I Spent Half an Hour Fixing the Wi-Fi to Finish This

This week's post is a bit brief because a. I was at Bear Lake most of the day, b. the Church's wi-fi at this location sucks beyond belief and can't work for more than two consecutive minutes, and c. maybe more people will read it that way. The site looks a bit different, and will need some fine-tuning, because I learned how to edit the html to create a sidebar, which will give my Facebook page (which, incidentally, recouped all its lost likes after I gave it a shout-out last week) more prominence and allow a widget that tracks the locations of visitors. It only tracks them if they have those cookies activated, and I don't think it appears on the mobile version that most people use, and I don't have that many visitors to begin with, so it only shows a handful a day and kind of makes me look lame. But it was a neat idea in theory.

The search terms that people have used to find my website so far this month are:
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christopher randall nicholson (9)
christopher randall nicholson about mormons (1)
content (1)
god is egotistical (1)
why are mormon missionaries so hot (1)

I have no idea who's been Googling my full name, but good for them. I'm glad people are stumbling on the site, but frustrated that after well over a year the pageviews are still sometimes lower than I like and that the top viewed pages almost never include any of my writing projects that I hoped to use to jump-start a career in that direction. Granted, since I can't get most of my so-called friends to read my novel for free I suppose I can't expect strangers to read my poems. What does one have to do to get noticed around here?

At least I think I've discovered what the problem is outside of the internet. The first few times I was monitored for quality control at this job, I was told to put more inflection and enthusiasm in my voice. After a bit of struggle I stopped getting that feedback and presumed that it had been resolved. But my overall rate of success is still lower than it's supposed to be, and whenever discussing this one of the supervisors keeps saying "Try not to sound like a robot." I had an epiphany and realized that if my monotone voice is the reason people say "Not interested" over the phone, it could well be the reason they say the same thing in real life. It's one of those little things that subliminally affects the way people see you even if they're not consciously trying to be jerks. I suppose I should work on it, but that's a daunting task since it comes to normal people as easy as breathing. They don't have to think about which words to emphasize, how much, and in what way. All I can think to do is trial and error, and that could go badly.

Peace Together Choir - Angels Are Making Their Rounds

A couple weeks ago dreamed that Debbie was mad at me and refusing to speak to me. It was unpleasant and when I woke up from it I said to my subconscious, "Please don't give me dreams like that anymore." I went back to sleep and dreamed that I was a Jew watching the Nazis cook my grandfather for dog meat. I made a rather tasteless wisecrack about it to my father too, which hopefully was just a coping mechanism for the trauma.

​Anyway, after that I guess my subconscious felt bad and decided to make it up to me. The other night I dreamed that this song was being performed in sacrament meeting. Halfway through one of the refrains I started to wake up, and I thought “Wait, wait, let me finish!” and my subconscious allowed me to sleep for a few seconds more as I rushed through the rest. I first heard it last year at the Latter-day Voices Christmas concert, where the singers came down from the stage and spread throughout the audience to provide an exquisite surround sound experience that sadly I can't replicate here even if you have headphones.