I feel compelled to address what is, apparently, a very significant issue.

First, some background.

Embedded within this blog is a site meter. It tracks how many people visit per day, what pages they view, and how they found the blog to begin with. The # of people and where they’re located is fun to know (holla back Yemen!!). But the root of the issue I need to address today comes from the “how people found it” function.

See, if you found this blog through someone’s Facebook page, the referring domain that I see in the site meter is Facebook.com. If you just typed it in from memory it reads “20-nothings.com”. But if you, say, googled something that related to a blog post and the blog popped up in the search results I would see, “google.com search” and then the exact search terms.

So, for example, if you searched “go to a bar alone” or “how to go to a bar alone” or “do people go to bar alone”, google would produce a link to this article – a little thing I wrote about how you can meet people if you to a bar alone.

This has happened 18 times. 18 separate people have entered something along the lines of “how do I go to a bar alone” since I published that story and thus found my blog. It bears mentioning that of the 18 only half were from the US. Apparently going to bars alone is just as confusing in England, Australia, Denmark and Bermuda.

Now, in the grand scheme of the google-searching world 18 is not wildly significant. But let’s assume that if 18 went through with a google search of “how do I go to a bar alone” then at least three times as many have thought of it. So if whatever 18 x 3 people is have gone so far as to consider this google search then probably four times that many have asked themselves the question at one point or another. By now we’re at, I don’t know, 5,000?

But to me, if even 18 people in this wide world are living in question about the perplexing details around how one goes to a bar alone well then I am flummoxed – flummoxed beyond words.

Let’s take care of this before we move on:

You pick a bar where you think there will be ample seating and men. You go there without the company of anyone else. You sit. You order a drink. You drink that drink while doing one of many things (watching the tv, reading a newspaper, making some notes in a small notebook, nothing at all but drinking). You smile and look inviting so that if you see someone you might like to talk to they might decide they like to talk to you too. If after one hour/you’re drunk you have yet to feel productive you move on. Rinse, repeat.

Hopefully we’re all clear now.