Operation Enduring Tofu – The Name Game

This is an ongoing saga of my quest — to explore the origins of my vegetarianism, to find the catalyst for a decision I made in high school, and to possibly go back to eating meat. If you’d like to catch up, you can do so by reading:

Chapter I: The Legend of Shiny – An Introduction
Chapter II: Acquired Memories
Chapter III: The Celery Stalk
Intermission: a short video (not by me)

Chapter IV – The Name Game

I had just heard a radio interview with the guy who created the movie titled Google Me! a few days ago. For those of you unfamiliar with the premise, a guy named Jim Killeen decided to Google his own name to find the other Jim Killeens of the world. He meets many of them from different parts of the world, and eventually gets them all together in Killeen, TX. (Come on — where else would it be?) Apparently it’s quite a witty little film.

My goal here was not to find as many people with Robin’s name as possible. In fact, I was doing the opposite of what Jim Killeen set out to do: I wanted to find specifically one Robin.

The problem was this: Robin’s last name isn’t that unique. In fact, her last name (which might not be her last name any longer!) can also be used as a different noun. Which makes Google searching even trickier. So — even trying to find the correct Robin Sparkles* was much trickier than it seemed.

* (Okay. Her name isn’t really Robin Sparkles. But I sure as hell am not going to use her real last name — especially since it’s someone I’ve been trying to track down for what could be considered less than normal circumstances. I chose the surname “Sparkles” not because this specific Robin was a teen pop singer in Canada in the 80s, but rather because the name fits the part-of-speech profile.)

So — I started my Google search the same way anyone would: “Robin Sparkles” with the quotation marks.

Her website was the first hit that came up! I was amazed. She really had quite a bit of technical savvy! Her website was created in Flash. Flash! And her credentials in multimedia production were astonishing! Why — she had done a lot of work abroad!

Wait — it mentioned that she went to college in Leeds. My Robin Sparkles went to school in New York.

And — this Robin Sparkles was a guy.

Oh well; back to square one…

The next Robin Sparkles on the list is, in fact, female. There’s even a picture! She’s a graduate coordinator for an Ivy League school. Plausible? Perhaps. Until I saw her scarf. There’d be no way my Robin Sparkles would put that on in public…

Moving right along — Robin Sparkles has a MySpace page! A music page, in fact! Oh, wait. Yet another guy. And his English isn’t very good. The Robin I knew was very proficient in the language, having been on the editorial staff of her student newspaper. You see what kind of things I retain over 19 years?

The next several entries were conjunctions of “Round” and “Robin Sparkles.” The notion of “Round Robin Sparkles” apparently has hit the home crafts market niche with a vengeance. Which I support fully. Especially because it made it easier to comb through this stack.

It took me a while to discover that people overuse the phrase “round robin” a whole lot. I mean, there were pages upon pages upon pages mentioning that phrase. Perhaps I’m just late to the game?

Oh — and references to birthday parties at “Red Robin. Sparkles were adorning…” and such sentences. And this is when I learned one of the more important rules of Google searching: Anything past page 4 is usually really a stretch.

I decided to narrow it down a bit — and search on her name and the town in which she grew up. I found a page recognizing her role in her high school newspaper where she was the managing editor. Bingo! At least I knew that she was somewhere on the net! But that was a dead end. I thought I had something else — a MySpace page popped into the results. But it turned out to be someone from her town who loved sparkles and the movie “Robin Hood: Men in Tights.”

Oh – and what’s up with all of the running information on the web? I found someone with Robin’s name who participated in a local “Race for Hope” 5K event in 2006! That sounded promising — until I read her age and surmised that this Robin Sparkles was about 25 years too old.

Facebook. Friendster. LinkedIn. All of them have plenty of Robin Sparkles out there, but none of them appeared to be mine. Again, what are the odds that her name was still Sparkles, anyway? Was I on a wild goose chase?

I decided to go a different route: I had her home address from 1990. I used some net resources to find that the last time that house was sold was 1988 — before I had met her. A white pages search showed that, at least relatively recently, Mr. and Mrs. Sparkles still lived there. And there was a phone number!

Last night I left the most awkward message ever on their voicemail (which only announced the phone number — not the people who own it). It said who I was, that I wanted to get in touch with Robin (and how I knew her), and offered both my name and email address. So now I wait for a phone call — one which may or may not come.

If it doesn’t, I’ll switch to plan B.

Oh — and their house has a pool. How creepy am I now? 🙂