Happy birthday to us

By David McElroy · May 13, 2012

At 9:27 a.m. a year ago today, I made a brief announcement on Facebook that my new website was open. The result wasn’t especially promising. I had a grand total of 35 visitors from three countries that day.

Although the numbers climbed — very slowly — it wasn’t until late July that things really took off. On July 25, I had more than 30,000 visitors to the site — in one day — which created problems with the server crashing from the overload, but it was a great problem to have. Things have settled down to somewhere far lower than the peak, but far higher than the meager beginning. For instance, in the past week, the site has had 6,233 visitors.

Where are all those people coming from? Well, I’ve had visitors from all 50 U.S. states and 163 countries. I still haven’t figured out why people in some of those places come — much less come back — but I’ve watched with gratitude as it’s continued to happen.

The list of most active countries for sending visitors has been led by English-speaking countries, which seems natural, but six of the top 10 are not primarily English-speaking: In order, the most visitors have come from the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Australia, Germany, Spain, India, Italy, the Netherlands and Sweden.

The top 10 U.S. states in sending visitors have been Texas, California, Alabama, New York, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Ohio, Washington and Pennsylvania. The only surprise on the list is Alabama, but that’s certainly because of people here who happen to know me.

If you’re curious what operating systems people use to get here, here’s the breakdown. I had thought Windows would dominate more strongly, but I guess it’s a sign of change in the computer world that it “only” sends 70 percent of the visitors: Windows, 70 percent; Macintosh, 16 percent; iPhone, 5 percent; iPad, 4 percent; Android, 3 percent; and other (mostly Linux, iPod, BlackBerry, Symbian) 2 percent. The biggest surprise is how strongly the Mac does with my audience, but the second biggest surprise is that slightly more than 10 percent of visits are coming from mobile devices.

When I started a year ago, I had no idea what to expect. I’ve done better than I expected in some ways, but I’m disappointed in other ways that I haven’t made more progress. When I look back at the writing from a year ago, I’m surprised at how bad some of it is. Although I’d been writing for a living for many years, I had been out of the discipline of having to write every single day for an audience. It took awhile to get back in the swing of that, and there are still days when the work isn’t up to my standards.

I badly need a copy editor. With rare exceptions, nobody reads anything before it’s published. (I’m really picky about letting anybody touch my writing anyway, so there are few people I’d even allow to copyedit it, which is a problem.) I have to admit that I frequently don’t even have time to read what I’ve written myself to make sure it’s what I meant to say. I just don’t have enough time — since the bulk of my time has to go to pursuits that bring in money.

The biggest pleasure has been building relationships with some of the readers, some just through the public comments but through email with a number of you. It’s been great to get to know you and listen to the diversity of thought and expectation out there. Readers have left 3,358 comments on articles over the year, and that engagement from you is very important to me.

I’m still trying to figure out how to do a podcast to go along with the site, but I don’t want to launch anything that I don’t think will entertain you enough to make it worth the investment of time — for both of us. It’s a lot of work to make something entertaining and worth the time to listen to, so I’m thinking and talking to others a lot about how to do this. The broadcast professionals who I’ve asked for opinions have been encouraging, so it’s something I expect to happen in time.

When I started, I promised myself I’d give it at least a year. If I could see progress toward something worth the investment of time, I’d give it another year to see what it could become. I would have never predicted a year ago today all the changes that have come about (and all the people I’ve met) because of this site. I’m eager to see what the next year brings. I have a feeling it’ll be more than I can imagine.

Thanks for being a part of this first year. The truth of the matter is that you’re the most important element. If you weren’t here reading, none of it would be worth doing. So I’m grateful to all of you. I hope you’ll keep coming back. I’ll be trying to dream up ways to make it worth your time.

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I’ve never been attracted to skinny women. There’s nothing wrong with someone who’s naturally thin, but it’s never been my preference. What has shocked me, though, is the judgment I’ve heard from women all through my life — about themselves and others — about who’s “fat.” I concluded long ago that most women in our culture have been brainwashed to believe that skinny is attractive — and that anything other than skinny is ugly. I first assumed that I was the oddball — for preferring women with bigger and heavier bodies — but I’m coming to the conclusion that most men naturally feel this way to one extent or another. I just ran across new research by a couple of Northwestern University psychology professors that shows that women seriously overestimate how much a straight man will be attracted to a skinny woman. In a perfect world, we would all be at a healthy weight, but when it comes to attractiveness, too heavy is more attractive than skinny. At least to me — and to a lot of men, too.

Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

After I wrote last night about being happy, I thought of an old song that mirrored what I was feeling. After listening to the entire album, I found it remarkable how well the emotions of that music match my own heart at this point in my life. Bob Bennett’s “Matters of the Heart” came out while I was in college. Even after all these years, it holds up really well, and you can listen to the entire album on YouTube. The specific song which matched my feelings last night was “Madness Dancing,” but I still find every song on the album to be strong with the exception of the eighth and ninth. (The song about his parents, called “1951,” is especially poignant.) In fact, the opening and closing songs paint a picture of my heart at its best now in these lines: “A light shining in this heart of darkness, A new beginning and a miracle, Day by day the integration of the concrete and the spiritual.” It’s old music that you’ve probably never heard, but it means a lot to me.

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