The title is a phrase you won’t see around here too often; after all, even though I call attention to posts from past years every day on Twitter, that retrospective stops at three years. But given that leap day only occurs every four years, I don’t have much choice if I want to refer back to my last column on the subject. And when I was thinking earlier today about what I’d like to do with this essay, I realized an awful lot has changed since the previous one; frankly, I’m hoping that the next four years doesn’t see quite so much change, unless it’s because I marry a billionaire or something.
On Leap Day of 2012, this blog wasn’t even two years old yet; I was still doing a daily feature called “One Year Ago Today”, and I had just started reporting sex work news on a weekly basis rather than a monthly one (now, of course, it’s semi-weekly). I was still months away from a regular links column, and though my traffic was increasing it wasn’t anywhere near what it is now; I was still half a year from my first million pageviews, and now I’m at four and a half million. I hadn’t yet made any public appearances, and didn’t show my face on the internet at all; indeed, it would still be more than two years before I would do that clearly. I had been on Twitter for only two months, so my follower count was in the low hundreds rather than approaching 8000 as it is today (and if you want a laugh, take a look at this column I wrote about it). I was still quietly living on my ranch in Oklahoma, hoping against hope that my husband and I (who had already been estranged for almost two years) would be able to reconcile our differences; I had returned to work part-time soon after starting the blog, but I didn’t dream I’d ever be back doing it full time again (and under the name “Maggie McNeill”, no less). I could never have guessed that in only two years I’d have published a book and be preparing for a national tour, that in three years I’d be divorcing my husband and moving to Seattle, that I’d soon have a whole new circle of wonderful friends, and that I’d become a minor celebrity. And that’s only the stuff I care to mention publicly; there are a number of other things, equally major and at least as radically different from my life in February of 2012, that I think it’s better not to publicize too widely.
Where will I be on February 29th, 2020? Will I still be posting every day, or will I have wound down somewhat? How many new books will I have written? Will I still be living in Seattle? What will my income be like? What new experiences will I have had? How well-known will I be? Will the “sex trafficking” hysteria be over, as I predicted just before that last Leap Day? Will I even be alive? There’s no way to know, or even to guess; the only way to find out is to wait.
Whatever the bad and good issues in your life might be, you’re still getting naked with Cthulhu, so you haven’t lost track of the important things!
!Cthulhu Maggie wgah’nagl fhtagn!
A little gem of information I learned today, with reference to your picture. Waldemar Januszczak is presenting a series of films on BBC4 about the Renaissance, and this week he was in Venice.
He described how the story of Mary Magdalene was invented around a Mary, any Mary, and the idea of a repentant prostitute. He then showed several paintings, saying that you could always recognise the Magdalene in the art of this time; she had (long) loose hair, a symbol of loose morals.
Happy Leap Day Maggie. I hope this year is better than last.
Well put… well put ondeed 👍🏻