So, Who Are You People?

I gotta say, I'm intrigued by some of you.

One of the many cool aspects of this Internet thing that seems to have taken over much of most people's lives is that, thanks to the miracle of relatively simple modern technology, when you visit my blog, I can see you.

Fine, not literally; we're not all webcam-connected at this point, though I'm sure that won't be true for long. And won't THAT be a horrible setback for those of us who like to blog in our pajamas, on bad hair days, all shiny-faced with spinach in our teeth and an unmade bed behind us. But I digress.

Anyway, the point is, my "readership" is such a smallish and manageable number that I can tell where you are, when you visited, how long you stayed, what you looked at, what you clicked on, and how you found me... just by looking at my site statistics. In most cases, the sum of this information allows me to figure out who you are, assuming you're someone I already know. Of course, I'm sure there are a few folks out there who are so well cloaked in secrecy (government? military? the coming alien conquerors of the human race?) that they don't even show up on my stats with "unknown" listed in all of the above slots, but I'm guessing those folks are few and far between, and not particularly interested in what I might have to say anyway.

So who's reading? Some people from my present, some people from my past, and some people who, I'm sure, have no idea that I know they're visiting (which makes it all the more fun).

But I'll be hornswaggled if there aren't at least a few compelling mysteries out there that churn my brain a bit. And because I'm having one of those feeling-just-a-bit-devil-may-care days, I am inviting a few of you to be in a new and exciting category called "people from my future."

Are you the person who always finds me by searching for "Jenny Haynes Dallas" (though I assure you, as a person who has -- unfortunately -- never visited Texas, nor -- fortunately -- starred on a cheesy nighttime soap opera from the 1980s, I'm probably not who you think you're looking for)?

Are you the person from a popular online dating site's domain who clicks through from a list of weblogs belonging to former staffers of a camp where I worked for two summers in the early '90s?

Are you from Slough? From Thousand Oaks?

Let's be grownups about this. We all go a-Googling in search of interesting people and strange things, looking up old schoolmates and former co-workers from days of yore, performing do-it-yourself background checks on people we've just met, in the curious voyeuristic way we've been taught to approach our increasingly exposed lives in the digital age. I do it, you do it. It's amazing and amusing. Admit it. Embrace it. 'Fess up.

You don't even have to out yourself publicly by leaving a comment. E-mail me (there's a link in my Blogger profile) and tell me who you are. Seriously, I'm dying to know.

What are ya, chicken?