Year In Review posts are so passé and trite and boring, Sidney. Boring. These are so, like, totally everywhere now, but I’ll do one anyway. It will be completely different from everyone else’s, mostly because it is mine.

Post A Day

I started doing The Daily Post‘s Post A Day thing. I did not post every day. Here’s what I did manage to write:

January: 32 posts.
February: 16
March: 10
April: 4 (eek)
May: 20
June: 14
July: 16
August: 10
September: 19
October: 15
November: 10
December: 11

Total posts in 2011: 177

That doesn’t add up to 365.  Even if I’m really bad at math, that doesn’t add up to 365. I’m pretty sure that the month of April has more than 4 days in it.

Still, I probably wouldn’t have written a lot of those posts if it weren’t for the Post A Day thing, so there’s that.

2011s Top 5 Most Popular Posts

You people have some strange taste in reading material:

1. Natural Disasters
Posted February 1, 2011. 2,749 views. Most of those views were in the first two days when this post was promoted to Freshly Pressed.

2. Well-Known Facts: World Record Mammal Edition
Posted July 1, 2011. 2,507 views. This one was really popular for a while due to a ton of people searching for maps of Africa. Feeling guilty about people looking for facts and ending up at my not-so-facts, I took out all of the references to Africa and the views dropped down to a normal level.

3. Are we too dependent on technology?
Posted July 22, 2011. 1,946 views. I’m not quite sure why this one is viewed so often, but a lot of people search for “are we too dependent on technology?” I find it amusing that so many people are using technology to ask if we’re too dependent on technology, but what do I know.

4. Dear Goldfish Part 2
Posted September 29, 2011. 1,503 views. Again, I have a sneaking suspicion that this one is viewed a lot because of people looking for maps of Africa. I have three of them in this post, none of them helpful at all.

5. A Fictional Character I’d Like to Hang Out With
Posted January 12, 2011. 1,292 views. I chose Spider Jerusalem as my fictional character and the people over at WarrenEllis.com appreciated my thoughts on the subject enough to feature this post on their front page.

Top 10 Personal Favorite Posts

In the order that they were written:

Detroit, My First Love.
A love letter to my hometown.

The Zoo.
I don’t write poetry with good reason. That reason being, I suck at it. But I was trying to take a nap one day and The Zoo kept poking at my brain. It wouldn’t let me sleep until I wrote it down. It’s certainly not great, but I’m rather fond of it since it is the only piece of poetry I’ve ever written that doesn’t immediately make me cringe.

The Onion.
This is sort of cheating since this post wasn’t actually written in 2011. It was posted on this blog in 2011 though, so I think it counts. This is a real conversation I had with a friend of mine. Even though I’ve read it a million times at this point, it still makes me laugh every time. Not many things can do that.

The Category of Parades.
A story about how I denigrated someone’s belief in astrology at a dinner party. This is why I shouldn’t attend dinner parties.

On Being Dead.
This post describes my childhood battle with meningitis. I’m not sure it would mean anything to anyone else, but it was cathartic for me to write it.

Furious Spurious Lexis.
The Daily Post told me to make up a word and its definition. I didn’t stop at just one word. Some of these are good and should be used right now.

The Missing Shoe.
A story which I won’t reveal as either fiction or non-fiction. You’ll just have to decide for yourself whether it’s true or not.

The Night That Changed My Life.
Another cathartic story. This one is as true as I can remember.

Well-Known Facts: American History Edition.
My favorite of the Well-Known Facts series. I plan on doing more historical editions in the future. That is, I will write them in the future, not that I plan to write futuristic history. Although, that’s not a bad idea…

Love Letter To Los Angeles.
I love this post for some reason. It makes me want to get in my car and drive around LA. It’s not often that I talk about the city in which I currently reside. I’m probably too close to it to really see it.

New Series

I started a few new series on the blog in 2011. First, there was the Well-Known Facts series, which is as ridiculous as I am. I can’t really remember how this started. I think I was just bored one day and decided to make things up. Anyway, there are nine well-known facts posts now and I’m sure there will be more as I can’t seem to stop the shenanigans.

Then we have Dear Goldfish, a series where I answer search terms that people have used to find their way to this blog. I’ve always been fascinated by the stats page here and I used to write posts about silly search words. Somehow, the search word posts morphed into Dear Goldfish where I throw a question mark on the end of real search terms and answer them as if I’m Dear Abby.

Plus, I continued hating many things in the Things I Hate series. Hate will never die.

NaNoWriMo

I attempted to write a novel in the month of November. I failed. I did write over 15,000 words on a book that didn’t exist in anything other than character sketches and outlines before that, so I’m still pretty proud of myself. My reflections on the process can be found starting here.

Landmarks and Conclusions

• I joined the Atheist Blogroll in 2011.

• One of my posts was Freshly Pressed (featured on the front page of WordPress).

• I broke 300 posts and wrote about the things I learned. I’m currently 40 posts (39 if you count this one) away from 400 posts.

• I wrote and posted six short fiction stories on this blog in 2011.

• I’ve only ever written one post about my cat. Since I got a dog in April, I’ve written three posts. Apparently, I’m a dog person.

• I didn’t read nearly as much in 2011 as I did in 2010.

• I failed at Post A Day. I failed at NaNoWriMo. But I tried both.

• I didn’t post as much this year as I would have liked. I didn’t write as much as I would have liked. But I did write and I did post, so that’s got to count for something, right?

2011 Haiku

And just so that my Year in Review post is completely different from all the rest:

Here is a Haiku.
For every month this year.
Whoopity-do-da.

January
First month of the year
Unemployed and so depressed.
non compos mentis

February
I’m a breadwinner!
Reason to get out of bed
I have got a job.

March
Another friend died.
Bought lots of ammunition.
Two discrete events.

April
A curse on your house.
In the form of a puppy.
Gah, total chaos.

May
Well-Known Facts is born.
The lies and shenanigans
just keep on comin’.

June
Another birthday.
Meh. Surely feeling older
but not much wiser.

July
Reconnected with
old friends. I’m not sure why they
found me July.

August
I do not recall
what happened this month at all.
Must have been special.

September
Puppy became dog.
Summer turned into autumn.
I hated more things.

October
The Halloweenies
At my door again. Take some
sweets and go away.

November
It’s NaNoWriMo.
Fell farther behind each day.
Novel writing FAIL.

December
Ugh, the holidays.
Don’t you have homes of your own?
Too much social stuff.