The annoying thing about blogs is that they can’t really die. They’re like anthrax spores; they linger around for years, dormant and insidious. Where’s the closure?
There is no closure, so I suppose I may as well start writing again.
And a big hello to my friends at Wharton. It’s probably not entirely coincidental that my interest in this web site has flagged just as my classmates’ awareness of it has mushroomed. Painful self-consciousness, oddly enough, is just the worst thing for navel-gazing. When I think about some of my recent posts (e.g., weepy stories about dead dogs, rehashing of application essays, etc.), I literally cringe.
The fact that so many of my classmates seem to have independently discovered this site (and let me be completely straight up about this: I’m only talking about a handful of people) is a bit mystifying. Based on my monthly hit rate, the odds of accidentally chancing across adamstein.org would seem to hover somewhere below infitesimal. But discover it they have.
To my further surprise, traffic has remained strong throughout the two-month hiatus, and possibly even climbed a bit. Is this a good thing? I used to flatter myself that people stopped by to read the things I wrote. That was before I got wise to the statistic-mangling behavior of all those newsreader programs automatically peeking at my home page every day to check for updates.
Some of the traffic is legit, however, particularly the wanderers sent here by Google’s image search engine. Bizarrely, the most popular page on this entire site is a picture of a heap of dead bunnies (warning: mildly grim, although technically speaking it is just a photo of a deli counter). The search term sending people to that page is “rabbits”, not “dead rabbits” or “skinless rabbits”, or “pile of flayed bunnies”. So far no one has complained.
The geographic distribution of traffic continues to be an endless source of fascination. Someday I’ll have to put together some graphs to get a better look at the patterns, although the factors driving the changes will likely remain forever mysterious. Why the sudden popularity in Israel? Why so fickle, Argentina? Don’t you have anything better to do, Belgium? The tail end of the distribution is even more interesting than the fat end. This month has seen single visitors from Tuvalu, Kyrgyzstan, Iceland, and Trinidad, to name but a few. Whatever drew these solitary travelers here, it wasn’t enough to entice them back.
To all of these visitors, both faithful and fickle, I want to say: can I crash at your place sometime?
I’m reluctant to predict a return to a semi-regular post schedule. I’ve been tempted to make such an announcement several times over the past two months, and in each case I would have been wrong. But I do have a vague sense that the ice might be breaking. The sap is beginning to move.
After all, how can I resist this chance to pander to my new growth markets? Coming soon: “Canada: Our Plucky Neighbor to the North”; “Israel: Spicy Little Desert Garbanzo”; “Belgium: The Phoenix Rises”…
