I was looking for a category for my blog posts about accessibility, ethics, politics, human rights, love, relationships, and family, so I Googled some of those terms together, and the top result was lifestyle. A very nice definition I found on Wikipedia was:

Lifestyle may include views on politics, religion, health, intimacy, and more.

This sociological definition helped overcome my reservations about using the term lifestyle. You have to understand that there is a historical tension between straights and gays about lifestyle. You may have heard the expression “the homosexual lifestyle,” as if there were just one lifestyle for all gay people, and as if everything that made up a person’s sexual orientation and entire way of life outside of the bedroom could be reduced to the a lifestyle. I remember a gay activist saying, “so they [straight people who condemn “the homosexual lifestyle”] have a life, and we get a lifestyle” (as if a lifestyle were somehow cheaper than a life). Well, maybe it’s time to let go of those old connotations and embrace the definition of lifestyle as simply a way of living, minus the judgment.

Another reason I picked the word lifestyle for this category is that some people classify blogs as either lifestyle or niche. Since my blog is a combination of niche and lifestyle, I chose lifestyle for those posts that do not fit a niche (like interpreting), but instead are about, well, “life.”

I might change the name of this category, but for now, that’s why I’m calling it Lifestyle.