I'm moving. The lure of the new username got too much. It's not that I'm leaving diaryland entirely. The Big Brother blog will still be here when series 3 starts. I will still be checking my buddy list (though not adding anyone. Does anyone really have time to keep up with 75 diaries? I have more time than most, and struggle with less than half that.) I'll still be around. I just won't be notthatugly anymore.

I was never notthatugly anyway. 'Notthatugly' was a name I thought up on the spot when I couldn't have the one I wanted. An imagined answer to an imagined question: I've never had a boyfriend, but no, I'm not that ugly. But when it's all mashed together into one word, the emphasis gets lost. (It was a gift of a name for the design site, of course, and that's another reason why I'm tired of it -- it's not about me anymore, it's about the templates.) Usernames shouldn't need footnotes -- they shouldn't need to be explained or defended -- they shouldn't, really, be doing the work of explaining or defending. It doesn't matter how ugly I am, or am not -- it's one less thing to worry about, that's all.

And it's a name that belies itself by being hideous. That double 't' just grates.

But I've been the absent student since I signed up to Yahoo! back in 1999 and set up the obligatory crappy Geocities site; named for a minor character in Lucy Ellmann's Man or Mango?, the girl who takes a creative writing class with the hero and vanishes, leaving him with the notebook where she has recorded her musings on the crapness of life in general and men in particular. She isn't the heroine but her articulate shadow, who never gets saved.

(I love Lucy Ellmann, I wish she'd write something new)

Therefore, in future you will find me at absentstudent.diary-x.com. I'm leaving the daffodils and 210 entries of 'yesterday tomorrow today' here. Time for a new start.