Personal Statistics

I was going through some of my old college notebooks a while back and found a bunch of numbers written on the inside cover. It was a mean grade, the standard deviation of the curve, followed by the equivalent letter grade. Underneath that was the conversion of the other letter grades in my other classes converted to a 4 point scale multiplied by the number of credits. I was determining my overall GPA.

My mathematical obsession did not stop in college. When I became an adult and played sports I tracked my match scores and wins and losses. As captain I did it for everyone else on my team. And golf appealed to me because of its handicap system--I knew all my scores I made computations from hole to hole—which is probably why golf was such a mental nightmare for me.

One of my greatest guilty pleasures in life is obsessively compulsively determining my personal statistics.

And now I have my blog to obsess over. I may see how many page reads on individual posts I receive daily, weekly, monthly and all time. I can view the origins of the reads—and what people googled before visiting Karenland. I review referred sites. I can even see an overview of my audience—worldwide. I have been read in every single continent except Antarctica.

Viewing my statistics is almost as much fun as the writing itself.

I can also surmise things—like when someone was viewing all the posts about my oldest daughter. At first I was concerned and so I emailed her—but I then discovered that she was the one reading about herself. And sometimes I can determine that friends are on vacation before I receive word by “normal” means. That is what happened a month or so ago when I noticed a bunch of hits from Turks and Caicos. I wondered who was there reading my blog. And shortly afterwards I found out--a photo popped up on Facebook with a friend with her daughter.

And while numbers are wonderfully exact, they do not tell the whole picture. Information must be extrapolated—especially the qualitative kind. Pageviews do not reflect  sentiment or thought—it is something only the comments can do. The people connection is more of an attractant than faceless readers in Spain. Which is why while my blog post on My Lord and Taylor Black Card has the highest number of all time reads (with numbers climbing daily), it is less meaningful to me than my blog post on Christmas Eve at Nonny’s.

Numbers serve only to inflate the ego. And ego does not direct my writing.  Yet—I would be lying if I did not say—sometimes I really like the numbers.