BNT: Every New Beginning

BNT = Blog Not Titled

In one of my early posts, I mentioned that there are two lines I love in the Semisonic song "Closing Time." One is "Time for you to go out to the places you will be from." The other is "Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end." I love this line because it acknowledges the bittersweet reality that having the opportunity to start something new often means leaving something else behind.

That's exactly what I'm experiencing as I leave Paris to make a new beginning in the Twin Cities, and so "Every New Beginning" was one of the original titles I considered for this blog. That name was already taken, so then I thought I'd use "Some Other Beginning." I registered that name and had even starting setting up the blog template, but then I realized what the obvious abbreviation for that name would be. Neither the word "sob" nor the common usage of "S.O.B." was pleasing to me for my blog, so I scratched it and went back to the drawing board.

.....

My last new beginning was on March 28, 2002, when I moved from Washington to Paris. Officially, my legal residency in France began on May 14, 2002, and ended today, June 30, 2008. At 5:20 p.m. CDT, I cleared U.S. Immigration Control at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport, where I declared myself a U.S. resident for the first time in over six years. My profile in the sidebar has been updated accordingly.

Every new beginning.

Ready for Syndication

Well, not really. There is some option about syndication in the blog settings, but since (unlike the comment page configuration :-)) I had no idea what it meant, I just left it on whatever the default setting was.

I have, however, been toying with different themes that I may (or may not) use on Native Observation, so I thought I'd give you a little preview of topic threads that may come up, along with their oh-so-clever abbreviations and acronyms:

• BNT. I confess: "Native Observation" was not actually my first choice for the title of this blog (but just because my baby was unplanned doesn't mean I love it any less!). For better or worse, many of my early ideas were already taken, in some cases by bloggers who, at least at first glance, do not seem Worthy of using my brilliantly conceived URLs. Because I think it's interesting to consider the road not taken (or in this case, the Blog Not Titled), I may tell you about the other titles we might have had. I suppose this theme could also offer the opportunity for guest bloggers who had their own title suggestions to tell us about them, but it's hard to imagine when I might be ready to relinquish that kind of artistic control. I can be a bit Particular at times.
• HYS. Life in a foreign country offers many opportunities for linguistic glitches, and I will be sharing anecdotes of words and thoughts lost in translation, and all the times I have to ask How You Say?
• MPAS. I have strong opinions on many, many things, and this blog is the ideal forum for sharing them. But sometimes, I may have to warn you that My Politics Are Showing (the correct pronunciation of this blog theme is to be "im-pass").
• TIMM. The question I hear most often when I tell people I'm moving away is, "What are you going to miss about France?" It occurs to me that telling about the Things I'll Miss the Most could be a nice way of sharing some of the loveliness of my adopted home.

OK, this is clearly far too cheesy for syndication, but now that the concept is all spelled out in pixels, I guess I'll stick with it.

UPDATE: One more blog theme I'd thought of but forgot to list: OBG (don't worry, Scott, I'm not going to have an entire topic thread dedicated to gynecological issues!). Way back when, in the dark ages before I started this blog, I sometimes sent out mass e-mails with stories about life in France to selected friends. I may recycle some of these Oldies But Goodies for use on this blog. Partly because, in my far-from-humble opinion, some of the messages were funny and deserve a broader audience, and partly because I'm lazy but can claim that reusing old material makes me Green.