The Five That Didn't Go Viral, and the One That Did

Last August, the Quaker magazine Friends Journal published an article I wrote about the Tiny Tornado. it went viral, getting over 20,000 "likes" on Facebook, and about 145,000 pageviews. This was, of course, very exciting.

Glad I Got a Screenshot Before the Counter Reset Itself

And yet, it causes one to reflect on the vicissitudes of the internet, and what does and doesn't go viral. Because that is not the best thing I've ever written, not even on the subject of the Tiny Tornado. It's not the funniest, or the most insightful, or the best-written, or the most thought-provoking. I have written several things in the past that I thought might catch the eye of a larger audience, that didn't. I will share them with you now.

The Five That Didn't Go Viral, But Might Have

Back when I had only one baby, I wrote this hilarious bit for some friends, imagining that diaper-changing was an Olympic sport. Share the link with your friends and they might spit coffee onto their keyboards, which is always fun.

Well, the quality of the sport just isn't what it used to be. In my day, every serious competitor at the national level had at least four children in at most six years; now it's all mothers-of-one. In 1978, I had to perform a near-perfect Simultaneous Bowel Movements of 8-Month-Old and Two-Year-Old in Car With Light-Colored Upholstery While Running Late to Pick Up Four-Year-Old From Preschool to win my second gold, but the multiple-child events have been completely phased out in recent years.

On the subject of gender transition, I wrote this piece on what we call "the mail forwarding stage," that time when you're on-board with the new name and pronouns but your brain hasn't quite caught up. I've never seen anybody else write a piece on this phenomenon. A dozen more people should read it, at least.

The most hilarious part of the mail-forwarding stage is that your brain starts checking to see if other names and pronouns need to be forwarded as well. You call non-trans friends by the wrong pronoun from time to time as the system over-corrects. When one close friend was transitioning a decade or so ago, I was once stopped dead because I suddenly couldn't remember whether one of my closest friends--a non-trans woman, as I know perfectly well--should be referred to as "he" or "she." Tiny little postal workers in my brain were dashing around chaotically, running back and forth between stations, flipping through piles of memos, trying to find the paperwork. I was frozen and stammering for a moment until they got it sorted out.

Last year some time, I wrote this really terrific essay about how my body image changed after I came out as a lesbian. With photographic proof!

The young woman on the glider drinking a Dr. Pepper is an amazing physical specimen. She can ride her bike 60 miles in a day, set up camp, and then hop back on to go exploring, riding another 10 or 20 miles before bed. Her bulging thighs and calves are like granite. But she believes herself to be basically an unfit and sedentary person, because she is so often harassed for the time she spends sitting around reading, and because she does not play any sports or do anything "athletic." She does her best to hide when the camera comes out, because even though she is in the middle of pedaling her bike over 700 miles across the state of Michigan and then up the western shore to the UP, she is ashamed of her body.

This piece is about sex and how much I like it. It's wonderfully written and edgy in just the right way to get internet attention. Yet there it sits non-virally.

I had some bad sex, sure. I also had some very good sex. And I had some terrific sex with people it wasn't worth being in a relationship with.

And this is an absolutely splendid bit of Pride & Prejudice fan fiction. OK, I don't really think there are tens of thousands of people out there dying to read this. But the 300 to whom it is of interest? Should be all over it, gushing at me and offereing to sew me a new pelisse.

"Lord, Lizzie," said Lydia Wickham to her one day as the sisters walked out together, "I would not be married to your husband for ten Pemberleys. He is always out of sorts."