"stats"

this is no good. there is a button on this blog that i can click when i log in called stats and it tells me how many people are reading this blog, this journal, these private ramblings, what country they're in and some other nonsense like that. i don't know who they (you) are but i have started to find their mysterious perusals meaningful. i am pleased when there are a lot of them. that is to say, when there are around 15 of them, but that still means that somehow, and for some mysterious reason, people are reading what is written here. this was never my intention with this thing, i meant for it to be my private journal, and it's super mind blowing to me that anyone ever found it. on campus once, a friend of mine named tom told me that he had read this blog thing. now i don't know tom very well. and though he very pleasant, i wouldn't go out of my way to tell him about writing i was doing on relationship insecurities and any number of other private things. anyway, his girlfriend had apparently somehow stumbled on it on the internet. ON THE INTERNET! how do people do these things? how do people find these things?

i don't want to have stats, to know whether or not this is amusing someone using internet explorer in india, because then i probably won't write as freely, because i'll peg my sense of self to the utter mystery, the terrifying anonymity of google. what a cruel and capricious thing. then again it might simply make sense, i might as well get used to people judging the things i do in a very distant and unknowable way, i do want to write after all and i do want it to be read so i might as well get used to trying to please those that might do that reading. but that that readership i might hope to please rises out of this statistical sea, this most bizarre sea, is awfully awfully weird. who are these (you) people? how can someone (me) be made to care, to love such MEANINGLESS numbers. i have thought a lot about numbers, about how statistical appraisals of our lives and behavior are probably the key to us living better, that if someone could graph our water usage or something like that that we might then feel competition with ourselves and an urge to do better, la da da, but when it comes to me and this little blog thing, i find it rather anxious-making and enormously strange. to whom am i trying to appeal? this makes me think of my mother. she has a web series and one of the episodes has a vaguely erotic sounding name to it and the thumbnail is of a woman dressed not indecently, but in some kind of negligee. and that episode has the most hits of any of her stuff, many of them from the UAE and Saudi Arabia and the like. Which is stupendously depressing.

basically, it's just about the absurdity of trying to appeal to an "audience" (that is hardly the right word) which, on any given day, may include a dozen readers in india. how can that not but contort you absurdly, make you silly in trying to do right by such a system? self worth is so bound up with other people, humans are fundamentally social creatures, but in a modern situation like this one should have a right to know who is responsible for sculpting that self worth

i played chess with y and it was wonderful because i beat him thoroughly three times. a shellacking.