It’s a play on words – get it? The abroad is broad. I’m going abroad. I’m a… nevermind.
Most of all, it’s a complete departure from all the names I’ve ever used online. I’ve used Kermit, Rager, vegan_chick, jlygrnmigt, buglady, and a few others. Some of these are still floating around, and some uses of these names are not me.
Back in the early 90′s, I started out on a couple of BBS’s using the name Kermit. I was 13 or 14 and thought flame wars were cool, so I participated. Then I got scared that I had angered the cool people I was trying to befriend, and changed my name to Rager. It declared my teenage angst and my status as a fan of Rage Against the Machine. I still wasn’t a cool kid, but the name stuck for a long time. I even got it engraved on my high school class ring above a little picture of a computer.
Even back then, short names were hard to get as email addresses because they were the first to be grabbed. Free email providers had informed me that Rager was unavailable. I was vegan at the time, and became veganchick.
Enter AOL Instant Messenger. As uncool as AOL was and remains (no really, it’s still around for some reason), AIM was rather essential. Oh, I also had ICQ, Yahoo Messenger, and stayed logged into a talker at all times, but AIM was the standard at the time. I crossed my fingers and hoped, but Rager and all imaginable spellings of vegan_chick were unavailable. A new name was needed, and at the time, AIM had a limit of ten characters. I came up with Jolly Green Midget, and shortened it to JlyGrnMigt. This stuck for even longer than Rager, except that nobody had any idea what it said. I’ve been explaining it to people for a decade.
Buglady was given to me by a kid after I introduced him to the joy of hissing cockroaches and giant millipedes, and stuck through grad school. It was even on my license plate!
Now, however, I no longer identify closely with a frog, nor am I filled with teen angst. I’m not vegan, I’m sick of re-spelling vowel-less words, and there are a few other bugladies out there. As it turns out, this new name isn’t terribly original either. But I like it, and it’s mine. You can call me The Broad. 
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