Some search terms that brought people here yesterday

1. "mad men 666" also "666 in mad men" and about twenty other variations on that. Several hundred people have come in on that every week for the last three weeks. I can always tell which shows are being rerun and even which countries they have been rerun in because there has been a sharp uptick in views on the relevant post lately.

2. "how to talk with your enlightened self" This is the one that cracked me up. I had to Google it myself just to find out where it was from. It comes from a book called Answers From Silence by Jeffrey Chappell. Here is a quote from the author:

At each time in your life, there was a part of you that was always there and that was always the same. Stay with that silent sense of self.

At each time in your life, there was a con artist in the wings willing to sell you a simple and ridiculously false approach to achieving happiness. If you were stupid enough to believe the others, you're probably stupid enough to believe Jeffrey Chappell too.  You're coming to this blog was a mistake: Stay with that silent sense of self.

3. "the silent generation" This is a steady draw. I get a few of these almost every day. It takes you to a post I'm often tempted to rewrite because it doesn't quite come together but hundreds of people are good enough to read it even now months after I wrote it so I'll just leave it as it is.

4. "anti princess movement" A hot topic of the moment that I happened to shoot my mouth of about a while ago. Because, you know, little girls never wanted to dress like princesses or ballerinas at any other time in history and it would be a cultural disaster to have feminine role models that were actually, you know, feminine.

5. "if personality is a series of unbroken gestures" Another steady draw. I suspect because people want to know who said it and where. My fond hope is that a few people who land here will come to consider the possibility that Fitzgerald intended to be ironic when he put those words in Nick Carraway's mouth. If you've just Googled here looking for it, it's from the Great Gatsby and Nick says it describing Jay Gatsby. And I'd humbly suggest the single most important word in the sentence is "if".

6. "sexuality nihilism" Well it's obvious why these two go together. Right? Actually, the more I think about it the less I want to know about the person who Googled that.

7. "we're flawed because we want". The most popular post I have ever written. Thousands of people have come here to read it. I suspect because they have all seen the Mad Men episode "The Summer Man" and they want to find this cool quote they only half heard while watching the show. And because I'm such a nice guy, here it is:

When a man walks into a room, he brings his whole life with him. He has a million reasons for being anywhere. Just ask him. If you listen, he'll tell you how he got there. How he forgot where he was going. And then he woke up. If you listen he'll tell you about the time he thought he was an angel and dreamt of being perfect. and then he'll smile with wisdom, content that he realized the world isn't perfect. We're flawed because we want so much more.

And it wraps up with this, I think, rather shallow conclusion:

We're ruined because we get these things and wish for what we had.

That last bit ruins it in my opinion. It has a sort of English-major-who-just-smoked-a-joint feeling about it.