Googling Can Be Hazardous to Your Health

One of the darker parts of the internet--you know, besides child porn--is how easy it is to find out things that you don't really need to know. We're always extolling the virtues of "having the world at our fingertips," but sometimes I think we were better off before. Relationships ended, people went their separate ways, and all you could think was, "Hmm. I wonder what ever happened to that person." And then only if you were nostalgic and felt like thinking that. Oh, occasionally your great aunt Ruth might run into someone's step-nephew and you'd hear something through the grapevine, but you never had to really know how your ex's were doing, hear their words just the way they would say them, see their pictures....you know.

I love looking up old Girl Scout camp friends, talking to weird people from highschool who never talked to me then but for some reason want to befriend me now, and seeing how that dweeb I dated when I was 14 is doing. But the power of Google can run away with a person.

Mostly what you find is that so-and-so got married and has 2.5 kids and 1.4 dogs. You see the wedding album and it tugs your heart a bit. You think semi-catty thoughts about their current spouse and you feel a little lost for a day. But what if you find out that something is really, really wrong...and there's absolutely nothing you can do to help? Nothing you could say that wouldn't make things worse, no way to cross back into who you were to take care of the person you loved then?

I think it's obvious I'm feeling a little melancholy. Mostly it's for my friend and partly for myself and a long ago girl who tried so hard to be a grown up and failed.