Milestone

I like milestones. The passage of time can get downright blurry, and milestones are the perfect way to divide that time and bring certain portions of it into focus. Yes, divisions such as seasons, semesters, or 525,600-minute increments are largely arbitrary, but life’s tireless forward momentum requires some artificial boundaries to break it up, or else the blurriness can degrade into outright monotony. It is good to be able to look back and think, “How did this [arbitrary segmentation of life] go?” Then you can get out the yardsticks and vernier calipers and telescopes and mass spectrometers and really do some serious self-assessing.

On a completely related note, The Yellow Shirt opened for business one year ago today. (Fweeeee!) I’m feeling a bit retrospective, as you might imagine. I’m feeling a bit listy as well, so I offer you, in seemingly random but possibly very particular order, the following Things That Are True After Year One:

1. Year One of The Yellow Shirt consisted of a seventy-one posts, totaling a little over 47,000 words. For those of you who are accustomed to the college paper format of double-spaced Times New Roman 12-point font (about 310 words per page), that comes to about 151 pages. Fortunately for my sense of life-shaped irony, this is substantially shorter than a dissertation.

2. As of 12:01 a.m. on March 9, The Yellow Shirt has recorded a total of 2,636 hits. This number is, unfortunately, totally meaningless, as I don’t remember when I put the hit counter on the site. I think it was sometime in October. As a representative sampling, there have been 618 hits in the last thirty days, but given the amount of would-be spammers roaming around, this number is also unreliable. Plus, 80% of these are just me staring at the site and hitting “refresh” as fast as my finger can click. Yes, I admit, I am the Barry Bonds of web hit statistics. In any event, it’s nice to know that people are checking in.

3. A key bottom-line accomplishment of Year One is that the site has remained consistently active. This project had every chance of being one of those ventures which are launched and initially pursued with great fervor but then abandoned when the energy of newness wears off. To be sure, I’ve had some fits and starts (five posts total in August and September, eek), and not everything has been maintained with equal vigor (hello, links), but I’m still going, and that’s the most important thing.

4. As far as my internet-shared life goes, this milestone allows me to take a look and see that I’ve had a pretty interesting year. I started a blog, backpacked in Michigan, lost my car to suicide, directed a play, saw the Super Bowl up close, sat on the beach in Boca Raton (post forthcoming), and rode in an elevator with Joe Theismann. Not a bad twelve months.

5. Mainly, I am pleased that after a year’s worth of work, The Yellow Shirt has consistently represented who I am as a person, or at least the parts of me that I feel ought to be shared with an unknown number of people who might or might not know me. Honest self-representation is a tricky thing in any public form.

6. I am extremely happy that the good people at Blogger have finally gotten around to putting up spam protection on the commenting. So every time you have to type in “S5DY8” or similar before you post a comment, remember that it's so you’ll never have to hear about Michael Jackson’s Plastic Surgery Blog again.

7. I will, really, seriously, no kidding, pinky swear, be writing the sequel to The Bus, Part I within 30 days of right now. This promise goes out to one reader in particular who has, through channels, communicated to me her dire need to hear the end of that story, an end which, at this point, is far too over-anticipated to ever possibly live up to the hype.

In the interests of maintaining the frequently overlooked first post goal of trying to remember that brevity is wit, I will wrap up this navel-gazing with a tribute to everyone who has taken the time to comment on any of the silliness posted hereon. In honor of your efforts, I offer you my five favorite comments of Year One, in no particular order (told you I was feeling listy):

1. In reply to Winter the Assassin and Warm Weather Insanity, Megan said:

I think your post is stupid.
I hate winter snobbery. You are not a martyr for me, Tyler. Not for me.
CALIFORNIA FOREVEIA. YAY CALIFORNIA! ESCAPE YOU FOOLS! ESCAPE!
I Spent Six Years Becoming a Person Who Says "awesome, it's 12 degrees" And Really Meant it And Went To Work In That Weather, and I remained empty.
Good Day.
(I have had a very fun time calling your post stupid.)
I would like to note that Tyler is terrific. But his post is still, seriously, very stupid. (seriously, call me stupid. this is fun.)

2. Wyatt added the following category to Buicks and Other Road Hazards:

Tyler, you forgot to mention the people who drive "lux cars for the young and snotty" - any sedan or coupe from a non-American manufacturer (see the BMW 5's, Infinity M's) and any "sport ute" by a lux maker. These people have 1 thing in common - the firmly held belief that their ability to afford $500+ lease payments entitles them to drive any way they please. These people are either driving 50 on the highway because they are having problems with their blue-tooth sync and dicking with their navigation systems, or driving 50 through downtown because their time is too valuable to bother with things like "right-of-way."

3. Guy Fawkes had this semi-soothing bit of perspective regarding My Car Committed Suicide:

Tyler, you should be happy your car did not try to kill itself while you were in it. Your car has chosen its own path. Let it go. If you try and raise it, then you are no better than those people holding signs outside the hospital saying that Terry Schiavo came to them in a dream and told them she wanted to live. I have only one word for you. It is an ancient word. It comes from the Latin “imgonnagityousucka.” It is to be spoken with care. Use it together. Use it in peace. Here is that word: karma.

[Good call, Guy. For the record, I did decide to let the poor thing die.]

4. Anonymous made a guess as to the identity of the mystery athletes (and possibly a well-placed jab at the overzealous photography) in Access:

Clearly, the two men in the middle of the fourteenth photograph from the top are D. "Dee" Brown and Sean "I Will Probably Change My Name At Least Three More Times Before My Career Fizzles Out" Combs. Also, possibly, they're not.

5. And finally, when I asked for captions to the last photograph in Yet Even More Small Things, I received a few submissions (all of which were excellent, especially Megan’s “Dog day night”), and then was spammed with the following comment:

howardharolds47564951 said...
I read over your blog, and i found it inquisitive, you may find My Blog interesting. So please Click Here To Read My Blog http://pennystockinvestment.blogspot.com

To which Jeff replied:
Harold!!! That doesn't make any sense! It is a dog driving a car. Why would he want us to read your blog?!?! Wait...in brainstorming there are no bad ideas. I apologize to you howardharolds, perhaps the dog is saying just that.

Thanks everyone for your contributions and keep up the good work. Remember: every time you comment on The Yellow Shirt, an orphan gets a new puppy. And don’t worry, it’s a different orphan each time, so one kid isn’t hoarding them or having to deal with multiple vet bills.

And finally, since it’s my retrospective and I’ll list if I want to, here are some forthcoming posts, again and always, in no particular order:

1. Why You Should Vacation In Boca Raton, Florida, But Only If You Are A Certain Type Of Person

2. Book recommendations: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer, The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson, and Love Monkey by Kyle Smith.

3. The Bus, Part II, At Long Damn Last

4. New Feature! New Feature! Wee Hah! I’ve enjoyed the ten minute writings, and I’m going to shift them a bit to get back to my fiction-writing roots. I’m going to try a series of ten minute improvised fiction writings. No forethought, no planning, just an attempt to kill the inner critic and see what comes out in fiction form. I have no idea what this might yield, but it’s worth finding out.

Thanks, everyone, for reading. I’ll keep doing what I’ve been doing, and hopefully you’ll keep coming back. All manner of feedback on Year One is welcome, unless it’s negative, in which case I will delete it, shut down the site, move to Eureka, California and become an herbal therapist who lives in a bio-friendly house with no electricity.