Nightglow Window

Resonance

One of the few benefits of writing a blog that just about nobody reads is that you can really analyze your few visitors and what they are looking for.

Now sometimes it's just plain disturbing: My post from September 21, 2006, entitled Panty Girl and Dr. McDreamy was about how I finally gave Grey's Anatomy a try and liked it. (By the way, I'm hooked now.) Well, girls in panties must be a big fetish in South Korea, because every few weeks the Sitemeter log for Nightglow Window will register some visitor from that far off place searching for a "panty girl" of his very own. Imagine his disappointment, hoping for titillation but only finding my rambles. Sorry pud pullers, no love for you here.

But oftentimes the searches -- after a while -- become almost poignant. One of my earliest posts, written from a hotel room in Stockholm, talked about how I was reading Steve Martin's novella Shop Girl. There was one passage that struck me and I copied it verbatim:

“Some nights, alone, he thinks of her, and some nights, alone, she thinks of him. Some nights these thoughts, separated by miles and time zones, occur at the same objective moment, and Ray and Mirabelle are connected without ever knowing it. One night, he will think of her as he looks into the eyes of someone new, searching for the two qualities that Mirabelle defined for him: loyalty and acceptance. Mirabelle, far away and in Jeremy’s embrace, knows that what had been lost is now regained.”

I loved that paragraph and it's clear it has resonance with people around the world. In the last two months or so I've received visitors from Australia (just today), Great Britain, New Mexico, Colorado, California, Washington, Tennessee, and Florida. Each of them had entered that paragraph into Google and let it fly, seeing where it would land, perhaps hoping for an answer. After all, it's a lonely paragraph, a paragraph of loss and redemption.

I don't think my post -- although it stands as one of my better ones -- offers much solstice (if any is indeed needed) to these web searchers. And yet their queries comfort me in some way, to see that a bit of Steve Martin's writing that I had keyed upon also held meaning for others. So hello to you Australia, Great Britain, New Mexico, Colorado, California, Washington, Tennessee, and Florida. Thanks for visiting this house of inanity. I hope you find what you are looking for.

But to you, South Korea: scram! And get your head out of the gutter already.


The Real Panty Girl and Dr. McDreamy