Fame! I’m gonna live forever

There are some people who should never enter their own names into an on-line search engine. Kirsten Dunst, for instance.

But for those of us who haven’t built up hordes of scary fan bases, it’s an interesting experiment. It’s both humiliating and embarrassing – humiliating because it demonstrates how little an impression most of us make upon the world, and embarrassing because of what the Internet decides to recognize as your greatest accomplishments.

Just fire up Google in your Web browser, type in your name (or email address) and click “search.” Are you a constant contributor to the newsgroup alt.queenamadalafixation? It’s all there. Got incredibly hammered and showed up at a meeting of your high school’s Model U.N. club as the plastered president of Djibouti? Somebody took pictures, and they’re there too.

In my case, as somebody who has been prolific in writing columns and editorials, I would expect to get back about 50 hits chronicaling the past two and a half years of my life. If nothing else, I would hope to get back a hit for my personal Web page; then, at least, I’d know a machine had been there and seen my work.

But, as the magic eight ball says, “outlook not so good.” A quick search for “JDewbre” does, indeed, turn up my Web page. It also turns up several links to rudimentary computer games I programmed when I was twelve, several Simon and Garfunkel MIDIs I wasted my time in transcribing and some embarrassing entries in the www.natalie-portman.org mailbag.

Apparently, however, my greatest contribution to the human race is not something that I created myself. It’s this archive of Robin Hood ballads I have on my Web Site.

Pathetically called “JDewbre’s Private Collection of Robin Hood Ballads,” this archive is the result of a fixation I had as a pre-pubescent teen after reading Howard Pyle’s famous re-writing of the legends. I would check out books of ballads and broadsides from the library, photocopy the ones related to Robin Hood and stick them in this special little binder which I would take with me everywhere. I was so attached to the thing that I even got into trouble with my 7th grade English teacher for reading ballads during class.

This fixation led me to eventually put my collection up on the Web, even before I knew anything about HTML programming. My first page was a bright Day-Glo orange, with woodcut illustrations strewn haphazardly everywhere. Despite the fact that the page looked like it was designed by a color-blind 4-year-old, somebody liked it enough to link to it on their page.

Now the Robin Hood ballad archive gets at least, if not more than 20 hits in Google. Most of these are links to “kids and teens” Internet directories, such as Yahoo and Cool4Kids.com. There are some oddball links on the list, such as Vampires.com, a “famous last words” page and some weirdo school in South Carolina which included my ballad archive as an “English department” link. Even Uncle Walt emerged from his cryogenic chamber long enough to surf the Web, find my page and include it as a teaching resource for “The Wonderful World of Disney’s Princess of Thieves.”

I regularly get e-mails from teachers and other interested people asking me questions about Robin Hood, such as, what are the full lyrics to the 1950s Robin Hood television show? Which ballad should I let my students read? It’s as if my ability to upload stuff that somebody wrote 500 years ago to the Internet suddenly makes me an expert. An instant celebrity. My fifteen minutes of fame are up, and I didn’t even ask for them.

Interestingly enough, Google hasn’t bothered to archive a single column that I’ve written in the past two years.

I guess it’s the goal of every human being to leave some kind of mark on the world, in order that some day, God forbid, if a guardian angel comes down to show us what life would be like had we never been born, we won’t have to hear, “Whoops! My mistake, I thought you were Mother Teresa. You really haven’t done anything anybody will ever remember. Thanks for wasting my time.”

But we’re college students. Not only that, we’re students at a liberal arts college! Let’s face it – we’re here because we think we have something to offer the world. We think that someday, everything we’ve done will be chronicaled in a leather-bound coffee table book, and that Peter Graves will talk about us on A&E in magistral tones.

But in the end, it’s always the dumb things that people remember us for. Sort of like how Tom Lehrer, despite his reputation in academic circles and his tenure as a Harvard professor of mathematics, will always be remembered for the silly novelty songs he recorded during the ’60s.

How do you reconcile this bleak outlook on life with a healthy desire to continue living? You don’t. You just go along in your life and try not to do anything dumb enough to start a cult.

And if you do something dumb, make sure that the Google crawler doesn’t see you doing it.