the main reason I always stuck to myself and my sad life as “subject matter” is because it felt the safest – as much as I wanted to write about a lot more, I always feared unintentionally saying the wrong thing about the wrong person/people and having that lead to some trouble, and especially as I was basically a non-entity, as bloggers go, I stuck to one of the subjects I knew best, and someone I was quite confident wouldn’t take issue with me – me. Plus I suppose there was a decent element of simply wanting to feel like my life had just a *bit* more significance than it actually had/has, so by trying to pretend that it did, I thought that I was making it matter more somehow. I think the kids would call it “screaming into the void” nowadays, but I’m not the most in-touch person with the current lingo.

Basically there’s a reason why I only ever posted about the “highlights” of what was going on with me – because pretty much *everything* else sucked big-time and I had no idea how to even make my “normal life” matter, being that I seemed to be eternally doomed to rejection from “proper” jobs and other stuff too, and for a long time I wasn’t sure what kind of person I was actually *supposed* to be. That teenage identity crisis most people go through? I’m only just *starting* to come out of that and I’m in my late thirties now. So I guess I just glommed onto “blogger” and ran with that for a while. Because hey what did I have to lose?

But deep down I never wanted to be just another “influencer”, even if I ever had somehow managed to gain a certain amount of commercial success – even the term “influencer” is super-cringe, or is it just me? – I think I was mostly trying to emulate a modern-day version of Bill Bryson, the classic travel writer who basically got me into the idea of travel writing in the first place. However, despite obviously liking travelling and writing – perchance at the same time – I always wanted to be “something more” and indeed would have probably ended up hating being “just another blogger/influencer/whatever” before too long. I think even back at the time when I was trying to convince myself that doing that sort of thing was for me, I might have been on some level holding myself back from properly “putting myself out there” because that would’ve meant way MORE exposure, in almost every sense. Looking back, I think that would’ve been a VERY bad idea. In any case, for the most part, I was largely dependent on what my circumstances would allow, which was not a hell of a lot for quite a long time, and to an extent, even now. And now, for the first time pretty much ever, I don’t think it’s terribly exciting, but I think what I have in mind for this blog is at least… something. Something more boring but also more interesting at the same time. Something more people would actually give a shit about, basically. Which was the whole damn point of this blog in the first place.

So here it is – my first published post in nearly six years. At least until I remembered that I actually posted a “first post in ages” post just a few months ago. To whoever out there still gives a shit about this site (thank you!), I’ll definitely try to revive it with more relevant and reasonably smart content as I always wanted to do from the beginning. For far too long a time, it has either just served as an attempt to go all “hello world” during a time when I had pretty much no idea who or what I even was or where I was going, or otherwise it has just sort of languished in blog-purgatory. Sounds familiar… but I figure if you’re going to post stuff on the internet, you should try to make it something that you’d want to read, not only when you’ve just posted it but at any point in the future.

So yeah… “hello world”, once more. I’ll not leave it nearly so long I’m not kidding where the hell does the time go to post again this time.