Oprah Possibly Reads This Site

Oprah possibly reads this site. You didn’t know this, but I stalk my stalkers through the use of my handy dandy web metrics doohickey, observing pretty much every facet of visitor minutiae—the steady wax and wane of site traffic throughout the day, the hopeful followers clicking refresh on their browsers, the geolocation of individual IP addresses. Nothing escapes my watchful eye. I know everything. I know that my old high school buddy who used to cheat off of me during the stoichiometry unit of our Honors Chemistry class uses Mozilla Firefox 3.0.8 and is an avid reader who has made a habit of visiting my site at two, sometimes three in the morning, perhaps because laughing oneself to sleep is a way to fight insomnia? I also know that on a particularly entertaining entry, John in Batavia, screen resolution 1280x1024, will stop looking at my latest entry via his RSS reader and instead open up my site in a browser, as if wanting to fully take in and admire the entire uninhibited Ill Noise effect. I know when you’re at work, reading during your lunch break. I know when you’re at an airport, reading from your Blackberry. All of my school teacher friends, I know to expect a sudden spike in activity around 3:30 pm every weekday, when you’ve all come home from work.

I know everything, but for obvious reasons I usually refrain from revealing my omniscience. It usually causes trepidation and unease among other people, like when I caught my neighbor in a lie. He’d boasted that the night before he’d been out partying on Rush and Division with all of these beautiful women half his age, so I smiled in pity and said, “No, I’m afraid you weren’t. You were at home, going through my site archives, reading my past blog entries over and over.” And my neighbor, pale as a ghost, he asked me how I knew so I told him about my handy dandy web metrics doohickey and he laughed uncomfortably, shaking his head, looking down, muttering, “The technology these days is just… awe-inspiring.”

Then he pulled out his wallet and stared blankly at an old photo of his dead wife and daughter. “These things just make God even harder to explain,” he said weakly, the lines on his forehead straining. “And yet I still choose to believe.”

The reason I say that Oprah possibly reads this site is because the other day I noticed an IP address from Harpo Studios. Yes, it could have been one of her producers, or maybe one of her interns, or perhaps it was simply just some neighborhood yuppie stealing unencrypted Wi-Fi, but I’d like to think that it was Oprah, looking for new show ideas, laughing at my blog and yelling across the room for Steadman to come over because he needed to read this. It was the most satisfying day of my life, beating out the time that one of my readers spotted me on a bus, took an unflattering cell phone picture of me sitting at the front while an old lady next to me stood, and then emailed it to me (we had previously never met before but he knew exactly who I was; the lack of anonymity is the cost of fame, I suppose).

I imagined Oprah bringing me on her show where she’d use air quotes to talk about the world of this exciting new thing called “blogs”. She’d introduce me as “The Self-Proclaimed Greatest Asian in the History of the Universe” and I’d walk out grinning in a black turtle neck, greeting her with a bear hug and then doing the Soulja Boy Dance before taking my seat.

Oprah would giggle some more and tell me that no one’s ever danced that way on The Oprah Winfrey Show before, and I’d feign shock and be like, “Whoops! Wrong show! I thought I was on Ellen!” and the audience would howl in laughter. I’d subsequently announce that the entire studio audience would be receiving a free, autographed copy of “Letter to a Platonic Friend” and then everyone would just go completely apeshit. Eyes would pop out of sockets. Heads would detach from necks. It would be a wild, wild show. One for the ages. One that would jumpstart my career and reignite Oprah’s. Oprah, if you’re reading this right now, and I know that you possibly are, just know that I love your show and I’m waiting for that call from your producers.