Fall temperatures—and influencers

 

A picture for the algorithms.
Jacob, much younger, and Sophie (pink collar).
What you do when there's no school and you're bored.
One of my favorite pictures.
These nice, lower temperatureswe’re having the last few days seem to energize people. I’ve heard from severalwho are rejoicing in how refreshed they fell, celebrating because it’s finallysoup weather, anticipating fall after the horrendous summer we have. Somehowthough, it has the opposite effect on me. All I want to do is curl up in my bedand doze. I even turned on the heat, but shhh! Don’t tell Jordan.

Yesterday I took two naps—longones, one in the afternoon and another for almost two hours after supper. Eachtime I slept heavily, and when I woke, I had to force myself to get out of bed.Once up and about I was fine, though aware that I was tired. Longtime friendscame for happy hour, and I was energized by their company. But after they left,I kept thinking about a nap—ate leftovers, wrote my blog, and went back to bed.Somehow, I stayed up from ten to midnight, and then slept soundly until Sophwakened me at seven this morning.

Today I didn’t feel as tired,but I still didn’t want to leave my bed. I fed Sophie at seven, went back tobed, fed her again at her insistence at 8:45 (she usually gets a two-stagebreakfast so we can time her insulin shot), and went back to bed for anunprecedented third time. After about half an hour, my old-fashioned work ethicdragged me out of bed, and I got going for the day. But by two o’clock I wasback in bed for another nap.  Surely bynow I’m caught up on sleep, but I can’t guarantee it.

What a quandary! I really don’tlike summer’s high temperatures, but I perhaps dislike even more the extremecold we’ve been getting in winter the last few years—I think that’s my Chicagobackground showing. But I do like the “in-between” seasons, so I hope I adjustsoon so I can enjoy these balmy days.

Something that’s been on mymind lately: how do you get to be an influencer? I’m not even sure what aninfluencer is, but I think they are mostly on TikTok, with maybe some onSubstack, Patreon, and other online subscription newsletter services. I havefriends on Substack and a couple of columns I follow though I don’t know thewriters—are they influencers? I’m not sure. Heather Cox Richardson is acolumnist whose newsletter, Letters from an American, I read every day, but Iwouldn’t call her an influencer. To me, she’s giving us history lessons thathelp us understand today’s political turmoil. And my friend Susan Wittig Albertwrites about life in the Hill Country, nature, herbs, and aging—what she doesnot do, and I’m thankful, is try to influence you to buy her books (I’ll put ina plug—her China Bayles mysteries, now up to #27, are terrific reading). I alsofollow Ruth Reichl, the food writer, who offers recipes, memories of meals, oldmenus—all good fun, but I’m not sure she influences people as much as she interests and entertains them—and makes me want to be a better cook. Stephanie Raffelock alsowrites about aging and women’s issues and finding your core—good stuff, but itdoesn’t influence me to rush out and do something dramatic.

I think true influencersmention, even push brand names. They have sponsors—I’m not understanding thisenough even to cite an example. But I did read today about an influencer whodid a heinous thing—she adopted an Asian child with special needs and thendecided, two or three year later, to re-home him, as you should not do even toa puppy, let alone a child. The influencer part of that horrible story thatinterests me is that she lost all of her sponsors and her income droppeddramatically. But what did she, an apparently quite shallow person, do to get to that high-income pinnacle and tohave those sponsors in the first place?

I gather it’s a bit more complicatedthan saying one day, “I want to be an influencer.” You have to have a fieldwhere you have some kind of expertise. That’s a stumbling block—I have a bit ofskill at cooking and a lot of political opinions, but I don’t think either ofthose qualify me to be an influencer. I probably know some more than most aboutwomen in the literature of the nineteenth-century American West, but who would I influence? Threeor four interested readers—among other things, I don’t see any income in that,not that income is my major goal at this point.

Maybe because I post on myblog more nights than not, I am already an influencer and just need to flauntthe title. But what am I influencing readers about? Sophie’s latest antics? WhatI’m cooking and eating? What I’m reading. I find this entire online worldconfusing to say the least, and for the time being I have decided to stay whereI am: a non-influencer blogging most nights about some of life’s significant momentsand a lot more about the trivia. Seems where I belong.

Now, I feel another nap comingon.