About Women Changing Their Names after Marriage

I was just thinking... Why do women change their last names after marriage?

When I grew up, it wasn't like I was confused what family I belonged to.  I was actually annoyed when people assumed that my mom had the same last name as me.

I don't know if it's widely known among Americans in general but married women never take their husband's last name; only the kids usually do.  (And even if it's with the kids, the kids' last names could either be the dad's or mom's depending on what the mom and dad agree on. For example, Naruto's last name is from his mother, not his father because the dad didn't want anyone to know that Naruto was the dad's child.)

Why?  It's like (traditionally) how married women take their husband's surname after marriage.  They just do.

I know there's this trend that the married woman will add on their husband's last name with a dash after her last name. However, I personally find this to be annoying, especially when I have to write out a compound (American) last name that's at least over 25 letters long.  [I don't mind Indian/Arabic names because I know linguistically those names are just wicked long hands down.]

Apparently (from history class before vacation), Southeast Asia still has to do significant work on women's rights before it is up to par with the UN's goals.  So this whole conception of "you give up your self-identity when you change your last name as a married woman" is ultimately a fallacy when that concept is not held by countries that don't have women's rights.

I'd like to find out more about the historical reason why (in the Western world) women don't keep their original last name but take their husband's last name.

Being Fashionable... Or Not

It seems to be that all my life (ok, maybe all throughout middle and high school) I have never seemed to be fashionable.  I mean if you could look at me right now, you'd never think that I would be contemplating about what is fashionable or what looks good, stuff such as Ralph Lauren Polo Purple Label or Chanel.  It wasn't like I was so blatantly stupid as to know that Lands' End khakis looked better, let alone more formal, than sweatpants.  It was just that I grew up in an environment where almost no one around me could afford even 1 article of clothing from those mentioned brands, let alone think that kind of stuff.

All my "friends" at school probably think that I dress very yuckily but they don't know inside my head that I'm evaluating whether or not a certain Gaultier look that I saw last night was a hit or miss.

Anyways, the point I really wanted to make is that I seem like I'm totally uninterested in the topics that really intrigue me.

I think that my "friends" think I'm antisocial or something among the lines of that because I don't connect with them on Facebook or Twitter or some other shenanigans like that.

Well, let me propose this point to that argument.

Back in the summer of 2007, when people who were really Internet geeks or quasi-Internet geeks, I was just a rising 7th grader.  At the end of the school year, I was asking all my "friends" in class to join me on Facebook.  (I found out about Facebook through my judo club, where people claimed it was a "neater version of MySpace."  I avoided the whole MySpace shebang because I heard about that kind of "sexy" stuff and other 18+ material tended to happen on MySpace anyways.)

All my friends were saying, "Um, I don't think I need it now." They said that as if I was doing something that was above my age limit, as if I was drinking alcohol.  Over the summer, I did manage to get 3 friends onto Facebook but at that point I was impatient with the process of everyone jumping on the bandwagon.

Flash forward to 8th grade.  Now everyone had a Facebook. (At least the 50% extroverted people did.  But I found my "friends" to be obnoxious things on Facebook, such as this friend having one of his girlfriends do a dropkick on me in Pet/Friend Arena.)

Flash forward to 9th grade.  (Sorry about the corny "flash forward"-s.)  My US I history teacher asked if people used Twitter in class.  (Because one of John Adams relatives wrote 1 sentence journal entries, comparable to tweets.)  One of my classmates openly declared that, "Only 30-something-year-olds use it," and the whole class was in accordance.  Well, what do you know?  By the summer after 10th grade nearly all of those teens in that room were tweeting away avidly.

[I was initially drawn to Twitter when it became quasi-mainstream and mentioned in newspapers but I didn't join right away because I was suffering in a antisocial phase of my depression then.]
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The bottom line is that I know what's trending even before the trend sweeps the world.   I was interested in Facebook and Twitter before any of my peers even gave those sites a thought.  So, who's really "in" and who's really "out"?

Everyone might say that I'm "out" while they're "in", but I'd like to suggest that this more-than-a-conjecture from my subconscious may have more veracity than what the masses say.

Thinking while Typing... or maybe Thinking after I Type

I'm not entirely sure of what I want to do with this blog...

I know for sure I'll always post my original thoughts.  That's a given.

I don't want to have a blog that's just personal but at the same time I don't want to have a blog that just fails because it tries to do everything.

I know I'll do some product reviews of some products that I think are either great or horrible products that people should know about.

I like to contemplate on art and just events that are happening.

There's only one way to find out: Just make the next post and see where that takes me.