TKM

“Stop Googling yourself!” le domestique commanded when I told her the two-faced kitten had died.

How could she know that having become Googlable represented for me the realization of a hastily conceived eleventh-hour backup dream? Indeed, how could she even understand the singular thrill of finding herself online when she can’t even effectively Google herself, her full name being far more common than mine and therefore returning more hits—72,800 in a quoted search—than are worth sifting through for the little nuggets of self-referential celebration contained therein.

“Teresa Morrison” isn’t such a rare name, of course, returning 1,590 hits of its own, and in searches past I’ve had to sift through my own share of more notable women who share my name—Teresa Morrison the bog turtle expert; Teresa Morrison the Nova Scotian soccer midfielder who, along with her identical twin, plays in a Canadian national women’s league; Teresa Morrison the racing yacht skipper; Teresa Morrison the second-grade teacher whose class collected 1 million buttons for a history project—to find even a single genuine reference to Teresa Morrison the copy editor—that would be me—as listed on the online masthead of The Advocate. Listen, I’m pleased as punch to work on the magazine, but finding myself on its masthead online isn’t as thrilling as all that; I know that I work there, and even what I do, and I can see my name on the masthead in real paper issues any old time.

Then again, I’m not sure the Teresa Morrison in Lake City, Fla., who grabbed headlines in March 2005 as the owner of a cat who gave birth to a kitten with two faces—two sets of eyes, two noses, and two mouths that mewed in unison, side by each like a little domesticated Janus—was herself all that thrilled with her peculiar status on the World Wide Web.

The two-faced kitten TM has long been the most prolific source of hits for all us Teresa Morrisons. So many were the mentions of her mother cat’s queer little anomaly—the first such birth on record—that like a tree lost amid a forest, the follow-up story reporting that the kitten had died just two days later had completely eluded me in my past searches. So it was with some sadness that I recently passed that news along to le domestique, prompting the suggestion from her that I was perhaps spending too much time searching for myself online.

All this self-Googling started a couple of weeks ago, when I noticed a precipitous spike in hits to my blog, including a wealth of click-throughs from a piece I had written for Advocate.com, “The People vs. Loving,” on California’s Assembly Bill 43, which but for its veto by Governor Terminator would have removed references to gender in the state’s marriage laws, clearing the way for same-sex couples to wed—and clearing the way also, by dint of an exceedingly slippery slope prophesied by the collective lurid imagination of the religious right, for polygamy, incest, bestiality, rampant public sex, the death of the American family, and the crucifixion of all that is holy and good.

Even Belgian dogs reject our advances.

The curious thing about this spike was that it came weeks after the commentary had been posted, and therefore weeks since it had been at all prominent on Advocate.com’s splash page. So I Googled the title of the commentary and solved my little mystery quicker than you can say “Encyclopedia Brown: Boy Detective.”

An article on the subject at The Washington Post’s Web site had linked to my AB 43 commentary, along with other recommended related reading. Let me say that again. A newspaper that is regarded among the top half dozen or so papers in the nation—that little rag that broke Watergate—pointed to my silly old commentary on an LGBT news site that likely sees 1/100th the traffic commanded by its own online maw. And some of the readers who followed the link and read the Advocate piece came, in turn, to my silly old blog!

Good golly, if The Post is tapping my genius, can The New York Times be far behind?

Yes, it turns out, it can be, as I have yet to find evidence of any notice of ME by the newspaper of record. I have found one other news site link, this one from a blog at the Spokane, Wash., Spokesman-Review pointing toward my latest piece, “Boy, Interrupted,” a commentary on our societal gender baggage as seen through the lens of LGBT infighting over the scope of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act.

That piece also prompted a number of links from sites that aggregate transgender and gender politics news, which is kind of cool considering that I feared just the opposite might happen: that transgender rights folks who read the piece might say, “Who the hell are you to speak out about gender issues?”

For the record, I’m just another voice in the wilderness. And thank you for not yelling at me.

My online proliferation—proliferation being defined here as anything less than complete anonymity—comes not a moment too soon, as I can practically feel the heat of 40 candles lighting up a trans-fat-free birthday cake even as I write this. Depending on whom you trust—me, or the federal government—I entered the world four decades ago tomorrow, or maybe yesterday.

Am I the only person with a Social Security birthday that differs from her actual birthday? I didn’t realize this until several years ago, the first time I tried to file my income tax return electronically. My return was rejected because the birthday I entered differed from my birthday of record, which was apparently entered as November 13, not November 15, at the time my Social Security number was issued. This was news to me, so I naturally called my mother, who had filled out the application for my SSN when I was still in grade school. After I explained the confusion, she expressed a moment of doubt (!) and suggested I check my birth certificate. I did, and it confirmed the date I’ve always celebrated: November 15.

For simplicity’s sake, I changed the date on that year’s tax return to November 13, thinking I would iron it out later, but in years since I’ve been both (a) too lazy and (b) too disinterested to go wait in line at the Social Security office to disabuse the feds of the notion that my birthday is any day but what I say it is. Besides which, when it comes to the Federal Bureau of Misinformation and Wrong-Headed Opinions About Me, date of birth is very low on my list of correction priorities.

So if you think our government is never wrong, my birthday was yesterday and you totally missed it. Otherwise it’s tomorrow.

Whenever you personally celebrate my birthday, I will this week enter my 40s, which is high season for a midlife crisis reflection as to who we are, what we stand for, and how life thus far stacks up against our lifelong goals and dreams. I could overcomplicate this, but for once I won’t:

Failure: I haven’t published a book.
Accomplishment: I haven’t killed myself.

The latter is an ongoing goal that can’t technically be called an “accomplishment” until my death is achieved via any non-self-inflicted means, but I feel confident in declaring victory on that front because I now know of a place I can go where condescending but well-meaning people will keep me away from the knife drawer and ration my pills in little paper cups.

On the other hand, the former goal can’t truly be labeled a “failure” just yet. In life’s marathon, I’m only at mile marker 13, maybe 14 (if you have reason to believe this is an erroneous assumption, please notify me immediately). I still have time to write my masterpiece minor-key memoir, and even if I never publish a book, that goal seems more mutable to me now than it did when I was 12 and first conceived it. In 1979, the World Wide Web was more than a decade from fruition. There was no way for me to conceive then of a future network through which I could pass school notes on a grand scale, reaching 10s, even scores of readers, many of whom aren’t even in my homeroom! Had I known that, would I still have dreamed of one day publishing something as tiredly old-school as a book—an object of heft in the hand, one with pages, whether rough or smooth, that propel the reader through setup, conflict, and, with any luck, a satisfying resolution, after which we may close its covers with some small ceremony, taking a moment to reflect on the just-completed journey, perhaps reading or rereading the author’s bio and gazing at his or her jacket photo with simultaneous deep admiration and slight jealousy?

OK, I might yet be suckling at the teat of that dream. But had I known at 12 what wonders lay just over the Commodore 64 horizon, surely I would have conceived a backup dream of one day being Googlable. And had I been so prescient, that backup dream would seem nigh on the eve of my 40th birthday!

I’ve been inching up the Google chain these past few weeks, and have made significant progress even in the last few days. During a search this weekend, my earliest Google hit was at number 25, with subsequent citations at odd intervals. But a search just conducted in the moment before I wrote this sentence yielded my first hit at number nine! I have entered the Teresa Morrison top 10! High-five me, bog turtle expert, even if my second mention slips all the way to number 61 (!), after which many of me can be found hanging with my homegirls in the 80s and 90s.

It’s fascinating, isn’t it, watching the notoriety of non-famous people—and even famous bog turtle experts—rise and fall like stock market shares?

The Teresa Morrison with the two-faced kitten, once so dominant on the Googlescape, has now fallen behind me. She’s also lost ground to folk musician Teresa Morrison of the duo Up River, available for weddings and your more Celtic-themed bar mitzvahs; New York chanteuse Teresa Morrison, who can be seen and heard on YouTube singing “Easy As Life” from Aida to a noisy-to-the-point-of-rude lounge audience; and, of course, Nova Scotian identical twin soccer stud Teresa Morrison.

And don’t count out that second tier of Teresa Morrisons—the group with whom I identify most strongly, even if I’ve temporarily slipped toward the head of the pack. Many of us are making our case for first-page status even as you read this. There’s the Teresa Morrison of Kitchener, Canada, who in a formal complaint to her district laments that excessive truck noise and traffic on her residential street limits the time she spends in her garden and her outdoor enjoyment of her property. There’s the Teresa who owns the Morrison Inn and Holiday Bar in Morrison, Colo., whose 450 residents fancy theirs “the most haunted town in America, per capita.” There’s the Teresa Morrison of Nassau County, N.Y., who, as a losing candidate for the Farmingdale Village Board of Trustees, campaigned on a platform that pleaded “for people to be happy to live here and for the bickering to stop,” a sentiment I think we can all get behind. There’s the Teresa Morrison who as a lab tech at the University of Georgia School of Veterinary Medicine founded a now-20-year-old pet visitation program for homebound seniors.

In the end, though, I think there may be one way in which I’ve affected the Google fame of every Teresa Morrison out there, and I’m not sure how they’re going to feel about it. Due to the nature of my appearances and citations on LGBT-oriented sites, our name has become a keyword that will generate hits on bottom-feeder porn sites, whose little spiders go out Web crawling and collect captive phrases resulting in nonsensical hits like this one, which, if clicked, will make your monitor erupt as a pornographic house of mirrors with new windows opening faster than you can shut them:

Gay Squirts: Most actual news about hunk fucking and gay surfing; civil unions; gay-friendly; Teresa Morrison!

Or, even better:

Gay Canadians: Best Gay of Mexican hunk information source! By Teresa Morrison

At last, I’ve achieved gay porn search term status! And to all those other Teresa Morrisons who never did nothin’ gay to nobody, “You’re welcome!”

With my backup dream accomplished, and my not-killing-myself goal making steady progress, I can put foolish dreams and cares aside and turn 40 without a worry in the world as to what this second act may yield. With one eye focused bravely on the future, and one lazy walleye retrospectively surveying the detritus strewn about my beaten path, I will move through life with the courage and the pride of a woman who has no need of worldly huzzahs.

Life, I am told, begins at 40. Well, all I’ve got to say is that that’s one fucking lame time for life to start, given all the preamble and muck we have to go through to get there. But seeing as how I’ve arrived and all, bring on the dancing ponies. I’m ready for the good bits.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 14th, 2007 at 8:00 pm and is filed under le domestique, the gays, writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.