Watching you watching me.

14 January 2002—I shouldn’t even cop to this, I know, but it’s too damned interesting to pass up. A confession: I watch you. OK, not you personally, but a sort of representation of you as you pass through the site. Don’t worry, I can't find out any personal information about you from my site-visitor-tracking thingy: neither your name, nor your email address, nor any information about how to contact you. (Unless, of course, you’re a friend or family member, and I already have such information.)

I must make this clear, as some people have expressed a certain amount of alarm: I can’t find out your email address through this. If you have your own domain, even that probably doesn’t show up; I have my own, but what comes up when I visit a site is pacbell.net. No one can figure out it’s me based simply on that information. So don’t worry. I repeat, don’t worry.

What I do know, sort of, is about how long anyone spends on the site, plus how many pages each person looked at, which page each person came in on and which page each person saw last before s/he high-tailed it out of here. I don’t know, beyond those two, which pages that person looked at.

But really, the most interesting piece of information I get is where people were just before they came to the journal. Sometimes that information is missing, which probably means they either had my site bookmarked (thank you!) or punched in the address manually (thanks to you too!). Other places people come from are the various pages that link to the journal, such as Alison, Jennifer, and Raymond (more about them on the Other Mouths page), and various directories of journals, and a couple of other random things.

And then there’s Google. If you don’t know Google, it’s a fabulous search engine that helps you find all kinds of useful and useless shit on the Web. I’ve known that for a long time, but recently I’ve discovered that people stumble onto this journal while they’re searching Google for all manner of things. Some you would instantly understand how they found my site, some, well.... Herewith, a list of search keywords that have led people to the journal (clicking on the boldfaced search terms will take you to the page where the wayward searcher ended up):

Mastication: A fair amount of these, plus variations. Needs no explanation.

Cat eye dilation: Not too surprising, either.

Jonathan Franzen: A few of these, leading right where you would expect, if you’ve read that piece.

Bret Easton Ellis: Jeez, he’s barely mentioned in the Franzen piece. Are there so few sites devoted to him that mine comes up near the top of the list?

Anti-semantic: Why is someone looking this up?

I choo-choo-choose you: A quote from the Simpsons. Two people found the journal this way, but I can hardly fault them; I searched Google for those words, too, to make sure I quoted them correctly.

Leather recliner in Los Angeles: Bizarre search terms, but I guess someone really knows exactly what he or she wants. God bless ’em.

Banzai Kitty: There were a few of these. It turns out what the people were searching for was this horrendous site someone posted on the net with photos of kittens stuffed into jars. Satire, of what I don’t know, though the photos will make you wince nonetheless. This is, uh, humor.

and the winners:

Pictures of erect penises: People find my site about once a week this way, and judging from their service providers, not the same person every time.

Pictures of normal penises: What?

Postscript, 28 January 2002: Since posting this list, I’ve discovered there’s an entire site devoted to just this topic. Want to see more bizarre requests than what I’ve received? Click here.