The Internet: It is Humbling

Sister Little's high school ten-year reunion is this coming weekend.  She convinced me to bring the little angel up to Iowa for a visit and to keep her from having a nervous breakdown at the thought of having to face her arch-nemeses again.  My beloved is going to be somewhere in Ohio, watching football and drinking much beer.  Probably Natty Light (gag).

She has been talking about it all week: what to wear, what pre-reunion primping to do, etc.  I remember my ten-year reunion.  I was sort of freaked out by it, too.  Before I went, I googled many of my old high-school friends, then myself.  It's sort of like in high-school P.E. when they make you take the Presidential Fitness Test and compare how high everyone can vertical.  The self-Google is sort of like that.  Did I get further than anyone else?  Is my self-Googling where I always imagined it would be (before I could imagine the Internet, but still)?

My sister's angst made me decide to do my own little personal vertical again. Funny, though, now I have to self-Google both my maiden name and my married name. It divides my accomplishments into little piles, further compounded by the fact that I did a lot of writing under my pen name, which is sort of a bastardized version of my maiden name.  My pen name is the only one that made anything official:  The Kansas City Public Library listings.  Yeehaw!  It's almost like I wrote a book.  My married name - it is not doing so well.  The best thing I could get was a listing on a dolphin-watching site from my honeymoon. This is humbling. I have been married for four years.  What the hell have I been doing?

Still, the public library. It almost makes up for the fact that someone else with my former name is eating up all the good spots because she's the PR contact for the MS Society.  Someone else with my pen name is apparently a rocket scientist.  Dude, I so totally could've done that instead.

Then I tried to find some old classmates, to no avail. Unfortunately, everyone from my hometown has an extremely common name or has done nothing to speak of, which I KNOW is not true because a girl from a few classes below me actually made a documentary on our Homecoming procedures (they are a bit draconian) for her film school.  We are almost famous.