Today, I’m not cribbing my actual post title from a 70s or 80s cut. But today’s topic did bring a 1980 classic to mind, so let’s keep the playlist going a little bit longer, shall we?
And the great insight that brought this tune into my head (drum roll, please):
I have entirely too many clothes.
Mid-day today, I got a group Facebook message from a friend of mine, C:
Hey! If you are getting this message it’s because either you have posted about Warren or I think you might like/support her.
On my way to work today, I realized that I drive by her house every day. People are leaving notes and flowers on her porch.
With this realization, C had had a flash of inspiration. Her plan was simple: she was offering to deliver any messages any of us wanted to send to Elizabeth Warren. If we could email our message to C by 5, she’d print them all out and then drop them on Warren’s porch as C made her way home from work.
Well, I’d assumed that today would be my first angry post about the presidential primaries. But then this happened:
And I realized that I’d be having a much more complicated kind of day, emotionally speaking.*
One the fascinating (to me) pieces of this “alphabetic CD tour” I do every few years is how many of these 1300-or-so albums still hold a place in my heart and my affections. I have different reasons for liking different things, but considering I started collecting CDs back in 1989 or so, it’s kind of surprising to me how infrequently I listen to a long-forgotten/rediscovered album and say to myself.
Eh. No longer my bag.
Given that, it’s kind of notable that in the last 2 weeks, I’ve come across not one, but two different artists/albums I’m thinking of adding to the Goodwill pile.
I know why I didn’t post on Tuesday night: I had a fairly long Zoom call with some friends, and then I had some crucial prep-work to do for a Wednesday morning meeting.
I’m less sure about why I didn’t post last night. I stopped watching TV at 7 PM, I came into my “Goddess room,” I sat down at my computer, opened up WordPress, and then. . . . nothing much happened.
It’s not like it was the first night where I didn’t have an easy topic: no fresh books or movies, no yoga class, no introspective insights. But I’ve had other nights without an obvious topic, and I’ve still shown up to the page and written something. Heck, that’s what the whole “From the Hat” category is about!
When all is said and done, I just couldn’t summon up the energy, the will, last night to write anything.
I’ve never actually read Dante’s Inferno, but I have enough 101-level cultural literacy to know that there’s 9 circles of hell described there, each one with its own individual ambiance.
I think one of those hell levels is of the frozen wasteland variety?
I am, of course, ruminating on this notion because I am writing this in glorious Indianapolis, Indiana, where the current temperature is a balmy 10 degrees Fahrenheit, and where tomorrow’s predicted high will be an even more impressive 2 degrees.
And so it begins.
Winter has lots of possible beginnings: cultural (Monday after Thanksgiving), calendrical (December 1st), astrological (Winter Solstice), what-have-you. But in my experience as a newbie-Bostonian, I’m pretty sure that the winter storm season doesn’t begin until right about now. There have been exceptions to this, of course: a couple of our years here have had one biggish snowfall in December. But in most years, the first big snow dump seems to happen somewhere around mid-January or MLK day. And even in those years that had a single snowstorm in December, the rotating lineup of winter storms didn’t start until then.
And, right on time, Winter Storm Harper is scheduled to arrive tomorrow evening.
Anyone who knows me knows that I am a clutter-hound, and that I am kind-of-perpetually trying to figure out how to get that part of my life and our house under control. (Just look at the whole Stuff about Stuff category here on JALC for a few snapshots on this theme…)
So I’ve been vaguely intrigued by the various chatter I’ve been seeing about Marie Kondo‘s new Netflix series.
I haven’t watched this show yet, in large part because I have absolutely been minimizing my TV time in order to keep a priority on my 2019 reading and writing pursuits.
Full disclosure: I’m very much on the fence as to whether I will ever watch it.
QUICK HIT: The choir season starts up again tonight, which means my Wednesday posts for the foreseeable future will have to be:
Obviously, today I’ve chosen option 2. Well, not entirely obviously, since I could have pre-written and scheduled this post. But trust me: I didn’t do that. Because my life and to-do list are not currently at such a level of organization and under-controlness. I’d love to tell you otherwise, but I don’t have it in my to maintain that level of facade.
Where was I? Oh yeah: QUICK HIT tonight. In more ways than one. (Go below the fold to see what I mean…)
A funny thing happened this past week. A friend of mine shared an upsetting incident on Facebook where she experienced public prejudice against breast-feeding. Her story then went viral, earning (well-deserved) media coverage and public outrage.
That’s not the funny part. The funny thing is what happened next: I wrote a blog post about the event, and then I went viral, too.
See exhibit A, WordPress’s visitor stats summary for JALC during the last couple weeks:
The August 12-19 stretch shows me with my customary rate of site visitors — usually somewhere in the 15-25 range, with slight upticks and down-drops depending on factors like weekday vs. weekend, if I skipped a day, etc.
August 20 is when I posted about Ingrid’s experience: you can already see the uptick to 60 site visitors in those hours between hitting “Publish” and midnight, as a few folks started sharing my post within their own networks.
The next day, August 21st was when things hit big (relatively speaking). Yeah, that’s more than 400 hits — and from there, things have dropped off until yesterday and today I seem to have re-equalized back where I started.
So, all told, this is a very mild flavor of “going viral,” as compared to Youtube videos that get hundreds of thousands, or even millions of hits. Still, it was such a disproportionate spike in attention that it feels like the junior baby blogger version of “going viral.” And the sorts of study and self-examination the experience has invited for me — well, I wonder how different these reflections would be if I were talking about 4,000 hits rather than 400. I’m thinking: perhaps not that different at all.
First: Who woulda thunk it? For the most part, my writing here on JALC has been divorced from expectations about achieving any particular readership level on any timetable. The practice for me has been a practice of showing up, of experimenting with regular, focused writing. Finding my voice again. Yes, at some level there’s the prayer of my words being read and having positive impact — otherwise I’d just be writing in my diary rather than in a blog. But I’ve maintained a pretty decent level of non-attachment from any expectations about how many readers I want to have and how quickly I want them to appear.
And if you asked child-free me what sort of post I’d predict might be the first one to get public traction, there’s no way on this earth I would have predicted it be something about breast-feeding and the mommy wars. Talk about a subject that’s completely outside of my field of knowledge! (Okay, not completely, since I do have breasts as an anatomical feature of my body. But still.) You never know what’s going to hit a nerve and garner that flash of attention. Like catching lightning in a bottle, that is. Write something true and honest and authentic, and I guess sometimes it’ll hit a nerve, fall in with a moment of zeitgeist. But to predict what’s going to hit that zeitgeist energy? Not within my current powers, as so clearly evidenced by the disconnect between my expectations and the actual happening of which JALC post first topped 550 views.
Second: You never know what’s going to hit a nerve and garner that flash of attention. I’ll admit, however well I’ve maintained a state of non-attachment around my readership numbers where they were at a low and steady pace, that there was something sincerely exciting about seeing the bar graph keep climbing during the 21st. And when I sat down the evening of the 21st to write my first post-viral post, I could absolutely feel myself on a precipice. Feeling the demand that I “measure up” to this new level I’d achieved, feeling the temptation towards finding some other juicy topic that’d be “click bait” and that could build some kind of popularity for myself.
I walked myself back from that precipice, reminding myself: it’s like catching lightning in a bottle, that is. All I can do is continue showing up at the screen, writing as true and authentically as I can, taking on the topics that grab me and won’t let go until I say what I have to say. That’s why I wrote my post to begin with — even though I’ve spent years trying not to comment on parenting choices or the mommy wars. Something about Ingrid’s story just grabbed me, and I couldn’t rest until I wrote about it. That’s the feeling I need to keep following: I can’t rest until I write about this, rather than I think this will get good traffic.
So who knows? Maybe another post of mine will hit a zeitgeist moment a few weeks from now. Or a few years from now. Or never again. It’s all in service, however it unfolds.
I just need to keep in the practice of it. Say it plain, say it true. Stay as authentic as I can be.
Self-Love: It's Just Another Lifestyle Change 