Here's Looking At Me, Kid
Saturday, October 9, 2010
While looking at my blog stats, I noticed that someone visited the blog after finding it by doing a Google search for the word "Shelly".
Please allow me to introduce you to the odds of finding a blog with low readership and virtually no advertising by searching the un-famous author's not-entirely-unique first name.
Because I'm here for you, I did the research.
Of the 17 million results, the bulk of the first several pages consisted of web sites for a bunch of people most of us have never heard of, with verbiage stating that "This is the OFFICIAL Shelly _(last name)_ web site!" like it means something. There were the "Shelly, Inc," sites and the Shellys who are actors/TV hosts/authors, and the Shellys who are wacky stay at home moms with "crazy" lives (Tip: if you own a mini-van, your activities are immediately excluded from being considered "crazy". Driving your kids around and making it home just in time to make dinner is not "crazy"--that's just a Tuesday), and that's all very entertaining reading for a bitch like me, BUT...
I think my personal favorite was the description under shelly.com, which states "Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn't here."
I would like to apply that last statement to all of the self-important Shellys on the web, myself included. I would especially like to say that very thing to the Shellys I found who spoke about themselves in the third person, or peppered their pages with performance reviews declaring them to be the only Shellys we should care about, or those Shellys who appear to be taking themselves too seriously (talking to you, Lowenkopf--you're lucky you're a man, is all I can say. Wait--I would also like to say, Mars, you're cool, so just ignore all that negative shit I just said about all those other Shellys).
There are a lot of singer Shellys, photographer and writer Shellys and, oddly, realtor Shellys on the web. I'm sure they are all lovely people. Then again, if they are anything like me, maybe not.
I found a web site for the 2008 Shelly Awards, OK? The friggin' Shelly AWARDS.
Anyway...my point is that I never did find this blog while searching for Shelly. I didn't even find anyone named Shelly Payne in the first 30 or 40 pages, so, wow, and also, I didn't know Zac Brown's wife was named Shelly! Cool!
OK, forget that last part. My real point is...we all get so wrapped up in our little "thing" that we forget that there are hundreds of other Shellys out there, waiting to be found.
Except for Zac Brown's wife--clearly, she has already been located.
Many are, like me, in various stages of desperation, depending on what day of the week it is, and whether or not anybody said anything nice about them that day. Because you've never heard of most of them, you might be safe in assuming that they have more love than "talent" or "luck"--those two wildly subjective things that determine whether or not people take you seriously enough to throw piles of money at you and adore and/or loathe everything you do, regardless of whether you think they should.
But they keep trying, those Shellys...I like that. I like the fact that there are a bunch of schmo's like me, getting up every day and doing something, and feeling good enough about it to share. Even better? There's somebody willing to power through hundreds of pages of search results to find even the most obscure of them.
