Counting, Dooce and Self-focus

March 14, 2007

Einstein muttered a quote once that I often turn to in times of stress and uncertainty. I turn to it when I’m getting wrapped up in my little universe and paying attention to only me.

Take this week, for instance (and yes, the quote will be listed at the bottom to make sure you read this entire post). In the last seven days I have:

Won a poker tournament worth $1000
Got some new bookcases
Explored the blogosphere
Had sushi twice
Enjoyed homemade/handmade crabcakes
Dropped a 12-pack of Dr. Pepper on my foot
Bought some bike parts
Listened to dozens of podcasts
Watched the Sarah Silverman Show
Wrote a column for the paper
Did about 60 hours worth of client work
Read part of a book and all of three magazines
Recorded a podcast and wrote in my blog
Searched for cheap fares to Paris
And generally lived my life

Now the self-focus/wrapped up in my universe part comes in at number three. While exploring the blogs of others I came upon dooce.com. The site was created a few years back by a woman who felt like blogging. She wrote regular entries about her workplace and people in her life. She wrote about minutiae. She wrote about big events. In all, she was just sharing her electronic journal with the world and her readership wasn’t too large.

Then her boss caught wind of the blog and read it. Finding material and comments within that didn’t show the business and certain people in a good light, dooce’s creator was fired.

From that one event the site has gained notoriety and has now been popularized to the point that this woman and her husband are both SAHP’s (stay at home parents) while google ad revenue pays all their bills.

All she has to do is put up a new post every so often and ride the gravy train.

It’s amazing and disturbing concurrently. Amazing that people are so interested in her commentary that they visit the site repeatedly. And disturbing because this woman who was at one time a valedictorian and has a degree in English, admits that she almost misspelled the word ‘get’ in her blog.

Further disturbing is that about 70% of the sites I clicked to in a random wander around the Web link to her site. Ironically, I’ve put a link to her site up above so I now fall into that category.

My point in all this is that I’m jealous of her seemingly effortless success.

My readership is pretty steady at about 100 regular readers per day. They click over here to see if I have new stuff up (like this post), then they go off to live their lives…hopefully enriched by the clean content they find within Bowl of Cheese.

But I suspect that even with my tiny adsense ad on the right sidebar, I probably will still have to work for another 16 years before I can retire. Maybe I should take myself to task for this little hop of self pity and get my next book written.

Speaking of which, the quote I spoke of earlier is…

“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”

More to come…