On the Internet, as they say, no one knows you're a cat; but apparently no one notices even if you drop some heavy hints. The title of my blog, Life with Lunchhooks, and the name of the domain is supposed to suggest the idea that I am a creature with paws and claws (such as a domestic cat), but I'm not really sure how many of the people who've actually read this site really get that idea.

If you were, or now are, trying to imagine me as a domestic cat, paws poised over the keys, your picture of me will nevertheless be somewhat fuzzy, since I have not given you my breed, color, national origin, age, gender, orientation or socioeconomic status. Cat or not, one thing I can tell you for sure is that if you're imagining a 20-something straight white American male college kid, you're not just barking up the wrong tree, you're on the wrong side of a different planet, barking up at a street lamp.

What you imagine doesn't matter that much so long as you keep your assumptions to yourself.  But if you let them loose, unverified, you run the risk of embarrassing both of us.  If you are the kind of person who must fill in those unspecified details (FWIW, I'm mostly not), one way to train yourself to avoid making these kinds of embarrassing faux pas is to imagine the unusual for unspecified things.  That way, you're more likely to remember that you made up that detail yourself out of whole cloth, and you'll also be living a much richer inner life.

(Of course, with the “barking up the wrong tree” metaphor, maybe I'm giving things away about how I imagine you.)