Don't Look

I'm making a promise to myself. I'm not going to look up people anymore. I'm not going to Google, Facebook, MySpace (I'm not on MySpace, so that helps) or anything to anyone anymore. Because it just confuses everything.

I recently met a person who reminded me a lot of another person. So I looked up the other person. And found out way more than I ever wanted to know about said person. What was I looking for? What type of information would have made me happy? Once you learn everything about the person you're looking at, short of their blood type, how does that enrich your life at all?

I googled myself. And based on that alone, I appear to be far more interesting online than I am in real life. My "Google Self" runs races, writes papers, wins awards. My real, live, actual self makes ice cream on the weekends, loves cats, and knows the entire nighttime lineup on Lifetime: Will and Grace, Frasier, the Golden Girls, and the Nanny. Which is an inversion of their morning lineup. So you can see the discrepancy.

I suppose we (meaning me) want to look at the lives of people we know because we're too cowardly to actually reach out to them. In some cases, I guess we want to compare ourselves to others, though I tend not to do that because I always disappoint myself. Oh, she's married and has three kids and has gone hiking in the Andes and won a MacArthur Genius Grant? Cool. I recently learned how to straighten my hair without singeing it.

But, what's the point of looking for these people if you're too scared or unwilling to connect? I don't like being a voyeur, it just makes me feel distant and alienated from my past experiences. Maybe it's just too creepy. And though my method is probably more annoying to my past acquaintances, I'd rather go ahead and just drop them a line. I know if someone out there was stalk-Googling me, I'd prefer them to just say "hi". Assuming we've been friends at some point. I have my limits.