Oh So Random.

The featured image for this post is basically the long and short of this post. And if I could just slip in a caption for the picture, all the words that follow would have no purpose. But that would really damage my blogging urges. Also who doesn’t want to exploit some blog material just lying around on the surface of Internet.

It’s not a secret really. That screenshot above is taken from Daily Post’s post Your Statistics: More Than Just an Ego Boost. And those are not my WordPress stats but Daily Post’s (sigh..I wish). That’s pretty much my idea of the pinnacle of stats and I hoped to be very depressed or very encouraged (depending on what hour of the day it is) on seeing this. Obviously the madhouse that my brain is – I laughed off the stable hopelessness of my stats instead. I look at my stats more times a day than the times I check the number of new leaves on my Money Plant. For a person who had zero views/day until very recently, one more than that is a LOT. The aforementioned blog post said something about finding a pattern of ebb and flow of stats by analysing every single posts’s reception.

So I did. Anything to get away from you dearest Assignment-on-Mechanical-Manual-Transmission!

Took a post from my blog ‘Grace Just Isn’t My Forté’ and googled it to check the SEO. And THERE on the first page of results was my post. I somersaulted a mile away (in my head) before I realised the post had a very specific name; hence the appearance on the google search. I chose to go with something more general this time and googled another post ‘Let’s Be Honest’. As the first page of results began with song lyrics and Huffington Post links, my spirits took a deep plunge. Steeling myself, I crawled my way through 82 pages of search results (as I said – a.n.y.t.h.i.n.g to get away from work). I was forced to go off track a couple times when links saying Star Wars and Ryan Gosling jumped out of the screen at me. My post wasn’t anywhere to be found, unless it was on one of those last 50 or so search result pages where I was practically staring at the white screen with blue and black dots and the brain registering nothing meaningful.

At the end of the very emotionally stimulating exercise I learned some life-changing lessons. Life, dear people, is not about coming back to your blog stats and asking yourself ‘What am I doing wrong here?’. Life is not about going back and reading your own posts over and over and telling yourself that you write very well but the PR isn’t right. Life is, finally, not about going without a blog post for more than a week because you know the one you have been working on is not a masterpiece. Life is beyond facile retrospection.

Life is about being a scavenger and feeding on anything to make into a post. And life is about stopping by your stats page only to reassure self that the views are on the positive side of zero even today.