It's Official! StrangeTango.com

We went through several iterations before coming up with the name for the website: Mermaid and Sun...Muse and Tango...Millennium Muse…among them. The act of naming a personal website is like choosing a baptismal name—signifying a new life—for yourself. So I sent out a Quick Poll to gauge the fleeting impressions left by prospective titles.

One response, by Alan Hoffman in San Diego, read my soul.

”I'm more partial to Strange Tango, because it speaks directly to the inter-relationship and inter-action between you and your subjects (the Tango); the adjective "Strange" serves to modify the noun not in the traditional sense of "strange" but rather to signify that it's not about the actual dance.”

So StrangeTango.com became the name of my personal website—now it’s official!

For me, anything sustainable has to originate organically. Here's my backstory:

When my Harvard Business School experience ended in May 2004, I kept myself busy by co-founding the Harvard Administrative Fellows alumni association a month later. Simultaneously, I started The Cool Community, the precursor to my popular e-mail communiques, which would morph into the book of essays, memoir and musings—Millennium Muse—and the cyberspace platform for my writings and experiential work—Mermaid and Sun—which was officially named StrangeTango.com. Then in April 2006, Joseph and I relocated to southwest Oklahoma to be closer to my family. Many in my wide friendship circle in Greater Boston and Cambridge were demonstrably distraught at my departure, so I began producing prodigious amounts of content that popped up regularly in their in-boxes, so much so that one of my confidants commented, "It's as though you never left town!" So, I've essentially been blogging for four years—enough time to hone my craft and my message of: literature, art, inspiration, and amplitude

This was the process of karmic causation: my departure from HBS meant there was no economic reason for me to remain in New England, which inspired me to relocate to Oklahoma and dive full-time into my personal life with my extended family, which led to a streamlined spa lifestyle...and thus the time and inclination to indulge my literary, artistic, conceptual, and entrepreneurial talents.

StrangeTango.com is a global platform.

Why?

Well, why not?!

Why move online now?

When a notable friend repeatedly encouraged me to set up my own website two years ago, her opinion spoke volumes to me. And imagine my surprise when my husband's former manager, from more than a decade ago at a blue chip high tech company, e-mailed me: "I like to see your name in my email. You are such a unique coin and I enjoy reading what you have written."!

What inspired me that I could touch a mass audience were sentiments expressed by my nephew in Hong Kong who wrote, "I like your writing," and a longtime assistant to one of my mentors who asked me to keep sending her e-mails, "...I have met a lot of people, you are one of the people I will always remember."

Two years ago the technology wasn't quite yet in place for how I wanted to brand myself. Even though schools started teaching interactive multimedia around 1994, only since 2006 have personal websites become notably sophisticated in design and technology. By 2007-2008, I was excited to see some of the most original personal websites I had ever discovered on the web.

I am reminded of a comment from a person in Great Britain left on a website design blog: "I’m always wondering what more can be done with a blog? It seems almost a shame that people ‘only’ go the journalistic route, or the photo-a-day route, or the rant route. There should be more we can do with blogs than simply post text and photos."

I agree: I believe the time is now to take the personal website to the next—experiential—level. My vision for StrangeTango.com is to create an interactive, literary work of art in cyberspace: I don't know that it's ever been done before. And instead of outsourcing this cyberspace branding project to an interactive marketing agency, my collaborators and I are doing this ourselves...how authentic can you get? We're building the site in our spare time because most of us have full-time jobs and various responsibilities.

There's nothing obvious in my writing that would suggest I'm a female Filipino-American author/artist/activist/intellectual born in the provinces and raised in southwest Oklahoma, with an Ivy League and blue chip pedigree. A citizen of the world who has traveled on five continents, a stay-at-home wife whose interests are protean. I've always been very Zen (noun, a Buddhist doctrine that enlightenment can be attained through direct intuitive insight) in my sensibilities. Given all of the above, I feel I can articulate a collective subconscious that transcends demographic barriers.