Trivial pursuits

If you’ve been reading Minnesota Transplant long enough, you know that some days I really don’t have anything to say.

But I write a post anyway.

Today is one of those days.

I write for practice. I’ve come up with something interesting or inane to say about 26 times a month on average over the past five years. (I don’t obsess with my stats much, no, though astute readers might have noticed I recently surpassed 1,000 followers. If you’re reading me on your iPad, that is. On my PC, I supposedly have 643 followers. Who can account for the vagaries of WordPress stat crunchers? Who pays attention to such minutia anyway?)

In any case, today was one of those rare days in May. I ran 3.53 miles this morning (again, who’s counting?) as the glorious sun was rising. Not too hot, not too cold, it was Goldilocks “just right.” When I walked the dog briefly this evening, it was “just right” again.

Today’s meals? Not worth mentioning, except to say pesto mayo is awesome on a bacon-and-egg sandwiches.

Didn’t do anything worth writing home about either, except one thing: I wrote 877 words on my work-in-progress. Click here for today’s taste of the memories of the year I turned 15.

That’s about it. Oh, I slept well last night, too. Hoping for the same tonight. Here’s wishing you sweet dreams.

Minnesota Transplant 2012 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys helpfully prepared a 2012 annual report for Minnesota Transplant.

Here’s an excerpt:

4,329 films were submitted to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This blog had 27,000 views in 2012. If each view were a film, this blog would power 6 Film Festivals.

Crunchy numbers

In 2012, there were 307 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 1,254 posts. There were 304 pictures uploaded. That’s about 6 pictures per week.

The busiest day of the year was August 11th with 1,140 views. The most popular post that day was My life … in all its banality. Thanks, Freshly Pressed homepage.

The post commented on most in 2012 was What a perfect haystack means.

Where did they come from?

More than 120 countries in all!

Most visitors came from The United States. Canada & The United Kingdom were not far behind.

Thanks, dear readers of Minnesota Transplant. I appreciate you.

Famous blogger inspires kids to blog, too!

When I was in fifth grade, my greatest idea was capitalizing on my proximity to the Little Store by buying packs of “Charlie’s Angels” trading cards on my walk to school and selling them to kids who lived in the country and couldn’t buy them themselves.

I believe my profit was 5 cents a pack, which was a highway-robberyesque 20 percent markup. When I sold five packs, I could invest in a mini bag of Nacho Cheese Doritos, my favorite snack (still is).

Kids today, or at least kids at Merriman Park Elementary School in Texas, are a little more magnanimous in their goals. They want to blog.

(Hey, kids at Merriman Park Elementary: “Magnanimous” means “noble, big thinking, generous.”)

Yeah, bloggers are cool with their fast typing, big vocabulary and legions of fans. “When I grow up, I want to be a blogger”: I totally would have said that if web logs existed back in 1979. Instead, I aspired to write Danielle Steel novels. (To-may-to, to-mah-to.)

I met these noble writers at Merriman Park today on Skype when they interviewed me about blogging.

Their enthusiasm was contagious!

I addressed questions like “how long have you been blogging?” (four years) and “what inspired you to create your blog?” (the opportunity to write every day) but the best question was this one:

“Do you have tips for making blogs spicy?”

That’s a dangerous question for a woman who has written a memoir with the word “sex” in the title.

Settle down, people, settle down. These interviewers were in fifth grade.

My answer?

Details, details, details! Details make my blog posts spicy. C’mon, doesn’t the detail that a little girl was making money on trading cards for a 1970′s television show that was making money by selling, um, titillating storylines make this post that much spicier?

(Hey, kids at Merriman Park Elementary, “titillating” means “exciting.”)

Details, and sensational headlines. Sensational headlines are spicy, too (for example, see the headline on this post).

(Just kidding, kids, headlines should be descriptive, not sensational. Leave the sensational to the National Enquirer and Fox News.)

(Again, I kid!)

I enjoyed talking with these aspiring bloggers, and the attention highlighted how I feel about all my readers. The kids asked me, “What were your emotions when you first learned that people were reading your blog?”

I said I felt important.

I love my readers. Thanks for caring.

If absence makes the heart grow fonder, this post should cure that

When people read my blog, I hope they sometimes laugh. I hope they sometimes  gain a new perspective. I hope they sometimes enjoy my clever use of words. I know some days I’m entertaining myself but I hope I’m not the only one.

When I write, I write with my audience in mind, but I write on an almost-every-day schedule for me. Writing something — anything — keeps me sharp and gives me an opportunity to try different writing styles. Practice makes perfect, it is said.

It has come to my attention that My No. 1 Fan looks for a post from me every day but not for my pithy prose or my newsworthy nuggets. My mother gauges my well-being not only on what I write but whether I write at all.

She called tonight and left a message:

“Hi. This is Mother. We’re worried about you. Haven’t heard anything from you or about you for [pregnant pause] several days. Bye.”

No kidding. That’s a word-for-word transcript of her message.

You see, it’s been a little more than 72 hours since I’ve posted here, and apparently that’s the threshold for issuing a “We’re worried about you” all-points bulletin.

Mother makes me chuckle. I would say “chortle” but I’m not exactly gleeful as much as I am amused.

I called Mother back and filled her in. I’ve been busy, Dear Reader, not abducted, forlorn or gravely injured so there is no need to worry.

In case you’re interested, here’s how I filled my 72 AWOL hours: I spoke to a lively crowd at a library (as lively as a crowd gets at a library) on Thursday night about how to organize one’s photos. On Friday, I had lunch over Thai green curry with the inspirational founder of the Association of Personal Photo Organizer who suggested the subject for my next book (rest assured, it will not have “sex” in the title). That evening, the clouds parted and I enjoyed a friend’s son’s high school football game under clear September skies and applauded loudly when my friend’s older son was lauded with an on-field introduction for his recent military service in Afghanistan. Saturday, I spoke to another lively library crowd about organizing photos and then celebrated the weekend with adult beverages at Oktoberfest (the evening included an enormous beef rib and a raunchy comedy show, too).

Life’s good. Busy, but “good” busy. The only reason Mother needed to leave a message at all instead of talk to me directly was because I was on the other line with my Adored Stepson. He was seeking writing advice; what words-loving stepmother wouldn’t be flattered?

It’s funny — in an “it amuses me” sort of way — what a personal blog does for my conversations with close family and friends who are regular readers. They get a dose of Monica nearly every day so when we encounter each other in person, they don’t always ask, “How are you?” because they know. Or they think they know how I am. Or they know enough; a few paragraphs a day may be all they can take about my exploits.

From my perspective, those few paragraphs are but a tiny glimpse into The Life Of Monica. “There’s so much more I could share with you and/or bore you with! Just ask!” And my mother, of all people, should know she’s the first person I call when I need a pep talk. If there’s “something to worry about,” we don’t have a “you read it here first” sort of relationship; she knows before you do, Dear Reader.

In any case, if you missed me during the past 72 hours, well, I’m flattered. And if you didn’t? Well, I’m back anyway, cluttering up your In Box. I hope you’ve found this post as amusing as I have.

The No. 1 secret to accumulating blog readers

One of my favorite quotes about success is generally attributed to Woody Allen, with varying percentages, but I like: “Ninety percent of success is showing up.”

So it is with blogging, too.

I’ve been posting here at Minnesota Transplant for nearly four years, and I just recorded a record month: 4,813 hits in August. That’s an average of 155 hits a day when prior to August it was more like 52 hits per day (plus between 206 and 672 subscribers — I’m not clear on how WordPress figures that — in any case, if you want to subscribe, type in your address up there, above right).

It helped (a lot) that I was Freshly Pressed by WordPress not once but twice (I know, it’s both amazing and totally unfair).

But it’s my longevity and profuse number of posts (roughly 26 a month) that bring a lot of traffic. Minnesota Transplant has a lot of history now. The search engines now notice me (type “Minnesota Transplant” into Google, and I’m No. 1 — talk about “feeling lucky”!).

A couple dozen hits per day come from posts I wrote weeks or years ago. Who knew that no one else was writing about Target commercials based on ’70s school musicals, the top secret recipe for Who-Hash and how much your kid’s teacher gets paid? I’m it, and nearly everyday somebody clicks on one or more of those posts. There’s no accounting for taste.

The lesson here is, if you’re in a funk about how few readers you have, keep writing. Instant success is not as satisfying as success earned by a long, hard slog anyway, right?

You can run but you can’t hide from your online persona

Longtime readers probably were familiar with this vague but singular Gravatar which accompanied all my blog posts and blog comments:

It’s a picture of the hickory tree in my back yard. The “MT” stands for Minnesota Transplant. Everything I wrote was “by Minnesota Transplant.”

That’s the persona I adopted in cyberspace. On WordPress and on Twitter, I was simply Minnesota Transplant. No one called me “Minnesota,” a la “Zombieland,” in the real world. Usually, when someone who knows me as “Monica” mentioned my name in a comment, I would delete or change my name to Minnesota Transplant. I don’t post pictures of me. I was hiding, to some extent, behind a mask (even on Twitter, I wore sunglasses in my Gravatar). I stand behind the opinions I espoused (mostly safe, Minnesota Nice sort of proclamations, unless I was talking about the Yankees or the Chicago White Sox), but I didn’t assign my real name to those mostly safe perspectives.

I wasn’t fooling anyone. If you know me, you know I love blogging and you probably read my blog occasionally just to be polite (or maybe you liked it — thank you much — or maybe you liked it because you know me) and you know very well that Minnesota Transplant = Monica Lee. And if you don’t know me, you probably couldn’t care less what my name is. And if you’re the stalker type who doesn’t know me but for some creepy reason cares what my real name is, you probably figured it out already.

About a year ago, I started another blog with my real name on the premise that if I become an author, there’s no point in hiding behind a pseudonym. Then I started a third blog about enjoying family photos. Since I’m attempting to build a business, my real name was on that blog, too. I was happy to lead parallel lives in cyberspace, but slowly, slowly, my real name started seeping into my virtual reality.

A month ago, I decided to self-publish my memoir. Of course, I’m quite proud of it, so I want to tell everyone about it.

Only half the virtual world doesn’t even know who “Monica Lee” is. How confusing. All these years of obscuring my identity, coming to a head. How inconvenient.

A few days ago, I changed my WordPress Gravatar. That’s really a picture of me, but I wasn’t really featured in a magazine; why be completely forthright, right? I made this cool profile photo on Photofunia. Check it out — you, too, can have your photo on a billboard or work of art.

Now my email subscribers are receiving blog posts written by “Monica Lee.” Who’s that? Well, it’s me, Minnesota Transplant, the former Minnesotan transplanted to a tiny suburb outside of Chicago.

This blog will continue to be my platform for writing about all things trivial and interesting to a former Minnesotan. But I shall claim authorship as Monica Lee.

Have I clarified who’s who and what’s what? Well, if not, you may proceed in your state of unaffected confusion — why mess with a good thing?

This is Minnesota Transplant, signing off.

My life … in all its banality

Have you seen this website? OhLife is designed to help you write a letter to your future self. You write the letter, and it arrives in your InBox on the date you specify.

Interesting concept, but I’m not entirely sure I make a lot of meaningful statements worth reading in my future.

Regular readers have seen the dumb things I recorded for posterity in my junior high and high school diaries. Scintillating stuff like this from March 14, 1982:

I have a terrible fear that I’m gonna get my period on Tuesday, the day of my swimming lessons — it’s terrible. I’ll die. I’ll just die. But what can I do except pray?

The prayers worked. Four days later, I wrote: “I got my period. Today is Thursday so it should be done by next Tuesday and I won’t have to worry about it. Yay!”

I have bookshelves full of photo albums of just about every mundane occurence in my life, most with photos but some without. Among the memorabilia, I found this epic account in a copy of a letter written to a friend on July 3, 1994 [Steve is my ex-husband]:

Sollie, the bird killer

Tragedy strikes! We had a sad, horrible event occur a couple days ago. Who would have thought Sollie — our clawless, gutless kitty who’s never eaten anything but cat food — would kill a bird? Not me. We’ve let him outside before, and he’s never indicated he’d be capable of killing anything — he’s too stupid. But I let him out the other day, and then went back inside to grab the paper to read while I was watching him and in the few seconds he was out of my sight, he managed to find a wren in a bush and get it in his jaws! Yuck! I heard this awful squawk! and then I saw Sollie. I totally lost it. I went into the house screaming and as you can image, Steve was livid! Wrens are his favorite birds living in our yard and he felt bad luring them here and making them feel safe, and then having Sollie go on a hunting trip. We buried the bird in Steve’s little garden by the garage.

The letter also included a long account of how we decorated our kitchen with a cow theme. Cow. As in bovine.

More recently, I’ve used this blog to record stories from my life. Some days, I think I’m brilliant. But other days …

Here’s a snippet from a very early post (Nov. 4, 2008):

On a normal day, I wake up and immediately dress for a workout. Sometimes I run. Sometimes I walk the dog. Sometimes I do yoga in front of the TV.

This morning, instead of getting dressed for exercise, I awakened excited. Today, I got to exercise my American rights. I got to vote for president.

OK, I’m sort of impressed I’ve been keeping this blog active for almost four years, but I tend to get excited about mundane things (“I’ll die! I’ll just die!”).

Of course, my blog is out there in the world for everyone to see on the good days and the bad ones. You can read everything I’ve ever blogged about by clicking on a month under “Archive” over there on the right. Check out this gem from a post titled “25 random things” on Feb. 2, 2009:

I want to be a writer. Of books. But sometimes I spend more time on Facebook and writing my blog than I do advancing the goal of writing books.

I probably shouldn’t be announcing to the world all the inane things I’ve ever written when I’m readying a book (a book! my first book! read more here!) for publication, but so be it. That’s life.

By the way, I wrote a letter on OhLife to myself. To arrive in my InBox one year from now. Its meaning and value will be evaluated then.

The truth and accuracy, as relayed by Minnesota Transplant

The revelations today that Jonah Lehrer fabricated quotes in his best-selling book, “Imagine: How Creativity Works,” compel me to confess to my readers: The less-than-scintillating quotes in my less-than-best-selling blog aren’t always transcribed word-for-word, but they are accurate on the whole.

I don’t carry a notebook or tape recorder (does tape even exist anymore?) when I’m having conversations with my Beloved or my nephew or not-so-friendly local grocery store cashier, but when I relay a conversation, I can honestly say I participated in it and I’m reporting the content of the conversation more or less accurately.

Sheesh.

I enjoy nonfiction precisely because reality is more interesting — and usually more unbelievable — than anything I could make up. I believe the old saw that truth is stranger than fiction.

And even when it isn’t, it’s not worth leading people to believe otherwise. It’s called integrity, and I thought reporters were taught that in Journalism 101.

“Imagine” is sitting in my Kobo queue waiting to be finished, and now I’m wondering if it’s worth my time. Really, highly-paid New Yorker writer, you had to make things up?

[For the record, I didn't actually speak that question to Jonah Lehrer -- it's a rhetorical device.]

Ugh.

On a lighter note, let’s discuss spam and search engine terms

My spam folder collected 491 messages in the past month.

On a day like today when the nation experiences the result of real horror in the incomprehensible actions of a gun-toting madman at a movie theater, spam doesn’t seem so horrible, but that’s what I’m addressing today: Spam, the irritating consequence of being a member of the online community (not the pink, gelatinous stuff about which I opined last week — click here if you’d rather read about SPAM).

Of those 491 messages caught by Yahoo’s spam filters, 83 of them were from Buy Viagra Now, Purchase Viagra Now or some version of that. That’s almost three messages a day urgently reminding me that Viagra is available online. In case I forget. Does Viagra affect memory, too?

Several dozen spam emails offered me ways to find an alternative to my Beloved including Discreet Dating Community, Free Adult Webcam and Married Women Threesomes. Thanks, but no thanks. I’m good. Very good in fact. The last thing I need is the hormonal cycles of two other married women who found me through spam. Yikes.

Plenty of people need my help transferring money from far-flung places around the world because I’m so trustworthy. Or might be. Subject: “CAN I TRUST YOU?” I may have won two different lotteries. With “WINNER!!!!!!” in the subject line, how could you resist? On the other hand, the FBI and IRS are looking for me (“YOU WILL BE ARRESTED AND JAILED”).

If anything is a tip-off to spam, IT’S ALL-CAPS!

Having a blog means I get spam there, too. Lately, someone really wants to disparage my readers with comments like, “Could it be only me or does it look like a few of these responses look like they are coming from brain dead individuals?”

Um, I think I know which commenter is brain dead.

Of course, I cannot vouch for the brain-lividity of any of my readers. It’s amazing the sort of search terms bring readers to my blog. In the past 30 days, “Minnesota Transplant” has been the No. 1 search term on this blog, which makes sense, but the No. 2 term is “dairy queen peanut butter bash” or some version of that. Thirty-nine people in the past month got here because I wrote a four-paragraph post last summer lauding this DQ creation.

I can’t explain why “pantieviews” got anyone here. “June bugs/pinterest” is inexplicable, too; are there entomologists who pin pictures on Pinterest? Nor can I explain “Minnesota style hot dog” though I did once write about Chicago-style hot dogs which are piled high with all kinds of strange garnishes. A Minnesota-style hot dog has catsup. That’s it. Anything else is too spicy for most Minnesotans.

Two of my favorite searches, though, include “is dr seuss who hash a drink?” and “photos of a miniature schnauzer’s bottom teeth.”

No, for the love all that is cute and innocent, who hash is not a drink.

Recently, I found myself searching the internet for “popping a zit on my dog” and discovered a whole world of things less than cute and innocent on YouTube. People videotape popping zits on their dogs? The short answer is yes.

But to satisfy your curiosity for all that is cute and innocent (including my dog’s lower lip), here’s that photo:

Leave it to a Minnesotan to confuse her exotic fruits

Let’s just say, it’s a good thing I’m not covering the Supreme Court.

I don’t even know my exotic fruits, let alone my constitutional decisions.

Supreme Court strikes down individual mandate portion of health care law. on.cnn.com/LvVRcK—
CNN Breaking News (@cnnbrk) June 28, 2012

Like CNN, which was too fast on the Twitter trigger this morning, I blew it on yesterday’s passion fruit experiment.

Correction: The Supreme Court backs all parts of President Obama’s health care law. on.cnn.com/LvVRcK—
CNN Breaking News (@cnnbrk) June 28, 2012

When I was growing up in a small town in semi-northern Minnesota, the grocery store offered the following fruit options: apples, oranges and bananas. Seasonally, one could buy berries and melons.

That’s it.

So, can I be blamed for confusing a rambutan for a passion fruit?

Well, yes, I can. As a former journalist, I pride myself on proper research and accuracy, but googling “how to eat a passion fruit” without googling “images of passion fruit” was a big mistake.

A rambutan, surgically removed from Mr. Snuffleupagus’s eye socket (just kidding).

Yesterday’s post about passion fruit was a sham. What I was actually experimenting with was a rambutan. Thanks to Megs over at MegsFitness for enlightening me. Because blog posts live forever on the internet, the post has been corrected and updated. Minnesota Transplant regrets the error and all that.

I’m wondering if they were improperly labeled at the grocery store, or if the passion fruit were being displayed right next to the rambutans and I just assumed I was buying a passion fruit? The receipt says “passion fruit” but I remember authoritatively telling the cashier it was a passion fruit.

I will be in the vicinity of that grocery store next week, so I will doublecheck. And if I can buy a passion fruit there, I shall.

You’ll read it here first. Error free, I hope.