Thank You, Veterans

When I was in high school, I attempted to join the military. I had rather high ASVAB scores and all the branches were trying to recruit me. However, I never really pictured myself as a military man. My father, uncle and grandfather were all Navy men. I have cousins that have joined other branches. I had great respect for people in the armed forces, but wasn't sure that I would survive it.

I finally decided to do it for the college money, but didn't get past the physical. I had an asthma diagnosis when I was twelve years old and that was enough to keep me out, despite not having had any symptoms since then. I wasn't very upset about it since I really wasn't wanting to join anyway.

If it hadn't been for that pre-teen diagnosis, I would be a veteran today. I don't know how long I would have served or what my experience would have been, but I could have counted myself among the fine men and women that bravely serve our country every day.

Even today, I don't see myself as a military man and have no idea the quality of soldier I would have been, but want to take the time today to acknowledge, honor, and thank the individuals who volunteered to help keep our country safe from foreign threats.

I have heard many vets say that they are not looking for a thank you, but I still want to offer one and encourage everyone else to thank a vet. Thank you for your service. Happy Veterans' Day

Blog Traffic OR Fifty Shades of Grey

I've said many times that I write for me. I enjoy writing and would continue to do it even if no one ever saw what I wrote. However, I can comfortably admit that I have an egotistical side as well. I love knowing that people do read what I am writing and really enjoy knowing that people enjoy it.

Since starting the Pish Posh Challenge, I have noticed something incredible happen on this blog. Take a look at my stats.

Last month on September 6, I wrote my first post for the Pish Posh Challenge and have written almost every day since then. Once I started this challenge, my traffic took off. I had to blog for 15 months before I hit a total of 6,000 page views. At my last check, I've had over 6,600 in just the last thirty days! That's more traffic in one month than I used to get in a year!

I believe there are several reasons for this. First, I have been posting much more content than I normally do. This means that my regular readers are stopping by to visit more often to read the newest post and are driving up my numbers. Next, I have to give some credit to Pish Posh since I link up to her blog every week and start pulling traffic from the people that are visiting her and participating in the challenge for themselves. I also have to give a shout out to the great guys over at Dude Write. I submit a post to them almost every week and pull traffic from their visitors as well. They even threw an award my way a few weeks ago.

However, a more careful look at my stats shows that I have been looking at this all the wrong way. Look at my numbers for the month of September.

Of my 6,000+ views last month, 13.6% of them occurred on a single day! I got 830 hits on September 10 because of a piece that I didn't even write that month. That day 758 of that day's page views were all to a post I wrote a year ago about My Remembrance of 9/11. That post only got about 50 visits back when I wrote it!
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Even if we take away the increased traffic of that day, I would still have had the highest traffic month to date, however I feel that I cannot ignore the evidence that is before me. Using a little forethought, I am confident that I could funnel traffic to my site.
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I saw a similar thing happen a year ago when I wrote about the UARS satellite falling out of the sky. It was a current event and I wrote about it the day it was supposed to fall. My traffic exploded! In order to capitalize on this trend I need to jump on board the flow of the web and try to predict what people will be searching for.
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Tonight was the first presidential debate between President Barack Obama and Republican nominee Mitt Romney. This is big news. Just mentioning their names in my post may get me a hundred extra visitors each since hundreds of thousands of people will be online for the next few days searching this topic. Of course, in order for the search engines to take my site seriously, I probably need to use their names more than once.
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MITT ROMNEY. I'm hoping the bold will get Google's attention better…or maybe I should use a bigger font and brighter colors.  BARACK OBAMA!
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In order to really draw traffic, I could link to the websites of each candidate.
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Click here to visit Mitt Romney's site.
Click here to visit Barack Obama's site.
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Obviously, if I am going to use this tactic, I don't want to miss out on any of the potential traffic that could come from people looking for this topic but using different search criteria. I need to make sure to include other terms and names, including links whenever available.
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Michelle Obama - Joe Biden - Fox News - Ann Romney - Hillary Clinton - Paul Ryan - Rush Limbaugh - CNN - Ann Coulter - Bill Clinton - Bill O'Reilly - Bill Maher - Obamacare - Medicaid - Debates - Focus Groups - Jim Lehrer - Republican - Democrat - Libertarian - Vegetarian - Pedestrian
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It looks like this post has the potential to get more traffic than any I have ever written. Nevertheless, I don't want to limit myself by missing out on the searches that may be about things not pertaining to politics. I better throw in a few more to get some REAL traffic.
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Let's talk about Honey Boo Boo and the $15,000 per episode raise that her family got. I could discuss the latest traffic violations of Lindsey Lohan or the incident of Amanda Bynes locking herself in a doughnut shop bathroom. Justin Bieber caught his own fever and puked on stage for his first show of the new Believe tour.
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The Fast and Furious weapons scandal has appeared in the news again.. Syria and Turkey still aren't getting along. We are still dealing with health care, illegal immigration, educational woes, and Brittany Spears on The X Factor. There is no end to the things I could talk about to bring in traffic. Lets throw in a few more terms just to be safe.
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Fifty Shades of Grey - NFL - 30 Rock - bath salts - bacon crisis - unemployment - eBay - Breaking Bad - referee strike - planking - diet - bloggers - Liam Neeson - Pepsi - China - ESPN - embassy - Starbucks - teachers' strike - Tupac - Google - Avengers - Benjamin Netanyahu - zombie apocalypse - Navy Seals - 2012 - McRib - Sons of Anarchy - legalization - Dallas Cowboys - Afghanistan - Charlie Sheen - climate change - pit bulls - conspiracy - Mayans - Hurricane Isaac - J.K. Rowling - education - vampires - Tea Party - Nikki Minaj - bullying
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Let's throw a few major search words out there for good measure to pull in some more.

SEX - PORN - NUDITY - X RATED - BOOBS - ANTHONY WEINER

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If I can pull traffic in this way and continue to predict the upcoming trends, then it won't matter if I am writing quality pieces. I could quit working so hard. In fact, if I can get my numbers high enough and keep them there, then I could sell ad space and start making money with my blog.

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In reality, I hate it when this happens. While it is exciting to see a jump in the numbers, I want people to come to my site because they actually intended to read what I wrote. When something in the news sparks an idea for a post, the traffic I end up getting because of the search terms they use lands them on my site  for only a few seconds. My UARS satellite piece jumped to the second most popular post within hours of it being posted, despite the scores of better material I had written. It jumped to the top due to topic rather than quality. I want traffic that will stay and continue to read and possibly even click over to some older posts because they liked what they saw. The only way to do that is to produce quality material. That is how bloggers grow their audience.

I love writing and I love my readers and the jumps in numbers are cool, but it's the repeat traffic that gets me the most excited.

However, I will be curious to see what kind of traffic this post gets.

My Remembrance of 9/11

On Friday, I had the privilege of substitute teaching at the Mt. Vernon High School. After working with preschoolers all week, I couldn't wait to get in a classroom with older kids. However, I had not considered that the day would have special significance. Since the 10 year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks falls over the weekend, many of the classes were showing a video and discussing this event and what it means.

I only showed the video during the 7th and 8th hour classes and several of the students exclaimed they had already seen it many times over the course of the day. It was a well made video produced either by the school or one of the students. It mixed various 9/11 footage with different students and teachers telling the story of where they were when they heard the news of the planes hitting the towers.

Afterwards, we discussed our memories and the importance of the event. Since the students were between the ages of five and seven when this history was made, they really did not understand the significance of the event at the time. It is just old history to many of them. The best I can compare to is my memory of Ronald Reagan getting shot. I remember it, but it wasn't that big of a deal to me since I was only nine years old. I did not understand the significance. Despite the fact that I was alive when it happened, it is just another part of history to me. However, I was an adult in 2001 and was quickly aware of what was happening as I watched the second plane hit the tower.

In July of 2001 I accepted a job with a private school in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Therefore, my family had only been on the island for a few months when September came around. I was working in my office when my secretary burst in very excited. She did not speak English and I really did not have a grasp on my Spanish yet.  She was jumping up and down yelling, "Pastor, Pastor, Pastor....Ah....plane, plane grande....Nuevo York....plane...BOOM!" She was saying a bunch of other things, but she was very aware of the fact that I was not understanding her. I knew something was wrong, so I followed her to the radio in her office. I knew enough Spanish at that point that I could gather the general idea of what someone was saying. Since the first plane had just hit a few minutes before, the newscasters were talking very quickly and did not really seem to know anything yet.

I caught that a commercial plane had hit the World Trade Center, so I ran home to turn on CNN. At that point, this was just an interesting news story. Planes crash sometimes, but for a commercial jet to hit the World Trade Center was awful. Once I thought I understood what had happened I stood up to go back to work. As I took a step forward to turn off the television, the second plane came onto the screen and crashed into the second tower. I felt my heart sink. As the announcers were still in stunned silence trying to figure out what to say, I realized that this was intentional. I didn't know what that meant, but someone had planned this. The news anchor then started to say the same thing I was thinking. This was a planned catastrophe.

I then started to record 'CNN en Español' for the teachers to watch in the break room so they could know what was going on. I kept watching CNN and saw the live footage of the first tower coming down. I had taken the tape back to the school before the second one came down, but got to see the footage hundreds of times over the next couple of weeks. The rest of the day I spent in my office glued to the Internet news feeds to hear the latest information, but don't really remember the events for the rest of the day.

Not knowing what this meant for the country was the worst part. Would there be more attacks? Once we realized this had been done to us by a foreign enemy I wondered if we may even see enemy soldiers on our soil. How bad is this going to get? I never wanted to be back home in the States as much as I did during this time. If the fight actually makes it to our soil and we are fighting for our lives, I would much rather be in familiar territory than in this new land we were in. Since Puerto Rico is part of the U.S. and we lived within a few miles of a large naval base, there was concern of an attack on the island, especially since it is a strategic defense position for the East Coast. There was no feeling of safety just because we were so far away.

Over the next few weeks we were pulled over several times and had our car searched at various road blocks. The heightened security was very visible. I don't think we would have experienced that in the Midwest. As much as I was mesmerized by knowing and talking about the latest developments, soon the news services were issuing warnings about the possible damage we could be doing to our children by the constant bombardment of fear, death, images of crashing planes, people leaping out of burning buildings and other bad news. I realized I did need to protect my children's' minds, but I probably needed to do the same for mine as well. That constant state of stress is not good for anyone.

As time rolled on, different people began to have different reactions. Some expressed anger, others felt a deep pride, many signed up to fight in the military and a renewed patriot spirit grew strong. Since then, many things have happened and many things have been said. Some good, some bad.

Now, 10 years later, I don't know how to finish this blog. I want to wrap it up with some deep, insightful statement to leave the reader thinking or give a renewed sense of pride, but I have nothing. I wrote this to project my memory of that day and I know it is something I will never forget, but it is something that no one who lived through it will forget, regardless of what personal conclusions they came to over the course of the next 10 years. Some people applaud the president's handling of the situation, while others condemn him. Some people believe we have captured the people responsible, while others believe we have been chasing the wrong people. I have read about hundreds of theories people have for why we were attacked to begin with.

What have I learned? I am left with the impression of the high school English classroom I was teaching on Friday. These teenagers do not have the same level of interest in this anniversary as their parents. Despite the fact that they were alive when this happened, they were so young, it did not leave the impression on them that it left on me, much like my limited recollection of the Reagan shooting. Listening to the generation before me talk about the Kennedy shooting is entirely different than me reading about it in a history book. Listening to war veteran's recall the adventures and horrors of Vietnam or World War II reminds me that real people lived through these things. These are events that actually happened. Families were deeply affected and lives were changed by these events. Whether we are discussing the events of the Revolutionary War, the attack on the World Trade Center or anything history in between, these are not just facts, names and places to learn for school. They are a part of who we are and shape our identity as Americans.

We must never forget.