The Bizarre Wonders Of The Internet

This weekend I received an email from a woman whose book club has chosen Sex, Murder And A Double Latte to read. She is in charge of coming up with discussion questions and wanted to know if there were any currently available on the internet (she hadn’t found any). In the interest of helping her out I went ahead and Googled my name to see is anything useful would come up.

What came up was 8,700 sites.

My first thought was that there must be a lot more Kyra Davis’ out there then I realized. So I started flipping through the search pages and sure enough I found that there are a few sites that have information about other Kyra Davis’…but this was only the case for approximately 10 out of every hundred results.

Just a few weeks ago a friend of mine told me that one of the lessons they teach people in AA is that “what other people think of you is none of your business.” I may be paraphrasing but I remember the underlying message: it's only what you think of yourself that matters.

It's that kind of philosophical outlook that will always prevent me from becoming a recovering alcoholic. I want to know what other people think of me, particularly if they're posting those thoughts on the internet. So I immediately started perusing the websites in which I am somehow featured. While doing so I found a recent reference to myself on Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez's Sucias message board. Well I had to know what the Sucias were saying so I clicked it. Apparently a few people there saw me on The Look for Less and thought that I was “f#%king fab.”

I have to say that I am very flattered by that. I was hoping that I would come across well and was even harboring the dream that a few viewers might think that I was fab. But f#%king fab? With both a # and a %? Well that’s just f#%king spectacular!

And then there’s my Amazon and Barnes & Noble ranking that dramatically improved right after the airing of the show. And to top it all off I have a wonderful new outfit sitting in my closet that I can wear anytime I want! So basically I’m having one of those somebody-pinch-me-moments.

But back to the Google search. Most of the results were online reviews, online retailers and inventory information from libraries across the country. But there’s some other random stuff too. Like there’s this site that lists all these different author’s birthdays and sure enough I made their calendar (how do people find this stuff out?). Then there’s the sites that repost my blogs and discuss them or the people who have briefly met me or exchanged an email with me and then chose to write about it. Everything I’ve read so far has been very complimentary…almost too much so. Don’t get me wrong, I want people to like me and if I managed to entertain them or help them in some way I’m glad but after I finished reading statements on various sites that referred to me as being “amazing,” “Incredible,” and/or “a goddess” I took a moment to study my home (which I haven’t really cleaned since the last eclipse), my son (who is currently missing an eyebrow due to a little run in he had with his grandfather’s electric razor), and the chocolate ice cream sundae that I whipped together in a PMS frenzy and I wondered if “goddess” wasn't too strong a word.

Nonetheless I’m touched by everyone’s kind words. I never did find the discussion questions for the book club but that doesn’t mean they aren’t floating around the web somewhere. I stopped checking out “Kyra” sites after I got to the fifteenth page of the Google search. I may not be Athena or Aphrodite but I’m not the female version of Narcissus either.

I’ll try to come up with a few discussion questions and post them
here later this week.

‘til next time!

Kyra Davis
www.kyradavis.com
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