Crashing back down to Earth

You know how how I wrote on the side that this blog is a way of trying to better keep in touch with you? Well I lied. Just a little, and more by omission than through a great big whopper, but I lied nevertheless.

Because you see, alongside my very real wish to let you know what's happening over here, I had a small secret dream. A dream of being discovered, of making it big in the blogging world. Not as big as Dooce - I'm not completely deluded - but at least having the bloggers I admire coming to my blog. Every day. As well as maybe a hundred or so other readers. And all of them commenting on how wonderful my posts are.

But for this dream to happen, people had to know I existed. So I plucked up my courage and left a comment on a blog I like. A comment that linked back to here.

And then I added a site monitor that keeps track of who's been visiting me.

And then I obsessively checked the site monitor, to see if the blogger had come to my blog.

Imagine my excitement when I saw that someone from his part of the world had visited me! And then my puzzlement when I saw that this person had spent exactly zero seconds here. Yes, zero seconds. That's basically clicking the back button before the page had even finished loading.

Huh? I thought. That can't be right. Why would someone click through and then not even read anything?

So I tried another blogger. And had a visit from her part of the world... which lasted for zero seconds.

What's the problem? I fumed. Do you not like the name of my blog, or the layout I chose? Are you really judging me on that?

I tried again. Same thing.

Hey, your blog's name isn't so great either. And I suffer through your less interesting posts and still loyally come back... give me a break here! Read a bit and I'm sure you'll love it!

I tried again. It was a really good comment. No visit at all this time.

I was getting desperate.

Desperate is a bad bad place to be. It makes you do things you wouldn't normally ever do, that you know are stupid even as you're doing them.

I'm too embarrassed to tell you what I actually did. Suffice to say that I bounced up to a group of strangers like an eager puppy, saying the equivalent of Please be my friend? Please? Pretty please? They politely turned away without even acknowledging my presence. I still shudder to think about it.

But one good thing came out of this - I no longer have the dream. And to prevent any further attention-seeking debacles, I have forbidden myself from ever leaving any comments ever again. Well, with the exception of friends' blogs (but even then I am worried that my comments may not come across as intended).

So what's written on the side is now the absolute truth. This blog is only for you, my dear friends and family - and just you reading my posts is way more attention than my very mundane life deserves.

But I wouldn't say no to a few more comments. Pretty please?