Getting a handle on a handle

Before I make an honest to goodness post, I think a short explanation of my pseudonym may be in order. I have seen through the years many people find my handle, abbywill, to be somewhat feminine, and, indeed, when only using the name I have been mistaken for being female more than once. One might then ask, why did I choose it and why do I still use it if it will possibly lead to unintended confusion? Well, as far for why I still use it, I have used the name for over a decade and I have become so attached to it that I can't really bear to forgo it for a new handle. It has become something of an identifying feature for me; Something that I like and that I find to be unique. But why did I choose it in the first place?
Well, that goes back to the time that I first ventured on the internet, almost 15 years ago, if memory serves me. I realized that, for several things I was exploring, I needed a handle. I wanted to remain as anonymous as possible, and I figured a good method for doing that would be to choose a name that was neither masculine nor feminine. I also realized, though, that doing that would be challenging since it is often hard to discern the subtle character of words. I decided that my best option would be to take a masculine name and combine it with a feminine one and hope that the result would be neither. I had a story that I was working on at that time with two main characters, a brother and sister, named William and Abigale. I thought that was as good a place to start as any, so I decided to combine those two names, and abbywill seemed to flow much more nicely that willabby.
It was much later that I realized that, since the feminine name came first, many who read the name thought of it as being feminine. I had already been using the name for some time before I came to this realization, and I had already become kind of stuck on it, so it became stuck on me, you might say. Looking back, I find it ironic that my attempt to create a name lacking in gender apparently lead to a name that many find quite gender specific. It was something of a first experiment, though, and even though it might have lead to unintended results, it has taught me a great deal about what characteristics people associate with names. This is a topic which I find of particular interest, and one in which I might end up writing a few of my thoughts on in the not too distant future (somewhere in time and space).

Best,
abbywill

I suppose I'm now entering the blogosphere

Well, I've been thinking about organizing a blog for a while, and I've finally decided to actually do it!

I'm a physicist (or at least one in training since I'm working on my graduate degree), and even though it would seem logical for me to write about physics, I find I spend more and more of my free time investigating things that are far outside my area of expertise. After contemplating this for a while, I realized I would probably get much more enjoyment out of writing about my observations of the world than I would from writing strictly about my work, and so this blog will be largely unfocused on any particular subject, often with the only real connection between topics being that I find them to be of personal interest. That being said, my approach to these observations will be largely from my personal perspective and education as a physicist.

I have no idea if my observations will be of interest to anyone else, but just posting my thoughts and explorations will be of great value to me both by organizing my often rambling stream of consciousness and also by providing an organized and dated log that I might be able to look back on later. If you as the reader do find my randomness to be interesting, humorous, or edifying in some way, I'd love to hear from you.

Best,
abbywill