Number Eight

So this is, like, my 8th blog entry. As cultural historians look back on the entire body of my blog work, in my first seven entries they will see an immature author struggling against patriarchal societal contraints, a student of the human condition crushed by the unrealistic expectations of his extended family, and a guy who never quite knew what to do with his hair.

Without the advantage of hindsight, though, those (and other) perspicacious observations really don't resonate, so I'm going to tell you (and I'd like to bust out a vosotros here, if I might... no need for formalities) one thing that I am struggling with as I hammer away on my keyboard and spew out my nonsense in this blog: I'm writing with one hand tied behind my back.

Not literally. I mean, it's possible that I've spent time at a computer keyboard with one hand otherwise engaged, but in this case I'm speaking more metaphorically.

Meaning that while I'm not afraid to whine about my life in general terms in this space, and while I've really got precious little to hide in my life, there are some things that I'm less than comfortable posting. Some things that I think about people I know and ways that I feel about people that could, conceivably, read this blog (and could, in theory, be reading this, wondering if I'm talking about them).

Of course, the odds are low that this will happen. And I've got data to back it up. I've recently completed a study of my audience for my blog and the visitors can be broken into three groups:

-- the Confused. These individuals tend to arrive at this space entirely by accident. Whether it's because they missed the banner ad they meant to click on or because they intended to visit a blog that they actually thought looked interesting, the Confused most often have visits to my blog that last about 0.75 seconds. Older visitors in this category often exceed one second in visit length as it takes them longer to move their mouse to the "Back" button on their browser and they don't know the Alt (left arrow) hot key for escaping as quickly as humanly possible.

-- the Disgusted. Before a significant sample size was reached, I'd tentatively titled this group "the Angered", but with the final results of the study in, I've found that waves of nausea are often associated with visitors in this category, and that nudged it to a reaction of disgust, rather than anger. These visitors are often lured by the verbose nature of my entries and are invariably turned off by the content, syntax, or gestalt of my ramblings. Most death threats I receive come from this group.

-- the Aroused. Sensing my quick wit and boyish charms, this class of readers tends to skim my entries (polysyllabic words tend to confuse them), sigh wistfully at how complicated I am, and yearn to meet me, to hold me, and just to be with me. Unfortunately, this is a very small group and is comprised exclusively of men above the age of 65.

Where was I? Ah, yeah. So I wish that I had the balls to just write exactly what I was feeling, with the massive caveatsthat it was subject to change and that my feelings could be massive distortions of reality (presented to help preserve my sanity and to confuse/disgust/arouse my readers). But I can't. Because while I have plans and theories about people I know and things I want to have happen, I'm going to leave them out until they either come to pass or become impossible. And I think we all know which of those two possibilities is more likely.

Then, of course, I will be much more likely to reveal them and mock myself ruthlessly over how ridiculous I was to ever have harbored them.