What are you looking at?
Wednesday morning we woke with a collective “WTF?” For some, it was a happy noise. For others… not so much. As far as I can tell from exit polls, America got its coveted “I Voted” sticker by sucking it up and voting for the candidate they hated least, or against the candidate they hated most. I totally get that, since my own ballot did not contain these names:
- Mother Theresa
- Michelle Obama
- Whoever invented mojitos
- Me
OR maybe people just want some of these crackers with a 2004 use-by date that we found under an old cabinet?
Along with just about every pollster, prediction, and human I spoke to, I don’t understand what happened. But that’s nothing new. On my own blog, for example, one post which has gotten thousands of hits recently is this one about the amazing things I’m discovering as we remove several hundred years of unfortunate decorating choices from the walls and floors of our Victorian cottage on an island off the coast of Scotland. Maybe my visitors are looking for guidance from the past. Maybe they have decorating tips. Maybe they’ve already packed their suitcases and want to stay in my new guest room (once we have a few luxuries installed like working bathrooms, floors, a kitchen…).
Since I don’t know why the visitors keep coming to this particular post, I decided to look into it. (Maybe if pollsters and journalists had looked at the most popular online search terms before the election, they would have spotted the number of people querying “suck it up?” or “calendar date for #EndOfDays?” At least they might have noticed #LeastLikelyToCauseProjectileVomiting trending on twitter.)
I decided to test this theory with a quick look through the search terms that brought people to my own blog. After discounting the usual—people looking for reasons not to get married, have children, people searching combinations of sex and Taub (such as the disturbing “girl work castration fantasy”, plus several requiring eyeball bleach), people typing-while-drunk (such as the poor fellow who actually put in eleven searches for “ned womne big boobse” and must have been SO frustrated when he kept ending up at this post)—I noticed something amazing.
People are looking for inspiration. My own posts that have received the most queries, searches, and hits aren’t the book reviews, stories about my travels or my life, or my attempts at humor. Instead, the ones which have received thousands more visitors are the following posts where I talk about things that have inspired me personally (in descending order of blog visitors):
- What the past tells us [What will you leave behind?]
- What our values tell us [Through the awful grace of God]
- What our heroes tell us [Thank a Hero]
- What our friendships tell us [Oh, America]
As Thanksgiving approaches, I’ll close with a link from another post that still gets lots of visitors [We won’t leave the light on… ]:
We have a Lady welcoming all to our shores. She rose from pennies raised by French and American school children, and she raises a lamp against the darkness. She says welcome. She says that’s who we are.
![Statue of Liberty at night [image credit: Guide TravelTourism http://guidetraveltourism.com/?attachment_id=2846]](https://barbtaub.files.wordpress.com/2015/11/the-statue-of-liberty-fun-facts.jpg?w=529)
Statue of Liberty at night
[image credit: Guide TravelTourism]
Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
–Emma Lazarus, 1883
Are we really ready to turn off her lamp?
Barb Taub 
Great post, Barb. I find it really interesting to look back over old posts and find out which were the most popular/read/engaged. Like you, I post book reviews and author interviews, however, it’s the ‘real life’ posts that always do better than the others. I was talking about this recently with my son, as I had scheduled an ‘alternative’ post that was loosely book related but predominantly personal. It ended up racing to the top of my most popular posts list, and yet an hour before it went live I was contemplating hitting ‘delete post’ because I thought it was stupid to share this stuff. I think these days people need a bit of ‘real life’ and, as you point you in your post, we’re all looking for a little inspiration. 🙂
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I completely agree! I had a post that was “freshly pressed” in WordPress, and got thousands of hits. Of course I was thrilled, but I still can’t figure out what was so exciting about that particular piece.
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Me too. I’m always looking for wallpaper stripping tips and how to inspire my wife to join the fun. My favourite post was about clouds. I think that says more about me actually.
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I’ve had the best luck removing wallpaper using a mixture of dish detergent and water (NOT dishwasher stuff). Since I never measure, I use a squirt bottle and mix it in whatever proportions. The harder the paper, the more detergent I use. It works brilliantly and doesn’t stink or destroy the walls, floor or carpeting.
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Now if only I’d known that 25 years ago. I might have saved myself a wasted day and countless arguments with my wife…
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Time machine. We really need a time machine!
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No, seriously. You need my two fabulous Polish decorators (Raphael and Adam). It’s absolutely the best way to remove wallpaper ever.
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Well I admit that having other people remove the wallpaper is preferrable.
Still, I’d love to get a time machine. I only need to go back about a month. Perhaps I can kidnap Comey and save America.
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I watched two decorating geniuses, Raphael and Adam, tackle a couple hundred years of bad decorating choices in our cottage. They use a steamer that loosens everything and then just seemed to peel it off. As a veteran of wallpaper stripping fiascos in the past, I was very impressed.
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Mostly I bring down walls or at least the plaster. I hope to be banned but I always seemed to be given another chance by the Commandantore…
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It will be interesting to see what happens now that the Orange Menace has won. I’m hoping that we won’t be removing the Statue of Liberty any time soon — in fact or in how we treat immigrants. Sigh.
Not long after I started blogging, I was Freshly Pressed. It was in the old days when that meant folks looked at the same six or seven posts … I had nearly 2K views of that one post, which I didn’t think was terribly good. Nothing else came close!
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I had one of those Freshly Pressed posts too. I was thrilled, of course I was. But I still don’t know what it was about that particular post that people liked so much.
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Exactly! I had others that were better. Oh well!
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Personally, I’ve always been kind of put off by that “wretched refuse” line.
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Wonderful observation, Barb. And it makes me feel a lot better that people are searching for inspiration, not more trash. Light fills up the darkness!
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Thank you! I’m trying, but I have to admit that I have a lot of sad moments.
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xo understood xo
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