Whee! There is now an Apple store in the West Village - and it's just a few blocks from our summer home. There is a god!

Anyway, long time no post. Whatevs. Don't say I didn't warn you. I'm actually here now to air my incredulity at how incredibly weird the interwebs can be. Argh.

So, I landed this gig (which in and of itself explains my long journal silence.) I'm, like, in charge of stuff. Queen of an infinitesimal and unimportant domain. It's the kind of post that only an uber-dork would find compelling -- but, you know, if the shoe fits... It makes me happy. It's a lot of work. It's constantly reminding me how small is this little world of ours.

{just as a few for examples, I've already come across 1) a woman who went to high school with two of my best friends, 2) a prof. who works in my field in my old city and knows all of the same people as me, 3) a bunch of other people who know this guy that knows this guys that I know, etc.}

But all of this is a big fat digression from what I really wanted to post about. Which is that one of the profs I'm currently working with at said gig sent me an email yesterday saying, "small world - I hear you know ______. She's one of my favorite students!" (He teaches at her school; he and I have never actually met.) So of course I promptly reported this exchange to our mutual acquaintance, because trust me, we all need constant validation in this strange field of ours.

But then I asked her how on earth he'd made the connection. Cuz, you know, we go to different schools in different parts of the country, and how would he guess that she's dating a friend of mine and that she and I will be working together this summer? And her response was, "You didn't tell him? I have no idea." So we puzzled this out over the past few days and realized that he must have figured it out from Facebook.

He. effing. Googled. me. No other explanation. I don't know why this strikes me as so...peculiar, and vaguely creepy. I'm damn well aware that prospective employers and dates regularly employ the google, but he's neither.

And I'm the only person with my name, or at least the only one with an internet presence, so people can learn a lot about me. Pictures of me engaged in public action from my rabble-rousing days of yore... committee notes from a governance body I sat on a million years ago in college... press releases from my first grown-up job in 2000... race results, grad school links, and on and on.

It's all fairly antiseptic. Nothing that's going to harm my future liscensure prospects or anything. I just -- well, I'm a pretty private person. The whole centerofattention thing is only half the story: I like the limelight when I like it, but then I like to go back to my corner. I'm like the toddler who covers her eyes and thinks she's become invisible. It's always unsettling when I'm fed a reminder that it ain't so. Oh me oh my, this crazy world.