Madison Monday: Staying home in comfy pants

Cat laying on my comfy pants (which have cats on them, by the way)

I was reading something online the other day about how to increase traffic on your blog. I read a lot of things online about how to increase traffic on your blog because, well, I want to increase traffic on my blog. The more difficult question is why, exactly, I want to increase traffic on my blog, besides the vague sense that more traffic on your blog is always a good thing. But as a sociologist and a shaper of young minds, it behooves me to ask, is more traffic on your blog a good thing? What, exactly, is it I want to accomplish?

A good question for an entirely different post, but back to the thing I read about how to increase traffic on your blog. One of the suggestions is to ask questions. Encourage comments. End your post with a, “So what do you do when your cat repeatedly throws up on the carpet?” or something like that.

This is difficult for me, because I almost always assume that I am implying a question every time I sit down to write. I don’t know the answers at all. You might think of every single post as an exploration of all the things I do not know. Here is the subtext of everything I write: “I have no idea what I’m talking about. What do you think?”

But I’ve come to realize that I may not be making that subtext quite as clear as I might, because there’s a lot of potential insularity about my blogging. It is, really, all about me. This may be due to the fact that it is the one topic upon which I feel absolute expertise–if I know about anything at all, it’s about me.

It’s hard to tell, but this is actually a very large cat laying on me

But it’s also, perhaps, because I don’t actually do much. There are lots of folks in town who go to a lot more events than I do. They see every band that plays and they eat at more than two restaurants. They go to Louisville and they run races and they make art and they take pictures. There are many, many people in this town who are far more interesting than me. I am sort of dull. I’m one of those people who still delights in the fact that being married means I don’t really have to ever go out again if I don’t want to. I get excited just thinking about not going out.

So because I’d rather sit on my couch in my comfy pants with a large cat on my lap watching tv or reading, the field of potential subjects for a blog becomes limited. I have great ideas for posts that would be more adventurous. Posts about the beautiful old barns around here. Posts about more local Madison businesses. Posts that are just conversations with local folks about something interesting. I have lots of interesting ideas. I could be more like Jessica Nunemaker at wonderful Little Indiana, who travels all around the state in search of great things to write about. But I’d have to wear something besides my comfy pants, and sometimes that just seems like too much.

Perhaps if I could blog for a living, I would, in fact, go take pictures of local barns, do more features of local businesses and interviews with folks. But I have a day job, a very cozy couch, and, have I conveyed to you how very comfy my comfy pants are?

So until someone offers to pay me to get up off the couch, and let’s face it, probably not even then, you’re just going to have to read all about me, me and more me.

Comments anyone?