Musings Of A Muddled Male

A Day in the Life of….

By Bob Stevens, The Muddled Male

 

        I was reading this morning that the new trend in Social Networking is vlogging.  You are probably thinking that I just misspelled a word.  My spell checker thought so too and is going crazy trying to get me to change “vlogging” to logging, flogging, clogging, slogging, or blogging.  But vlogging is one of those new words that creep into our dictionaries after being created by the younger generation.  Those of us who are older make fun of such words until we start to use them ourselves and then they are considered to be part of the language and accepted even by Dictionary publishers.  In my day that would be called “language creep” and was frowned on by most publishers, and by Mr. Braegger my English teacher.  But today, language creep is just part of our amazing digital world, like the use of emoticons as shorthand when we text.

 

        Vloggers, it turns out, are the same as bloggers except that instead of writing about every mundane thing in their life they make a video of those mundane things and share it on YouTube for the world to see.  The thing that caught my attention this morning, as I read about vlogging, was the possibility of making a living from one’s vlog.  One family in the article let their viewers watch them do such everyday things as unload their groceries into their kitchen and tend to their newborn baby.  You may think that would be kind of boring to watch, but the family has 47,000 viewers that subscribe to their vlog.  And the compensation they receive as their portion of the ad revenue generated by views of their YouTube videos is enough to let the mother of this little family stay home with the children instead of having to work outside the home.  But the one that really set off visions of sugar plums dancing in my head was the family that has 2.7 million viewers subscribing to their vlog to watch someone simply live their life.  And the income from their share of ads supports their whole family so that neither parent has to have a job other than to make videos of things they do and upload them to YouTube. 

        Just think of the opportunities that a successful vlog could bring into my life.  If I could get a sufficient number of you to subscribe to my vlog and watch a video of me putting on my socks in the morning, I could earn enough to hire someone to shovel snow off our deck and plow our driveway during the winter while I sat inside by the fireplace and watched.  To check the possibility that my vlog could be successful, I did an audit of my life to see whether or not there was anything interesting enough to keep you coming back to YouTube for more.  If you did, the money would come rolling in.  If you didn’t, the income from my share of the advertisements to which you were exposed would drop precipitously and I would have to go back to shoveling my own snow.  Well, my audit uncovered several things I might have to vary if I am going to keep your interest long enough for my share of the ad revenue to make me wealthy.  If I am successful it might bring in enough to pay for a person to shovel the snow plus let me buy propane to run my fireplace. 

        The video of me putting on my socks showed, more than anything, that I’m not interesting, but I am obsessive.  I always put my left sock on first after being careful to make certain that the sock that was on the left foot yesterday goes on the left foot today to avoid having a right, big-toe stretch mark in a left-foot sock.  If I mess up I have to put on new socks without any big-toe stretch marks and start over.  And a video of me taking my morning pills showed that I always take my eleven and a half morning pills the same way every day.  The vitamin C pill I chew first.  Next I swallow the three large and the half pill whole all at once with water.  Then I swallow the seven small pills, also whole and all at once with water.  I guess that I should explain that I swallow the pills all at once in groups because I take so many that if I swallowed each pill separately and one at a time followed by a drink of water each, I might drown. 

        Finally, a video of me preparing and eating breakfast provided the final confirmation that I am obsessive and not vlog worthy.  Several shakes of salt, four tablespoons of Cream-of-Wheat, a heaping quarter cup of Splenda, one cup of water, twenty pecans broken into pieces, a quarter of a Fuji Apple peeled and cut into pieces, and fat free Half & Half as needed, every morning.  I occasionally cook Zoom or steel cut Oats for a change instead of Cream-of-Wheat, but everything else is the same.  It probably didn’t help the video that I eat my mush standing, before I shave or comb my hair, and in my underwear. 

Well, I probably won’t need to hire a CPA to handle my finances when I become wealthy because I realize now that I wouldn’t do well as a vlogist.  But I’m going to keep filming in hopes that I will catch Ann hiding the M&M peanuts so that I know where they are and can occasionally sneak one.  I just hope that in the process she doesn’t find the Hershey Almond Kisses I bought and hid to use for sneak-snacks whenever I feel an M&M Peanut withdrawal coming on.  I guess I could always edit that out of the video.  Don’t you just love modern technology?