We're not dead, yet.

Some time ago, sitting in my lonely apartment at the school where I used to teach, no doubt longing for some contact outside of the thirty teenagers running up and down the hallways outside my rooms while calling me gay in Korean, I installed Google Analytics onto both of my blogs. If you don't know about Analytics, its a fascinating tool that Google developed for businesses that allows users to monitor the hits on websites. But it's more than a hit-counter. It will tell you the time spent on each page, the web searches that brought viewers to the site, and, perhaps most amazingly, the locations of each viewer.

I was fascinated to know that people, granted a very small number of people, outside of my friends read what I was writing, or in the case of my other blog, posting. Checking the statistics and the locations of the hits became somewhat addicting. I have no social life? It's cool—somoeone from Russia just read my tumbleblog. This is admittedly a very poor substitute for friends, but you can only handle playing so much Super Smash Brothers with 13 year-olds before resorting to ridiculous options.

Of course, the key to attracting viewers to a blog is to post frequently. Scroll on down to the next post—a half-ass affair of one paragraph—and you'll notice it was written in September. September is a long time ago. I was still unemployed, still somewhat hopeful about the the current year, and my feet weren't cold all the time. And so the hits fell. Which is fine—what does it matter if you get 150 hits a month or 20? Except for the fact that Google Analytics mapped out my sloth with humbling acumen.

Everytime I would log on to see the hits on my tumbleblog, which I posted to regularly, I would also be confronted with the sobbering statistcs that 50% less people read my this blog than last month. I don't care about the numbers. I'm not interesting enough to expect big numbers. But I always felt like Google was more or less admonishing me for not writing more, which is akin to your parents reminding you that you haven't cared for your dog, the dog you allegedy love, as evidenced by the fact that the only thing covering its ribs are scabs.

To put this feeling (and the blogs readership) in graphical form:





A line getting as close as possible to 0.

Rather than deleting my Analytics account or shutting this blog down—both easy and probably advisable—I'm going to try to remedy the lack of writing.

But you'll have to stay tuned for the next post because I can't waste what little I have to say on one post.