View or Review
Today is exactly 52 weeks since the launch of my weblog (Sunday 10/9/06).
I assume 75,000 hits throughout the past year cannot be that bad for a blog with only 4-6 items published per month
Being an Iranian woman, older and not your usual either, keeps the level of my expectations in check. With other words I am used to be active-aggressively unacknowledged by those who find a use for my ideas in order to advance themselves.
I’ve said it now since lower expectations do not necessarily mean a lesser hope.
It just means less disappointment.
But less disappointment when older could prove literally more deadly than a huge disappointment while you’re young.
This is because the experience feels as being more insidious and the cause more intentional.
I used the word ‘feel’ because it doesn’t need to be intentional at all.
It is only that if Achilles could have reached an older age at all, his tendon would have automatically become more vulnerable to any kind of external pressure and not just to arrows.
As for the hits, I have not been able to find a definite answer to what they exactly mean:
- If they mean the number of computers – as some tend to believe – then yes that number of hits is beyond every poet’s expectations espec ially those writing in English only (at least in UK). But hold on before you roll your beautiful green eyes in their sockets.
- Others may suggest that only the number of hits for each month show the actual number of computers used.
- But perhaps it could also mean that there are only c irca 260 people who have got into the habit of looking at my weblog every single day of the year.
- The worst scenario would be of course if it meant that there are only 2 people who have gone over the board and have hit their mouse for 37,500 times each, throughout the year, having been trapped in my website. You might think it is impossible for anyone to get that obsessed. But believe you me I have couple of spammers who sit for hours at their desk trying to think new ways of sending spam to the comment section. They create non stop new e-mail addresses, sites and names. You may say well they send those to many people and not just to me. But that doesn’t mean that they are less obsessed. No, they try to pass their obsession as if it was just another job (Like nowadays some people who usually talk to themselves on the street - for a longer period than it is normal for solo people – put one hand on their ear to make it look as if they are talking on the phone). But that is not another job. It’s compulsive- obsessive behaviour. And just because they do this anonymously doesn’t mean that they suffer less from mental illness than those already labelled.
Anyway I have the following observations + points to make:
– I do not check details of my blog’s individual readers. If I did, apart from other issues, I would loose the ability to see more effectively in other ways.
– Since June this year there has been a change in the percentage of my UK readers from 2% to 40%.
A trace of mud indicated Glastonbury Festival (My dear Watson, I never guess.). Since then UK readers have moved to the top of the countries’ list followed by US Commercials, Unresolved/ Unknown, Network and 10-12 other countries. There are of course some irregularities in the number of readers that coinc ide with term/semester times in education centres and holidays.
I must add that I have been only once at the Glastonbury Festival and that was in 1985. As a matter of fact I hadn’t even planned to go there.
On that Friday night 21st June - the summer solstice - together with a neighbour friend we got a lift in her friends’ car to Stonehenge.
But for the first time I believe the police was stopping people from getting there. I dec ided to go to Glastonbury festival instead.
I got the 10.05 p.m. train to Bristol and was told that there would be a bus from Bristol to Shepton Mallet. I arrived in Bristol around midnight and found out that there were no more buses going to Shepton Mallet on that night.
I walked around looking for a place to stay until about 2 in the morning.
It was raining. I had an umbrella and was carrying a small hand drum (intended for Stonehenge experience). Eventually I got a small room in a probably grotty hotel called Grosvenor. At 7 a.m. I was woken up by the noise of the cars. It was a smelly room and I was out fast to continue my journey to Glastonbury Festival.
A friend was going to perform in one of the tents in the afternoon, and I knew that another friend was supposed to be in the tent run by Peace Women offering perhaps some kind of health related service.
In those days the fence had at least one hole and a lot of people got in for free. So did I.
I basically ended up walking around till 8 in the evening not finding a dry spot to sit on. I was so exhausted.
In the Peace Women tent a friend of my friend offered her sleeping bag as she was going back to London on that day. I slept on one of the tables.
Later that night a band was playing. I didn’t know who they were.
There were two male singers in the band and a few men in the audience kept c limbing the stage and throwing themselves around. I was surprised that this kind of thing still existed.
And strangely somehow they behaved like spoilt children.
It looked like one would wait a bit for the other one to be taken away from the stage before he would c limb up himself as if he didn’t want to overwhelm the security staff. I thought perhaps they had been paid by the band to c limb the stage.
That night I dreamt only of water or in connection with water like a plane made of rubber in water and a child in water.
Once I returned home I went down with a temperature, diarrhoea and abdominal cramps with extremely weak legs and was almost delirious.
The same friend from the tent who happened to be my chosen homeopath as well - while doing her final exams - came around to bring my daughter’s raincoat. My daughter was going camping with a group of children I believe.
My friend gave me a remedy and stayed looking after me until that evening, when I started to feel much better.
December 1985 was one of the strangest times of my life. A wonderful music ian and friend in Germany committed suic ide and 2 days later on the Saturday before Christmas my homeopath friend was run over by a lorry while she was on her bicyc le.
The two friends were from different times of my life and did not know anything about each other at all.
I still remember her sitting on the other side of the room and watching me quietly every time I opened my eyes, until the crisis with the fever and pain was over.
A woman in Greece had called her Poulaki which means the little bird and she had kept that name.
It was Poulaki who had told me that while camping with her friend somewhere in Arizona they had seen a ‘UFO’ which landed a short distance from them sparkling with many mesmerizing colours.
While looking at the object she had thought she could be halluc inating and had asked her friend ‘do you see what I see?’ And the answer had been positive. Then the ‘UFO’ took off and was gone.
They checked with each other again and found that they both had definitely the same description of the object.
As for Glastonbury Festival experience, perhaps now I can say that a direct contact with mud and crowd combined makes me very ill, whereas an indirect contact can draw the crowd’s attention to me, which thankfully does not involve fever and delirium.
– Initially I had thousands of spam within short periods of time. Using some keywords has now reduced the number to hundreds. Nevertheless still time consuming whenever and if I can be bothered to go through them. At present of let us say 134 comments received perhaps only 3 could be ‘approved’. Although in recent times even those can hardly be described as comments. The rest are absolute spam.
The only interesting thing about spam is that one learns what is not selling well at present. Otherwise they wouldn’t need to go through all that trouble.
The point I want to make is as follows: As the comment section is not really moving on, I might have to consider c losing it down. Which I know is a shame that a few idiots can spoil other people’s option of expressing themselves if they choose to do so. But there you are, it’s your own choice. Silent majority can make it easier for those in control to limit their rights. I wouldn’t mind to put some time to go through the spam if there were more people using the section. Anyway for the time being I leave it open. If you don’t want to use the comment section yourself but feel strongly that it should be left open then say so, otherwise I am going to assume that you don’t mind it being c losed down. But first of all I have to get the time to look it up how that option works. Until then you still have time to prove me wrong.
As the Persian proverb goes ‘sokoot alaamat-e rezaast’ = Silence is a sign of consent. There is also another proverb ‘khalaayegh harcheh laayegh’ = People get what they deserve.
– The photographer of all the recent photos of me including the CD cover is Shiva Kashizadeh-Scott.