He doesn't care about winning the Pan-Pacific Grand Prix?

In the second week of my film class, my teacher told us that Krzysztof Kieslowski tried, with his films, to drive home the idea that shared memories, not just information about a person, form true intimacy. Just because Google knows my secrets doesn’t mean we are intimate. Since that lecture, the idea has really stuck with me. Reading Durkheim this week helped reinforce it. Durkheim believed that we create culture through shared interactions, and the more we share with a group, the closer we will feel to the people in it. It seems to me, however, that we are moving away from the interactions. We are accepting these connections on just the information and not the act of discovering it with someone. It starts with the celebrity worship in this country, the sheer glut of information we can find out about someone without knowing them. It trickles down to blogs just like mine. I don’t reveal much here, but there is information about me available, if someone should choose to learn it. This knowledge we acquire can be so dangerous because we are often guilty of overestimating our understanding of people. For example-

1. You may read my sister’s site. You might learn that she likes college basketball and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. You could discover the shocking truth about her candy corn addiction and her unflinching loyalty to Brenda Walsh. You could learn a good deal about her life: names, facts, everything mentioned without ceremony. But, you would never know why she, reading that last sentence, smirked.
2. You might know my friend John. You might know that he likes art, only passed consumer math, and works in the telecom field. You may even know, through casual conversation that he likes Robert DeNiro and Lisa Loeb but hates Vin Diesel and Edward Furlong. But, you have never been treated to a 30-minute comedic diatribe about Edward Furlong while taking him to the airport.
3. You might know that I work for a software company as a manager. You may be aware that I have an all male staff. You may even know how much I dislike customers who wonder why the software can’t anticipate or think. But, you don’t know that every time we get a call like this, we joke about software that thinks and make the joke that, “Skynet is self-aware.”

So what? So, Thursday I had this zygote, inkling of a migraine. I shook it off and thought I was past it, but this morning I woke up with a full-grown migraine. I hate having to go anywhere with a migraine. When I have a migraine, my perfume makes me sick, so I don’t wear it. Then I spend the day in public with a headache and the nagging, self-consciousness that I smell terrible. It sucks. I would rather have stayed home, but I had papers to turn in, and I figured I could get through the Terminator trilogy pretty easily. So, I used a small amount of perfume and took four Advil gel caps and two Advil migraines. I took those on an empty stomach, like a dummy, so I stopped at Starbucks to get some breakfast, a bottle of water, and a coffee. By the time I got to school, the headache was much worse, so I took three more Advil migraines and rode the accompanying buzz through the first Terminator and into lunch. Instead of lunch, however, I had four more Advil migraines and a bottle of water. I blame this mild overdose for much of my behavior after lunch. We started watching T2: Judgment Day, and between the memories of Edward Furlong and Skynet jokes, I spent much of the movie giggling uncontrollably.

At the end of the movie, eager to go home and detox in peace, I heard the know-it-all film buff below me mention Edward Furlong and that he was dead. That bulldozed me. Dead? Really? My immediate reaction was one of confusion and disbelief. My second reaction was revulsion at myself; I had just spent the last two hours giggling at the expense of a dead guy. My third reaction, hearing her discuss his death from an apparent overdose, was that this girl had mistaken Edward Furlong for Brad Renfro. As I drove over to meet my father for dinner, I thought of little else. The anticipated guilt over his death conflicted with my conviction that there was just no way that Edward Furlong was dead. I read enough celebrity gossip and IMDB; this wasn’t something that would get by me. And even if it got by me, it couldn’t have gotten by Villi and John. No way, right? I drove in a haze of ibuprofen and self-doubt. Before I even said hello to my dad, I went straight to the office computer and pulled up IMDB. I was relieved, almost frighteningly so, to find that Edward Furlong was alive and well. He is married to Rachael Bella, with whom he has one child, and he just completed the film Kingshighway. And there in my parents’ office, reading his IMDB mini-biography, feeling a tremendous relief that he wasn’t dead and a little surprise that he is a vegetarian, I realized how easily I sometimes mistake information for intimacy.