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 temperatures we’re having the last few days seem to energize people. I’ve heard from several who are rejoicing in how refreshed they fell, celebrating because it’s finally soup weather, anticipating fall after the horrendous summer we have. Somehow though, it has the opposite effect on me. All I want to do is curl up in my bed and doze. I even turned on the heat, but shhh! Don’t tell Jordan.

Yesterday I took two naps—long ones, one in the afternoon and another for almost two hours after supper. Each time 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 friends came 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 Soph wakened 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 to bed, fed her again at her insistence at 8:45 (she usually gets a two-stage breakfast so we can time her insulin shot), and went back to bed for an unprecedented third time. After about half an hour, my old-fashioned work ethic dragged me out of bed, and I got going for the day. But by two o’clock I was back in bed for another nap.  Surely by now I’m caught up on sleep, but I can’t guarantee it.

What a quandary! I really don’t like summer’s high temperatures, but I perhaps dislike even more the extreme cold we’ve been getting in winter the last few years—I think that’s my Chicago background showing. But I do like the “in-between” seasons, so I hope I adjust soon so I can enjoy these balmy days.

Something that’s been on my mind lately: how do you get to be an influencer? I’m not even sure what an influencer is, but I think they are mostly on TikTok, with maybe some on Substack, Patreon, and other online subscription newsletter services. I have friends on Substack and a couple of columns I follow though I don’t know the writers—are they influencers? I’m not sure. Heather Cox Richardson is a columnist whose newsletter, Letters from an American, I read every day, but I wouldn’t call her an influencer. To me, she’s giving us history lessons that help us understand today’s political turmoil. And my friend Susan Wittig Albert writes about life in the Hill Country, nature, herbs, and aging—what she does not do, and I’m thankful, is try to influence you to buy her books (I’ll put in a plug—her China Bayles mysteries, now up to #27, are terrific reading). I also follow Ruth Reichl, the food writer, who offers recipes, memories of meals, old menus—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 also writes about aging and women’s issues and finding your core—good stuff, but it doesn’t influence me to rush out and do something dramatic.

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

I gather it’s a bit more complicated than saying one day, “I want to be an influencer.” You have to have a field where you have some kind of expertise. That’s a stumbling block—I have a bit of skill at cooking and a lot of political opinions, but I don’t think either of those qualify me to be an influencer. I probably know some more than most about women in the literature of the nineteenth-century American West, but who would I influence? Three or 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 my blog more nights than not, I am already an influencer and just need to flaunt the title. But what am I influencing readers about? Sophie’s latest antics? What I’m cooking and eating? What I’m reading. I find this entire online world confusing to say the least, and for the time being I have decided to stay where I am: a non-influencer blogging most nights about some of life’s significant moments and a lot more about the trivia. Seems where I belong.

Now, I feel another nap coming on.