Rambling

This is the way my  week began. I woke up at 3:30 a.m. (which, of course, was really 2:30 a.m.), and couldn't get back to sleep. It was okay, though, because I had to get up at 4:00 a.m. (which was really 3) anyway, so that we could leave the house by 6:00 (5), so that I could take Bill, who currently cannot see well enough to drive, to work. I work about 35 minutes from here and have to be at work at 7:30 a.m., which means we have to leave pretty early even when it's not the second day of DST. Bill drops me off and then drives another 25 minutes or so to work. So, I had to drive him to work and then 25 minutes back to the parish. In case you haven't been keeping track (and you are still reading), that's pretty close to an hour and a half. I was tired, and I didn't have the best day at work, but I won't burden you with that. And then I did that over again 3 more times, but it's gotten better as I've gotten accustomed to getting up earlier. The upshot of this is that while I may not be, like Winnie the Pooh, a bear of very little brain, at this point I am the bearer of very little brain, and so am incapable of trying to put together anything like a cohesive post, so I'm going to ramble.

Today, I got a comment from an anonymous reader who says that he/she reads my blog every day at lunch time while drinking a cup of coffee. (Coffee-holding may explain the typos.) He/she loves the content. And also, he/she has a blog where one can buy handbags. Well, I need a handbag, really, but I think I'll pass. I mean, his/hers might have coffee stains. I almost let the comment through because it was, after all, a comment, but no.

To remove this comment (please don't think me ungenerous), I had to get into the "Design" part of the blog where, if one is very foolish, one may look at the stats. One thing that I noticed is that I will soon have had 50,000 pageviews (whatever they may be), which I don't think is very many, but then I never hoped to be the next Amy Welborn. Anyway, when I started looking around at the total number of pageviews on my blogposts and pages, I found that almost 10,000 of them were on the page with the novena to St. Martin. I knew that that was the most frequent search, but I had no idea how frequent it was. That's 20% of all the traffic on the blog.

The next most visited post is called Providence, Smoke, and Faith, and has had almost 1800 pageviews. I've tried to figure out why this might be. I thought maybe bots linked on to one particular post and used it to do something to the blog. That might be dumb, but I'm not very knowledgeable about the way those things work. I had also noticed, though, that the greatest number of searches that led to the blog, after those for St. Martin of course, were for smoke. I would do a search for smoke and my blog didn't show up anywhere in the results. Then I realized that people were looking for pictures of smoke, and my granddaughter's excellent picture, which is in that post, shows up on about the twelfth line of smoke images. It's far down, but it's the first one that isn't staged, so that explains it's popularity. Then I found a link to the picture in Japanese, and ultimately found about 8 uses of the picture on blogs, each of which was in a different language.

Compulsively checking the stats is one of the moral perils of blogging, and very difficult to stop--at least for me. It diverts the whole purpose of blogging from whatever goal I might have begun with into some sort of ego-building/ego-destroying exercise. Or it's like pulling the arm on a slot machine until I hit the jackpot. In other words, it's like any other addiction that people use to fill that emptiness that can only really be filled by the love of God. 

I visited Heather King's blog, Shirt of Flame for the first time in a long time yesterday. I found there a long passage from Karl Rahner in which he says:

You shall see that you should not try to run away from your empty heart, because [God] is already there, and so there can be no reason for you to flee from this blessed despair into a consolation that does not exist.

It simply doesn't exist. There is no consolation out there anywhere. There is only He Who is already within.

AMDG