Naming Conventions

(I swear I was writing this before I saw your post, Mag.)

I've been trying to figure out how to blog about my personal life. I mean, I'm fascinated by "emergence" and Lloyd Grove's Lowdown, but that's such a small part of my headspace, so I want to be able to talk about things that are more directly relevant to my day-to-day life.

The problem is, what do I call people?

There's several different blogging conventions. There's initials, but unfortunately I'm dating M, living with M', good friends with M'' and M''', taught by M'''', and so forth. Also I sometimes read sentences aloud. No way I'm going to read "M-prime-prime-prime wrote an article about M-prime-prime." My head would explode.

There's nicknames, but I feel like that's dangerous. I mean, there are definitely times of my life that I think of everyone in terms of nicknames, but right now I feel like I'd just get confused. Besides, even if I call Mohan "Big Galoot," I'll probably shorten that to BG. Then the initial problem hits. More than that, all these seem so impersonal. If I were reading someone's else's blog, I wouldn't to be called Glasses-Guy or Button-Down Dude or Awkward Fella.

But blogging about people with their names seems invasive, too.

Unless those people are Aaron Carter.