The Median Sib

I am Carol, and I am a blog addict. I started this blog because I like to write. But then I began looking at other blogs and seeing the number of visitors and all the links and all the comments and all the cool memberships in various blogging groups — and my competitive nature kicked into high gear. Instead of being fun, it became an obsession. I had to write posts - even when I didn’t have anything to say. If I had two posts yesterday, then I had to have three posts today. I had to get more people to look at my blog - that site meter had to keep going up. I had to get people to link to my blog so I could move to a higher level in the TTLB system. This evening I came to my senses. I don’t know what the catalyst was - nothing out of the ordinary happened - but I’m glad that something in my thinking changed. My blog is for me. I may cancel the site meter so I can stop fixating on it. I might even take off all the ads. So far in the 2+ months I’ve been blogging I’ve accumulated about $20 in on-paper income from the various ads and links on The Median Sib…and I’ll probably never see that since it has to reach a certain amount before it pays off. It would probably average less than a cent for every hour I’ve spent working on this blog. I don’t want to continue with the blogging-as-competition mindset.

Bottom line: Don’t look for as many posts from now on. However, maybe the posts will be better since I won’t be stretching to find something to write about. Yea for blogging sobriety!

A six-year old lad came home with a note from his teacher suggesting that he be taken out of school, as he was “too stupid to learn.” The boy’s name was Thomas A. Edison.

Alfred Tennyson’s grandfather gave him ten shillings for writing an elegy on his grandmother. Handing it to the boy, the old man said: “There, that’s the first money you ever earned by your poetry, and take my word for it, it will be the last.”

Benjamin Franklin’s mother-in-law hesitated at letting her daughter marry a printer. There were already two printing offices in the United States, and she feared that the country might not be able to support a third.

~Cora M. Campbell, Sunshine Magazine~

I don’t know whether or not those stories are true. If they are, then they’re good lessons in not putting too much stock in what others think about us. If they’re wrong then I guess old Cora M. Campbell fooled a lot of people.