100,000 HITS!

I almost forgot to notice this:



And it only took me six and a half years to get there.

Meanwhile, the big guns like Atrios and Kos get hundreds of thousands of hits every day. But no big deal, right? That's one of the things that's changed for me since the early days: I'm not so worried about becoming a bigtime blogger anymore. I mean, fame would be nice, very nice indeed, but I quickly realized that a desire for lots of people to read my words isn't what keeps me doing this everyday. Rather, it's therapeutic. Instead of getting pissed off at the news all the time with nothing more to do about it than bore my friends with endless ranting like I used to do, now I can rant with a sense that somebody, at least, somewhere, is hearing what I have to say--apolitical and non-artsy friends of mine greatly benefit from this in the non-cyber world, and a few of them who are foolish enough to read my opinions online seem to be getting something out of all this blogging, too.

And, of course, my ego is greatly stroked whenever one of those foolish friends approaches me in my daily life and tells me about something they read here at Real Art.

Beyond all the self-therapy my blogging affords me, I also believe it's made me smarter. Most of what I do here is about formulating arguments. I mean, okay, I post pictures of my cats and my Star Trek calendar and all that, but the vast majority of my Real Art writing is about refining ideas, figuring out what I think about the world and my place in it. It's a hassle at times - last night I only had one drink after work, telling my restaurant comrades that I had to stay sober so I could post on my blog - but it's rewarding overall: I'm much sharper these days in real world discussions about politics, movies, music, religion, you name it, whatever I'm writing about at Real Art.

There's nothing like reading over a post I made a week or two ago and saying to myself, "Yeah, that's right! You go, girl!" I've also found that whatever creative urge has made me waste my life chasing the theater or writing songs has found an outlet in my blogging: I often feel the same sense of satisfaction with my work here that I do in my more traditional artistic endeavors.

Anyway, congratulations to me! I'll celebrate again when I make it to 500,000 hits.

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