लिखा निष्क्रियता

After LASEK surgery, there’s little you’re allowed to do.  Forget about running, reading, working out, or watching tv.  Also, forget about bending over to pick things up, or taking showers that allow you to wash your face.  Also, forget about being comfortable.  If getting shampoo in your eye is a pastime of yours, however, I have the surgery for you!  For the rest of us, it just means lying in a dark room for a week listening to Harry Potter Books on tape that your fabulous girlfriend has bought you for Christmas.   Being a new-age invalid is similar to being an old-school invalid in that you’re a target of that midday unemployed and disgruntled demographic.  In yesteryear, 1-800 number-toting lawyers with bad comb-overs interrupted Jerry Springer with offers of free consultation and risk-free lawsuits so that one could collect on an injury that was most likely caused by stupidity (nail guns aren’t toys?)  Today we’ve come much farther; we have the internet.  With such a powerful tool one can peruse vast tracts of information to seek out knowledge to better our lives–like Ms. South Caronlina championing under-mapped South Africans, or Chuck Norris approving Mike Huckabee for president (winning my vote not out of logic, but out of pure fear).  And amidst this information are the ads for greater sex stamina, discount prescription drugs, and ads for clever ways to earn extra money. One of the ways to earn extra money is to ‘blog’.  I’ve never really ‘blogged’, but I do write a lot every day, and I began to wonder if the claims were true.  Is it possible to earn money writing?  For English majors, being paid for writing is the holy grail aspired to while cashing in our food stamps.  Could this be the answer?  Could this be what we were looking for this whole time?  Strange that no one else had caught on to this, since it did come up in the #1 spot on the google advertisement bar when I searched for ‘blogs’, but no matter–that’s the rest of the world’s loss!  Big money, here I come. The notion of making big money was short-lived.  It seems that the majority of pay-blogging sites allow authors to earn money from advertisers who keep track of the number of times readers click on advertisement windows.  Odd.  I don’t recall EVER clicking on an advertisement window.  EVER.  Immediately I found myself with a paradox; if I wanted to earn money, I would have to find a way to implicitly lure readers to ‘click my box’ (insert joke here)–but at the same time, I would have to attract the type of reader that would be repeatedly enthralled by the possibility of winning an iPod if he or she could “catch the goldfish” or “punch the boxer” or some other obnoxious form of advertising.  So I did what any rational person would do; if watched Chuck Norris endorse Huckabee and forgot what I was thinking about.  Problem solved.So the social experiment would go as follows: since I was stuck at home for a least a few weeks with one working eye, I would try to “earn money as a blogger”, but I would not self-promote.  I would sign up for one of those pay-sites as soon as I established a blog, and see what happened to the little Adsense account that would keep track of my blog advertisement traffic.  My time spent blogging would really be dependent on what I felt like doing that day.  At least an article a day, but no other real goals.  Is this another scam?  If it is, I sincerely doubt that I’ll be able to soak the neighbors.