A Milestone 2.0

Last month I reached 60,000 Comments. I obviously blogged about it 😉 Not ONLY because I’m vain and egotistical and love attention, but because celebrating blogging milestones is a good way to keep the joy of blogging going. Seven years ago I celebrated the original Milestone. And today, despite my best efforts at pruning and cutting off spam accounts and business accounts and general no-good-scumbag accounts, I still reached 500.

I want to apologize to you all for this egregious error on my part. I tried really hard to prevent this from happening, I really did. I was rude to people in the comments. I wrote complete and utter nonsensical posts that didn’t even make sense to me. I posted “book reviews” for a solid month with nothing but the data about the book itself. I even proselytize on Christmas and Resurrection Sunday. And despite that all, 501 of you are stupid enough to keep on following me. I don’t know what I’m going to do with you all. Well, we all have our crosses to bear and I guess this is mine. But don’t think I’m going to like it or bear it gracefully.

On a serious note, I mentioned finding joy in blogging. That is deliberate on my part. WordPress.com has sucked the joy from blogging and to combat that, I have to look for the good in blogging. It doesn’t happen naturally, easily or miraculously. I know I focus on a lot of bad things that WP does, but I also want to try to focus on the good things of blogging. I want to encourage you to look for those little things too. Don’t get bogged down in the bad and quit. Anybody can quit. Gritting your teeth and soldiering on will only take you so far before the burden crushes you beneath its weight. So find the joy. Find the happiness in blogging. Be deliberately thankful for what you do have and don’t focus on what you don’t.

I have survived 5 or 6 platform changes since ’05 (Blogspot. Devilreads. Leafmarks, Booklikes. Librarything. WordPress). I have done that by being thankful for what I had at each platform at the time I was using it. I enjoyed the people I was with too. I’d love to be able to give you a checklist of Thankfulness, but that is going to differ from blogger to blogger because all of our needs are as different as we are. So figure out what your needs are and what you have to be thankful for.

I’d also like to say that sharing milestones isn’t egotistical. It gives other people encouragement and it gives them something to celebrate. Don’t take that away from others by hiding what you have accomplished under the guise of false humility. Be happy with that special post you just wrote, say you are happy about it and LET me be happy with you.

Ok, that’s enough of that. I’ll ruin my crusty curmudgeonly image if I say one more positive thing. So get off my blog lawn, you kids!