354 Days

Dear Readers, I had planned on sitting around on Tiny Cat Pants's first birthday getting drunk and reminiscing about things, but since I'm going to be out of town, I thought I'd do it today. Sadly, there's no liquor in the house, so you're just getting rambling, not drunken rambling. I enjoy blogging a whole lot more than I would have imagined. I like the immediacy of it, that I can write something and get feed-back right away. I like the people I've met through it. I'm constantly surprised and grateful for the ways in which total strangers open themselves up. Bridgett put it best yesterday--y'all sustain me. I'm also eternally curious about how weird it is. In many ways, you guys aren't real. You're just some words on a screen attached to a name--as am I--and what that means is constantly hard to say. Still, if I have to have so many imaginary friends, I'm glad they're you guys. When I started Tiny Cat Pants, I had six readers and got about twenty hits a day. (To those original six--The Professor, The Super Genius, the Shill, The Legal Eagle, Miss J., Ms. B.--I hope you're still entertained.) For a long time, I could call all of my readers on the phone. I knew where they lived and what their real names were--first and last. Then, slowly, some other folks started poking around--Steve Pick, Peggasus, and then Twyla--and they were cool. It was weird, to write for folks I didn't know, but they were kind and generous while I was cutting my teeth. After Bitch PhD linked to me, though, I went from having seventy five hits a day to having between 120 and 150. Now that Nashville is Talking aggregates me, I consistently have between 180 and 225 hits a day. This week I'm running at about three hundred, but that should settle back down after I fall off the front of Jesus' General. Still, I think there are a core of about one hundred of you. This might seem like a very small amount, but it often intimidates the shit out of me. I'm not sure I've often navigated the switch from "I can kick your ass if you upset me because I know not only where you live, but where your mom lives" to "a lot of people who I don't know read this" very elegantly. I get embarrassed by things like Rex L. Camino or Steve Pick saying, "Yeah, I know that dude you just lambasted and he's actually quite nice." They never say "jackass," but I often feel it. Not to mention Aaron Fox showing up and demanding I remember that he's a real human being. Oops. I keep thinking maybe I should try to be nicer, but I don't think I'd be very good at it. Still, though this has always been a different kind of blog, it's changed a lot in response to how I perceive you. I have no goals for Tiny Cat Pants. It'll be more of the same old shit it always is. As always, I'm glad to take requests or answer questions or whatever. If you've got anything, you can leave it in the comments or email me. All suggestions will be considered and then probably ignored.

Love,

Aunt B.