About Pugilator

The Purpose of This Site

Almost a year ago I started a tryout blog. I really enjoyed the writing, reading the comments and, I admit, looking at the statistics. When you have a debilitating disease like ME/CFS, it is important to focus more on the things that you can do, than on the things that are currently outside your reach. Blogging is a way of communicating, of doing something with your creativity, and of producing something- getting something done. I don’t like to talk about ME/CFS. I find it easier to write about it. Writing makes it easier to organize my thoughts and afterward I can check if I haven’t forgotten anything.
I consider myself an Anglophile and want to grasp every opportunity to improve my knowledge and understanding of the English language. There is no way to do this passively, and there is only so much you can achieve by reading. So I intend to write, write, and then write some more. If I make spelling or grammar mistakes, you may always contact me, especially if I make that same mistake over and over again. However, I would prefer that the comment section beneath each article is used to comment on the contents of the article. You may contact me using this form.

What Is A Pugilator?

Before I started this blog, I already had enough ideas for at least 50 articles, and yes I wrote them all down, a title and some keywords or key-phrases, lest I forget them. Recently I was going through a period with severe brainfog for 2 months. I also came up with a dozen possible domain names for this site and the majority was and still is available. The problem was that every time I had an outburst of creativity and had ideas for 5-6 articles, I also came up with a new domain name. Every time the new domain fitted the new articles, but not the previous ones. I also didn’t want a domain name containing the words fighting, surviving, or struggling, nor did I want any official sounding domain name. It’s my blog, my playground.
I became so frustrated with this that I violated the first SEO rule for setting up an new website; pick a meaningful domain name. Instead, I decided to use my old Yahoo! ID as the domain name for my blog. You know, as in reduce, reuse, recycle. However, pugilator isn’t a made up name.

Diogenes pugilator

Diogenes pugilator

Is the Latin name for the small hermit-crab. The small hermit-crab can grow up to a length of 11 mm and the left chela (or claw) is much larger than the right chela. Compared to the common hermit-crab Pagurus bernhardus which can grow up to a length of 35 mm and where the right chela is larger than the left chela. The length mentioned is the carapace length, without the legs and the soft abdomen. Including the abdomen would at least double the length mentioned. To protect its soft abdomen, a hermit-crab carries an empty seashell on its back, into which the crab’s whole body can retract.

Why is this hermit-crab so dear to me? I started birdwatching at the age of 13 (27 years ago) and I occasionally ventured into some other areas of natural history. During the nineties that was marine biology, at least everything that either lived on or washed up on the beach. It was in the early nineties that I discovered this small hermit-crab on the beach. I was pretty certain that this was a new species, because I spend every sunny day during summer in my childhood playing on the beach, catching crabs and shrimps, which I released before going home, and I am sure that I would have remembered catching hermit-crabs. The small hermit-crab is a more southern species and the theory is that due to global warming it is expanding its territory northward.

Next summer I will take some more pictures of the small hermit-crab, and maybe even shoot a video.

Symbolism

It was only after I decided to use pugilator as domain name, that I realized that the name wasn’t as meaningless as I first thought.

• Like people with a severe case of ME/CFS, hermit-crabs are housebound, but that doesn’t prevent them from having a life.
• As the hermit crab grows in size, it has to find a larger shell/house. Your current limitations aren’t set in stone. I am an adept of graded exercise therapy (GET) and exercising just within my limitations, I notice that after a while those boundaries have moved up a bit; giving me some more breathing space and freedom, allowing me to do just a little bit more. Over and over again.
• The small hermit-crab Diogenes pugilator lives in the surf, at least during the summer. People with ME/CFS can, as I recently noticed and joined in, have a social life online: surfing (pun intended) the web, chatting, blogging, facebooking and tweeting.

The small hermit-crab Diogenes pugilator as a symbol or mascot for a blog on ME/CFS? Why not?