I searched for myself today and realized two things:
- There is only one other person in the country who both has stuff on the internet and has the same name is me. And he lives in New Jersey. And he played baseball in college.
- The pile of things “about me” on the internet keeps getting longer and longer and longer. That is, it’s not getting smaller.
About six years ago, I agreed to participate in a documentary about “modern relationships.” I was still on the edge of thinking that reality television wasn’t so bad and, hey, who wouldn’t want to have their relationship documented, particularly if it ended up being the relationship that ended in marriage, family, and, ultimately, shared death? It’d be a nice memento.
It did not work out like this. Almost immediately, I felt this sense of being trapped by what I had said but could not clearly remember having said: there was this sense of “what did I say? I hope I didn’t say it the way that I remember saying it. Did I actually say that? I hope that doesn’t make it into the final product.”
This, in a sense, is how I feel about the parts of my life that have been indexed by search engines. I search for them, find them, and while I understand them in the context that they were created, I’m pretty sure that someone else might not.
Anyway, to be fair, one of the other major reasons I didn’t do the documentary was because the guy who was directing it was totally crazy, one time requesting that a friend of mine who made a witty quip repeat it, three times, into the camera:
“Wait, what did you say?!”
“I said, ‘he has a Ph.D. in pussy-whipped.'”
“Say it again! This time on camera!!”
“He has a Ph.D. in pussy-whipped.”
“No, like you said it before!”
“He has a P H D in pussy-whipped.”
“One more time!”
*sigh* “He has a Ph.D. in pussy-whipped.”
It was then that I knew the “documentary” wasn’t going to turn out well — like Disney pushing lemmings to their death in the “documentary” White Wilderness.
