After a week, I suppose it’s time to summarize the results of the Orny’s blog reader survey. I found the results kinda interesting, generally not as grim as I’d expected.

I got 15 responses, which is a pretty decent response rate. Looking at the list of people who have friended me, I think at best I could expect around 20 responses, so 15 is a 75% response rate.

I had 2 responses within 2 hours, 10 after 24 hours, and 15 after 48 hours. No one has answered after 48 hours (as of this writing at 160 hours). That means people read my posts soon after they come out, which would be expected if my posts appear on their Friends Page.

To that point, 85% of people said they read my blog via their friends page.

65% of respondents said they read my journal daily, which again would make sense if I’m on people’s Friends Page. No one said they read it less than weekly, although a week into the survey, that’s a bit of a self-selecting set.

Not one person thought that I posted too often. I don’t think so, either. I generally don’t post unless there’s something worth saying. At least IMNSHO.

Of the 15 respondents, 60% said that I did not post often enough. Again, that’s a pleasant surprise.

78% of respondents said they read 75-100% of my posts. This is a surprisingly high number. I was expecting a lot more people to skim my posts, since they’re often lengthy, and sometimes repetitive.

No one said they read less than 50% of my posts, and no one checked the “I really don’t read very much of it” item. Again, I’m flattered that people think my stuff worth taking the time to read.

77% of people said my journal makes them laugh, and 70% said it made them nostalgic. Only a couple people said it made them angry or bored, so I think those are pretty good stats. The only head-scratcher for me is that five people said it made them sad, which I’m a bit curious about. And I’m kinda annoyed that no one said it made them want to give me money!

I got very few responses to the question of what there’s too much of in my blog. The answer I most expected was that there was too much heavy, thoughtful stuff. Although that was indeed the most popular response, only two people felt that way, and that’s a much lower number than I feared.

61% of people want more photos and more sex. Well, photos I can do, and I’d also point people at my Flickr account. Sex… Well, I can share, if you really want, but I’m not sure you’ll get what you’re thinking of. I found it kinda odd that the people who want to see more sex aren’t the ones I would have expected, and 70% of them are women. People also want to see more short posts and relationship stuff, and I’ll see what I can do there. Brevity is challenging.

The most openly controversial topic in the whole survey was Carmen Miranda. Four people said they wanted less, one explicitly wrote “Carmen Miranda” in the open text box asking what they didn’t want to read about, and another posted a comment to the same effect. On the other hand, seven people said they wanted more Carmen Miranda. That means very few people are neutral on the topic.

By the way, Wikipedia states that in 1945 Carmen Miranda was the highest paid woman in the entire United States, bar none.

Finally, 74% of responses said that they liked my blog just the way it is. I’m glad to know that I’m doing something right, and hopefully my stuff will continue to be of interest to people.

The full result set can, of course, be found here.

Thanks for reading!

Okay, I’ve finally gone through and tagged all my old LiveJournal entries.

I haven’t gone back and done a cleanup pass, but at this time I’ve got no less than 1054 tags used 2509 times.

Here’s a list of my top twenty tags, and how often I’ve used them:

Friday Five (68) humor (43) Buddhism (38) cycling (33) DargonZine (31) photographs (30) Boston (25) PMC (25) Inna (24) work (24) language (23) Sapient (19) food (17) friends (16) meme (16) NESAD (16) photography (16) LiveJournal (15) music (15) travel (15)

Five Alive

Feb. 16th, 2007 09:29 am

Today’s another anniversary: five years on LiveJournal. I guess I have to say that it’s been a success, since I’ve made over 500 posts between [livejournal.com profile] ornoth and in [livejournal.com profile] ornoth_cycling, and I’m generally happy with the stuff I’ve written. I think my stuff’s mostly got “content”, and I don’t seem to be running out of material, although it might be less of a flood than it once was. At least I haven’t abandoned it or let it deteriorate into a meme-choked waste of everyone’s time.

Equally importantly, LJ has become a good way to stay in touch with some old friends that I care about, but don’t see or talk with very often. My only complaint there is the number of people in that category who never (or almost never) post, which kinda defeats the porpoise.

And I’ve even met a few interesting folks through LJ, as well, which has been kinda cool.

But I’m afraid I don’t have anything any more dramatic than that at the moment. I just thought that the passage of five years warranted observance and an indication that I’m pretty happy with the results and plan to continue apace.

Thanks for reading, and thank you for writing, as well.

Nothing's Wrong

I recently read David Kundtz’s “Nothing’s Wrong: A Man’s Guide to Managing His Feelings”.

I guess the first thing to relate is why that book interested me. I grew up in a family where little to no emotion was visibly manifested. I was extremely introverted and intellectual. As an adolescent, I found myself becoming ever more angry, selfish, and hateful.

Then I started dating, which was an immensely transformative experience for me. I was confused by how impulsive my first girlfriend could be, and jealous of her stunningly carefree demeanor. I decided to try to incorporate this lesson into my life, thereby gaining a previously absent appreciation for beauty, nature, kindness, and humor.

Back then, I didn’t think the intellectual and the emotional halves of my personality could coexist, so I created separate, distinct identities for them. “David” was cold, calculating, and intellectual, while “Ornoth” was impulsive, open, and joyous. One or the other would be predominant for six months to a year, while the other popped up at odd moments, and then they’d reverse. In those days, someone close to me could see in my eyes when I switched gears. That took me through college and into marriage.

Despite all that, I guess the trend was for the cold intellectual to gradually reassert itself. My ex-wife’s parting shot to me was to give me a Mr. Spock tee shirt for my birthday, an unabashed reference to my lack of warmth toward her.

In the fifteen years since my divorce, I’ve changed more radically than I ever thought possible, but the basic disconnect with my emotions has persisted. I’ve worked hard to develop compassion and generosity, but no matter how hard I look, I can’t seem to detect what most women tell me is the essence of life: my emotions.

It’s undoubtedly a difficult thing for a woman to understand: that a man really doesn’t have the emotional range or insight into his emotions that is so basic to her. I can’t speak for any other men, but I don’t think I’m alone when I admit that I’ve spent much of my life honestly doubting whether I have any emotions at all, and whether I could ever detect any I had, however hard I try.

Thus, the book.

The first thing the book establishes is that men need a different vocabulary to talk about their emotions. Women’s emotions come from their hearts, but men feel things “in their gut”. By drawing attention to the body’s physical reactions, Kundtz actually echoed themes I’ve heard in my Buddhist studies, which emphasize the physical form and its state changes as the place to look for evidence of emotional activity.

The next logical step is, of course, for a man to become more aware of the changes in his body. That would seem like a potentially productive line of inquiry, although I found the way it was presented a bit unhelpful.

“The very first and vitally important thing you have to do in dealing with any feeling is really something that you must *not* do. Don’t bury it. Don’t run from it and don’t cover it over. Just stay in the moment and feel it. Just feel it. Don’t bury. Don’t run. Don’t cover. […] Got the idea? Just stay put; don’t run. Just feel.”

That kind of rhetoric does nothing to help those of us who have stopped, have looked, and found nothing. “Just take a few deep breaths and feel whatever you’re feeling” is not only an unhelpful tautology, but it’s also thoroughly frustrating for someone who has no idea how to “feel what they’re feeling”.

Kundtz talks about this ability to notice one’s feelings and says “Without this first step, all else is doomed”, but then turns around and says, “It might also be true that at any given moment you may not be feeling anything very strongly”. Well, duh. I can’t say I’ve “felt anything strongly” in years!

The underlying, common assumption is that men are all actively suppressing their feelings, because everyone has feelings, don’t they? As someone who is reasonably mature and has actively tried to sense my own feelings and come up empty, I find that a decidedly hurtful way to dismiss my difficulties. I may indeed have emotions, but don’t accuse me of being dysfunctional simply because my emotions are not as overt as a woman’s. Defining women as normal and men as inherently abnormal is both prejudicial and hurtful.

Beyond that, as Kundtz himself is quick to point out, “Nothing’s Wrong is based on the strong conviction that there is a direct and causal relationship between violent behavior in males and their repressed (buried) feelings.” If that were true, one might well expect me to be a mass murderer, given my longstanding and lack of emotion, which can supposedly only be explained by active repression. But it hasn’t happened yet, so far as I know.

Anyways, leaving that particular issue aside for the mo’, let’s turn back to Kundtz’s three-step program to male emotional fitness: notice the feeling, name the feeling, and express the feeling. Assuming I find some way to get past step one—the real problem—there’s still this final step of manifesting the emotion.

The next question is *how*. Okay, I’m feeling happy, and maybe I can even recognize that; now how do I make a conscious choice between the myriad ways of depicting that emotion in my actions? Should I skip and jump? Should I whistle a tune? Should I go buy a drink for a cutie at the pub? How do I choose? And don’t you *dare* tell me something useless like “whatever you feel like doing”, or I’ll rip your throat out. It’s not that easy.

When he starts to talk about expressing one’s feelings, Kundtz cites a 1998 Newsweek article that reads, “when people regularly talk or even write about things that are upsetting to them, their immune systems perk up and they require less medical care”. Kundtz interprets this as “The talking or writing is the third step. It externalizes the feeling.”

That’s actually extremely good news for me, because I do a *lot* of written self-expression, as the length of this entry attests. The very first thing I turned to when my wife left me was email. Ironically, even today my real-world friends criticize me because they see more of what’s inside me by reading my blog than by talking on the phone or hanging out with me. Another funny bit is that Kundtz not only mentions writing, but also specifically calls out cycling, poker games, exercise, and meditation as other avenues for self-expression, and those are all things I do quite a lot of.

Another interesting bit is how thoroughly Kundtz disses isolation. He opens one section with a quote from Men’s Health magazine which reads, “Lack of social connection is ’the largest unexplored issue in men’s health’”. He follows with, “If there is only one change that you make as a result of reading this book, please make it this one. *Please!* Determine somehow, some way, at some time to regularly get together with friends.” I found that kinda interesting, considering I’m really the epitome of the isolated bachelor, and have recently been pondering how to reach out and craft a few new meaningful friendships.

I don’t want to give you the impression that I disliked the book. It was reasonably interesting, and successful at raising all kinds of topics for reflection. I just wish there was a little more depth to his analysis of how to detect one’s own emotions. “Just feel what you feel” isn’t helpful at all, although I’ll start watching my physiological responses to see if they provide any clues.

One last bit, which is something of a tangent. In addition to the Mary McDowell quote I’ve posted about already, Kundtz also cites the following quotation: “When I do good, I feel good. When I do bad, I feel bad. And that’s my religion.”

I think that’s about the most eloquent statement of the Buddhist law of karma that I’ve ever heard. Satisfaction comes from taking moral actions, and immoral actions produce dissatisfaction. And I’m blown away that the speaker added “And that’s my religion” as a postscript. Can you guess who the quote was attributed to? I’ll give you a hint: he has a wretched hairdo and spends most of his time on $5 bills.

Imagine what might happen if we had a president today of a comparable ethical standard.

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