The Seventy Faces Of Sue

The nice people over at Harcourt (beloved publisher of Life As We Knew It and the dead and the gone and just maybe of Possible Third Book) got it into their collective heads that I'd be happy knowing how big my blog's slowly gained readership actually is.

I demurred, but they persisted. So at their collective insistence, I joined up with a service called Feedburner that claims to tell you this sort of stuff. I spent a minimal amount of Wednesday evening signing up, and Feedburner promptly assured me that not enough time had passed for it to give me the numbers I wanted, so I shouldn't feel upset when it said absolutely no one ever read my blog.

The next morning, when Feedburner still informed me that absolutely no one ever read my blog, I decided to play a little trick on it. I went to my mother's apartment, turned on her computer, and went to my blog. I even showed my mother the poll I had going. She oohed and ahhed in appropriate maternal fashion, and then we went searching for Jewish cemetaries in Orange County, New York. We oohed and ahhed over those as well.

This morning I raced over to Feedburner, and it said, in a kindly yet somewhat condescending way, that absolutely no one had ever read my blog.

Well, Feedburner must know. Harcourt recommended it. But there were 28 votes on my poll, which might have suggested that at some point 28 people had visited my blog long enough to vote Yes or No.

It was then that I realized what must have happened. I'd instructed Feedburner not to count any visits from my own computer to my blog. So I must be absolutely the only person who had ever read my blog. Therefore it stood to reason that I have multiple personalities, two thirds of whom thought it was a good idea for me to publish my P3B outline, and one third who didn't.

I decided to search even further for my various personalities, so I made a list of all the names used on comments since this blog began. I found seventy of them, with the three most dominant, Susan Beth Pfeffer, Anonymous, and Marci. I have no idea how I'm going to break it to Marci that she is merely a figment of my neurotic personality.

And while Norman Bates was satisified just being his own mother, I have been my mother, my brother, and my sister-in-law. I guess Norman was an only child.

Wanting confirmation of this extraordinary discovery, I raced to a mirror, and took a snapshot of what I saw reflected back at me.

Apparently seventeen of my personalities were camera shy. Either that, or it was a very small mirror.

While I am perfectly healthy, Personalities 19-32 woke up at four this morning coughing, and instead of falling back asleep, came up with a fabulous bleakity bleak addition to P3B. I'm pretty sure the Fourth Row From The Bottom Third Personality From The Left was responsible. But while I love this new bleakity bleak addition, it got me thinking that maybe P3B should take place five years after the meteor crashes into the moon, and not four. The longer things are bad, the more bad I can make things (or so Top Row Right Most Personality tells me).

While it was nice fantasizing that actual people (albeit mostly named Anonymous) actually read my blog on actual occasions, I've adjusted pretty easily to the idea that my slowly gained readership consists of me and my sixty nine alternate personalities. If nothing else, that means on Sunday I get to eat birthday cake for seventy!