On our daughter not having a stripper name

The very first piece I posted on this blog had to do with naming my daughter, whose full name is Addison Sage Call. After a lot of research and discussion, Lindsay and I felt pretty good about that name, even though one of the first reactions we got from anyone was from a good friend who exclaimed incredulously, "Sage? You're gonna give her a stripper's name?"

She's a really good friend, and we appreciate her frankness. But we decided that the etymological associations "Sage" has with healing, wisdom, and grace simply said so much about who we hoped our daughter could become. And, we really can't be expected to keep tabs on what strippers may or may not be calling themselves these days.

The reason I'm bringing all this up about names is that I had another spike in my pageviews because of a comment I put somewhere on the internet. About Addison's name. For a while, it looks like the heartbeat of my blog has just about flat-lined, and then suddenly:

Those two spikes over on the right-hand side? They're both from a comment I left on a Babycenter article about people naming their babies after flowers. Talk about a defibrillator right to the ticker, right? But really, it was pretty much a throw-away comment. I sometimes browse various parenting web-sites to start thinking about subjects to use for my own writing, and while this one didn't happen to do much for me, I decided to leave a comment anyway. Cause that's what a blogger does, right? I'm still learning the ropes.

Now, I've been told before that I shouldn't worry so much about my stats. It's good advice. Me figuring out the internet is about as likely as me solving a Rubik's Cube. It's really unlikely. I've never even gotten a single side to be a single color before. What happens after I get a hold of a Rubik's Cube makes a Pollock painting looks like freaking photorealism.

Anyway, I'm really not that worried about stats. Just intrigued. I love statistics. I love making comparisons, and thinking about group trends and social tendencies. I like to imagine why one thing strikes a chord, and another doesn't. It doesn't mean that I'll make any accurate predictions; it's just fun to think about. I also love seeing other people's stats, although it seems most people actually are too anxious or embarrassed about their stats to show them off.

This graph makes the whole thing even funnier:

Every last referral from the babycenter site is from that single comment. People really wanted to know about my process for naming my daughter, right?

Probably not. I think what they were really trying to figure out was this: what kind of a person would tell first-time parents of a lovely newborn that they've given her a stripper name? The horror! Because these are a few of the comments that were left after mine:

Regardless, I feel pretty comfortable telling our friend that the internet says we were right and she was wrong. Boo-yah.