We’ve all been there: clambering aboard the crazy, zigzagging Google train to nowhere in the early wee hours of the morn, pursuing indiscriminate topics that would be difficult to explain your interest in come the light of day.
Personally speaking, these bouts of mass data gorging usually coincide with looming assignment deadlines. I get the most persistent urges to find out about the most pointless stuff when I’m supposed to be studying. Like now. I have also managed to trick myself into believing that blogging about it will assist my assignment in writing itself, despite history repeatedly suggesting otherwise.
I’ve had a lot of questions answered by my dear friend Google over the past week – answers to questions I didn’t even know I had until my eyes saw the Google logo. It doesn’t help that I’m interested in, well, nearly everything. Some examples of my most recent Google searches:
· What attracts gay men to each other? (queried with sincere ignorance, respect and curiosity)
· If stars are so far away from each other, how come they all appear roughly the same size?
· Evidence of time travel throughout history (with surprising results)
· How do blind people think? (ie, they cannot visualise their thoughts)
· How does 7th Heaven end?
· Why did Shannon Doherty leave Charmed?
· Are we players in someone’s dream?
· What the fuck is wrong with people?
· Examples of spontaneous human combustion
· Is the dress in Pretty in Pink meant to look bad?
· Molly Ringwald teeth.
And so on.
Procrastination disguises itself in a number of sophisticated ways. My experience is usually with the more blatant, unsophisticated ways, but I can assure you they are equally effective in providing distraction, just as Best and Less is equally as effective as David Jones in providing a means to hide human nakedness.
The Google train is a long and pointless train, and it’s mighty hard to find a stop at which to alight as it doggedly traverses the lonely and desperate landscapes of procrastination and escapism.
Once you board the Google train, you will never be happy. You will formulate more questions, and crave more answers. Each will be as stupid as the next. It will be like John Farnham, always making one last appearance. But it never ends. It can’t end. The Google train is a train to nowhere. And it will take you during your darkest, most vulnerable Google Nights.
There, you join invisible forces with schmucks the world over, Googling about Molly Ringwald’s teeth when you should be using your uni subject as an intellectual whipping post.
Molly Ringwald would be ashamed.
And it is with that thought that I conclude this post. Molly Ringwald had to wear that hideous, homemade pink dress to her pretend prom when she filmed in Pretty in Pink.
She’s had enough shame to deal with in this lifetime without me adding to it.
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