Now that my workload is merely busy and not inhuman, I paradoxically feel less compulsion to post. I guess I use it as an escape--a way to vent--and I just don't have much to vent about right now. (Similar to how so many of us wrote horrible poetry as teenagers, when we had all that angst to expel.)

Every few years I have a fit of looking for people I used to know. For example: people I knew while living in Norway. Since the advent of the "internets", it has become almost unfairly easy. The part that is unsettling for me is that the women have become harder and harder to find. A boy I sat next to in second grade? Easy. A woman I worked with ten years ago? Invisible.

That's one of those problems with the whole marriage and name-change thing, is that it makes women disappear. It may be bad for the present, but it's much worse the longer it goes, especially when we start getting into historic contexts. I have photos of women who are my ancestors, but I only know them as "Mrs. So-and-So". It makes it look as though my ancestry is composed of "men (and their wives)", thus chopping off half the roots of my family tree. It doesn't seem very fair.

I've already changed my own last name once in adulthood (not marriage but a different long story), and I decided to include the last names of both my parents, in a kind of Spanish fashion, I suppose (although I know of no Spanish heritage in my ancestry...at least in my male ancestors!) The Icelandic naming system seems quite useful, too, although it might only work in a tiny population on a remote island. Like...Iceland.