The Personal: Our Last Bastion

I am determined to trump my search engine.

I use Google, and, in general, love Google.  Being an investor, the health and happiness of Google is very important to my own wellbeing, and to that of my household, fond as we all are of shelter and regular meals, as well as to my persnickety creditors, insistent as they are on timely and complete payments. 

The interconnectedness we evidence shall serve as witness to the wondrousness of God's faithful creation!  Or something.

Sorry.  It's Sunday morning and I left the television on during my last nap session, which allowed Joel Osteen and other Smarty-Panted Religious Folk to tiptoe around my brain unsupervised.

Dangerous stuff, leading to weird wakeful convictions, like how Google may well be omnipotent.  Well, at least three-in-one.

It's become nigh*   unto impossible

[*  I suffered one of my usual distractions with the word "nigh," but can report that the most interesting return on my curiousity was learning that the oft-used comparative -- yes, that'd be nigher -- has been in force since the 1400s.  Mysteriously, The Erudite are convinced that there is no etymological relationship between the adjective in its evolved form (near) and that form's comparative, nearer.  Crazy stuff, huh?]

Okay, so it's getting hard to enter any search term without Google cracking wise and "suggesting" it before I finish pecking the letters out.  I fear that, eventually, out of self-defense, the lacunae of my vocabulary will be filled with short words and small expressions.

Challenged at such an elementary level of my ontological being, I am now engaged in a challenge: 

Rather than seeking to be as concise as possible in my search requests, I am now wordy.  Early frustrations have even prompted my wordiness to contain misspellings.  Most of which Holy Google manages to catch.  And for which, frequently, feigning indifference, Godly Google suggests corrections!  Oy.

I can't be the only one to have noticed that The Personal has assumed a position of prominence in the face of technology.  We litter Facebook with our particulars, we stick our tongues out (nyah, nyah, na-na-na!), we're united in false friendships based on homonyms -- we rape proper nouns, forcing our intimate meanings upon them.  I tell Facebook to find my friend Joe Smith*   and what tops the list of "over 500" that it returns is one Joel-with-a-middle-initial, because this person is a mutual friend of someone completely unknown to me.

*  The first haphazard Joe Smith, as I know no actual Joe Smith, is represented by a photo of a person, face hooded and mostly blocked.  Blocked by a big handgun from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, the barrel of which is trained on all 1854 of its closest friends.  [All of which goes to support my ongoing suspicions about persons from that state.  See my editorial reflections introducing the blog post Shawnna's Con.]

The Personal is bound to become our Good News, bound to eventually so muck up the informational machinery that even Google's error rate at reading our minds will skyrocket.  My Mother's maiden name?  Your last four?  Her favorite erotica?  Joel-with-a-middle-initial's preferred handgun?  * Aunt Eugenia's taste in college roomies?

*  We hear this as we wake: Ah! je ris de me voir si belle en ce miroir.
We hear this as we fall asleep: Ah! je ris de me voir si belle en ce miroir.

The Personal, The Last Bastion!  I wanted to clue you in, Dearest Readers, to the Upcoming Paradigm
Shift.

Of course, the Upcoming Paradigm Shift will be delayed a few days.  Don't expect much in the way of movement from The People's Brigade before Thursday, October 14, 2010 -- when Google makes its earnings announcement.  We're thinking there should be a few days' allowance for additional fluctuations in the market, as well.