The new year is a good moment to reflect a little bit on what this blog is, or has become, or may be in the future. I have not changed what it’s primarily for: my intention is not journalism – journalism doesn’t interest me. Yet this is, in fact, a journal – in the narrower sense – of my life, for whoever happens to want to look. My readers include some close friends, and, more sparsely, relatives and even students or coworkers, past or present.
But strangers read this blog too. I use an online tool called feedjit to sometimes “watch” who’s reading my blog. Many people land on my blog for many different reasons. People seem to stumble on it a lot while looking for the words “karma” and “bitch” in the same sentence – this is a coincidence of a one time post about a certain joke, and the name of my place of work.
More seriously, people like to read about “phenomimes and psychomimes.” Go head, google it – I’ll wait.
By far the strangest query on google that landed someone on my blog, however, has got to be one I saw just yesterday. Here is the query as reported on feedjit:
Abbottabad, North-West Frontier arrived from google.com on “CAVEAT DVMPTRVCK” by searching for mayans troll the world.
What are they doing in Abbottabad, in Pakistan, such that they need this information? Did my blog help answer their question? I doubt it. If Osama wasn’t supposedly already murdered by Obama, I’d wonder if the sociopath wasn’t perhaps a little bit worried about the end of the world, sitting stooped over some computer in his stealthily-placed compound (uh, that’s a sort of joke, in very bad taste).
Well, blog-readers: Happy New Year. We went out last night, some coworkers and I. I enjoy their company, but as usual, it’s a little bit stressful – socializing in Korea is more stressful than work, mostly because of the linguistic issues and my insecurities surrounding those.
I have a cup of my Brazilian coffee, and big fat fluffy flakes of snow are falling from a slate gray sky on New Year’s morning. The world isn’t so bad.
