Navel-Gazing

Need to do a fairly simple post today — too much going on for a real thought-y one:

• Complete virus/spyware/adware scan of The Stepdaughter’s PC, which I have to keep swiveling around to monitor (I stab at thee, Internet Explorer!);
• Urgent post-holiday cleanup needed, primarily attributable to:
  • New Year’s Eve dinner and, er, aftermath
  • a Christmas tree which has mysteriously opted not simply to go dry, really fast, but seems actively to be flinging its needles (and the ornaments which depend on them) to the floor; and, especially,
• Tonight’s postponed edition of the annual “Christmas date” with The Missus (more on which later, at some point), which not only will require some prep time but also imposes a deadline on everything else.

So I’m pulling out the cheapest stunt in the lazy blogger’s bag-o’-tricks: wondering about the site’s cumulative statistics — page visits and such, and what it all “means” (to the extent it can be determined to mean anything).

We had a houseguest this week — a friend of us both (especially The Missus) who, like us, was a member of our old “biweekly Algonquin” writing workshop. We haven’t seen The Professor in something like nine years so naturally, in the process of catching up, we started talking about current writing projects.

“Why are you doing a blog?” she asked me.

Uh…

I’m still trying to figure that out. Obviously, the daily routine forces me to write — but I could do that to greater effect, perhaps, if I instead worked on something “real.”*

And I think The Boy within also fantasizes that random lightning will strike. Some famous editor or agent or, who knows, maybe Ellen Degeneres or one of the Weinsteins will land here while searching for something else, and suddenly realize, simultaneously, (a) what s/he has been missing all this time and (b) that every other powerful person has so far overlooked it, too.

Whatever my purpose might be, I know what I meant (and have succeeded) not to do with Running After My Hat is to write about just one thing, or two things, or even three or four things, All. The. Time. I happily read and admire blogs which do so but it would bore the living daylights out of me to write such a blog. (I know this because I’ve done it, or tried to.)

Anyhow, I decided to go back through the statistics collected by the little Sitemeter program in effect here (and lots of other places), just to see where most visitors landed when they got here.

Now, most visitors to RAMH (and probably to most blogs) enter the site through the home page. They have it bookmarked that way, or they’re following a link from somebody else’s blogroll. That sort of thing. I’m not counting visits which started out at the home page, because visitors there don’t (often) know specifically what they’re looking for. Instead, I’m looking at visits which began at specific pages within the blog.**

Below, the top 25 so-called “entry pages” on RAMH, in descending order from most to least often entered. I’d laugh to think of these as “2008’s greatest hits” (one of them is already from 2009) — really, I’ve posted only about 225 entries since starting, in April.

Nevertheless, I’m charmed that visitors found the following 25 pages, mostly via search engines, without knowing anything of me or of Running After My Hat.

1	The First Blank Page: Edward Gorey inspires the author to write
2	Squirrels in the Attic: an adventure with wildlife
3	About Suffering, They Were Never Wrong: about Breughel’s The Fall of Icarus
4	The Most Amazing Word: “but”
5	How Important Is Reading?: a young actress responds
6	What’s in a Song: “Blue Moon”: the background of the popular song
7	Ear Job (2): Hearing Aids: my experience with hearing aids
8	The “Sing, Sing, Sing” Triptych: how Benny Goodman’s “Sing, Sing, Sing (with a Swing) resembles a three-paneled work of art, joined by hinges
9	More on Setting: Height, Width, Depth, and…?: Walter Tevis’s “The Ifth of Oofth,” and storytelling in general
10	“… 3… 2… 1… 0… I Said ZERO, Dammit, ZERO!“: thanks for 2008; thanks in advance for 2009
11	Writer’s Bane: Alan Nelson’s “Lafayette”: the sh!tbird on every author’s shoulder
12	Thankful for the War Chant: the story of “The Hawaiian ‘War’ Chant”
13	(Un)Smiling Faces, in Black and White: Wisconsin Death Trip
14	Overwhelmed by Ursula Vernon: I learn about an artist
15	A Bout of Gout: an occasional affliction
16	“Stand by Me,” Worldwide: a project of the “Playing For Change: Peace Through Music” project
17	“Allow Me.” “No, Allow Me!”: the practice of blurbing in general, and Blurbings LLC in specific
18	The Hurricane Phone: when a new technology is really just “new”
19	“Sing, Sing, Sing”: my (long) short story
20	The Boy, The Boy’s Mother, the Two Trains: a meditation
21	Thought Music: how music works on our brains
22	Living for Books: a solid wall of books
23	You Can Run But You Can’t Hide: the whiskey river blog, and others, about finding what you think is lost
24	Bloghopping: Haven Kimmel on The Sopranos: Ms. Kimmel considers perhaps the best TV show in history
25	Ear Job (3): Tinnitus: my ears rang, and maybe still do

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* But oh the day is coming, fair reader. Once I am done mining the early Grail drafts and start what I hope will be the last one, expect RAMH‘s daily torrent to dwindle to a trickle.

** This, too, can be a little deceptive. Now that so many people are using Google Reader or other feed-watchers, they revisit favorite blogs simply by reading the most recent posts, no matter what they’re about, and bypassing the home page. But I don’t have that many followers at the moment, so I’m confident they’re not artificially inflating the counts.