I
didn’t want to take up blogging. Facebook was traumatic enough for me. When I
first started with it, I felt insecure. No. Worse than that. Threatened. I felt
like I was giving access to my house, my private safe place, ultimately to me, to
people I knew but would never have invited into my home. More than that. And
worse. Hundreds of thousands, a world full of people I didn’t even know.
With
a little help from my tech savvy daughter I learned enough about Facebook to feel like I have some control over who has access to me.
Then
I wrote a book.
And
people who knew what they were talking about said I would have to use ‘platforms’
to sell my book. To my horror, they meant Blogging and Twitter and Instagram and
goodness knows what other invasive technology. All I wanted to do was write a
book.
And
have people read the book and enjoy it. To do that a writer has to sell the
book.
I
used to be a reporter for a small town daily newspaper so the concept of having
strangers read what I write felt familiar to me. And I wouldn’t have to talk
about me like posting my status on Facebook. I could maintain some sense of
privacy.
I
could write about writing and reading and other people’s books and movies and
current events and . . . . Well you see. And it would feel quite normal that
strangers would read my blog. It goes right along with people reading my book.
I don’t need to know them either.
So
. . . .
I
chose Google’s blogspot to blog. Not because I knew what I was doing when I
made the choice. I didn’t weigh my options because I didn’t know what options
were available. I was using Google as my browser, my default research
librarian, my street navigator. You get the picture.
Blogspot
displays a curious set of information. (Actually a whole bunch of enigmatic
sets of information that I have not yet had the courage to explore.) It’s “Stats.”
Stats
includes something identified as Pageviews by Countries. I’m still not sure
exactly what constitutes a pageview, but I understand the concept of countries.
And one of the countries that began to show up on a somewhat regular basis was the
Ukraine.
Of
course I can’t tell if the person or persons are Ukrainian who are interested
in practicing their English by reading a basically anonymous American’s
writings. He, she, or they could be Americans currently in the Ukraine and
missing home. They could be terrorist spies redirecting their internet
connections through the UK to Germany to Japan to Indonesia and finally through
the Ukraine.
But
somehow, he or she or they felt like real people to me. I know nothing about
the geography of the Ukraine, so it wouldn’t mean anything to know which city
they live in. But I do know that the Ukraine is a battle ground where competing
governments are putting people in harm’s way. And when those ‘stats’ from the
Ukraine stopped showing up I worried.
I
worried that they were ill and unable to surf the internet. Or that they were
without power and I knew it could be cold there in winter. Or that the war had
come to them.
I
tried to remind myself that they could be on vacation in some nice warm country
with good wine and rich food. Or that their own writing was going so well that
they hadn’t time to bother with mine. Or worse scenario for me, that they’d
gotten bored with what I was writing.
The
good news is that they’re back.
Hello
Ukraine. I’m so glad to see you.
