Search Me

I was in the middle of relating my latest tale of woe when my sister interrupted me.

“Wait,” she said. “I have heard this story before.”

Why, yes, as a matter of fact, she had heard this story before—many times, actually, along with my aunt, my various shrinks, and you, too, if you’re a regular reader of this blog.

But after today, I promise you won’t hear it anymore...I hope.

Okay, so my sister and I were out on one of our COVID excursions. This time we had taken the ferry to downtown Manhattan and stopped at Brookfield Plaza to grab a snack.

My office is located in this building, by the way--back when we still went to offices.

I was whining to her because I had done an internet search for a guy I knew in grade school--I’ll call him Jerry--whom I have not seen or heard from since we escaped the clutches of Catholic school back in the Seventies.

His name just popped into my head one day when I should’ve been focusing on something else.

So, I did a search and found he had apparently done very well for himself, thus giving me an excuse to be miserable because I wasn’t as successful as he seemed to be.

Sound familiar? I pulled a similar stunt over the summer with the same self-pitying results. It sucked back then and it hasn’t improved with age.

But then I blogged about this very thing 16 years ago and I’m still doing it.

Geek and Ye Shall Find...

Witnessing my sister’s reaction illustrated to me how much time and energy I’ve wasted in these stupid cyber searches.

Self-sabotage is a demon with a thousand faces and this bogus “curiosity” about people I have not seen since Richard Nixon was in the White House is particularly insidious.

I regularly watch Joel Osteen’s program and I felt so rotten after looking up Jerry that I re-watched one of Joel’s recent messages called “Nothing to Prove” where he encouraged people to run their own race.

“Anytime we’re trying to prove something,” he said, “the root cause is insecurity. Your value should come from who you are, and not what you do or what you have.”

Yes, exactly, comparing yourself to others is always going to be a dead end because you’ll always find someone who’s got more money or a bigger house.

I did one last net search after Jerry, for a woman I knew in Pennsylvania named Coral, who was a reporter for a local TV station.

I used to see her at various incidents and press conferences we covered. She was a lot of fun and I enjoyed kidding around with her and her cameraman.

I hadn’t seen Coral since I left Pennsylvania in the Eighties and I was wondering what she had been up to lately.

Well, it turned out that Coral hadn’t been up to anything lately because she died 18 years ago. She was 49 years old.

I couldn’t believe my eyes. She was such a good person and her life had been cut short.

Thanks to my gratuitous googling I had dragged myself from envy to heartache, and I’m sure there was a part of mind psyche that was very pleased.

Enough. I am to going to wish Jerry well, pray for Coral’s soul, and thank God for what I have.

From now on the only person I want to search for is the greatest version of myself. I’ve been avoiding him for far too long.