It has been the year 2005 for a month, and I realized long ago that keeping New Year’s resolutions aren’t an adequate way to judge my progress thus far, because I usually forget them or rationalize them away. For example, my resolution this year to give up caffeine lasted a whole 13 days.
I’ve taken to doing a more objective analysis: I do a Google search for myself. The results are pretty good aside from the masses of links generated by failed attempts at blogging. At least all the links are about me in some capacity, dating back from high school. Then it strikes me as kind of creepy that anyone could very well do a Google search for my name and find out that I dropped in semis at the University of Texas-Austin debate tournament during my junior year of high school. I remember when the internet was this evil demon where I wasn’t supposed to reveal more than my first name, and even that was dangerous. It also required that I knew how to work a computer. Now the internet is cuddlier and simple, mouse-click friendlier. Now my first and last names are plastered in at least 10 unique places.
Yet, I really don’t care. I can even bolster my Google list through places of the Facebook variety and the eleventy billion different blog sites where I can record every single thing I’ve done ever. Yah know, set the record straight for all of random people perusing around who I probably won’t even meet. It seems in a world of six billion some odd, it’s getting really easy to get lost in the crowd. It doesn’t help that there is this reciprocal curiosity to look at all of these blogs, profiles and homepages, feeding this need for voyeurism when there isn’t anything new on reality TV. Or maybe I’m just being too thoughtful and the internet is really just a glorified dating service slash mall.
Still, my name is still out there and there is only one logical solution: stop telling people in my non-virtual reality my name. Then, they can’t do a Google search for it! However, it also makes all sorts of other things much harder too, like cashing checks or continuing to write this column. Then I wonder if I am more afraid of people I actually know or this imaginary army of creepy internet people that is constantly looking at my high school debate results online. Either way, having my extensive Google r