The Eerie Accuracy Of My Google Homepage Add-ons

I’m pretty much convinced that the folks over at Google either have a T3 to God himself or are somehow psychically eavesdropping on my life.

As if Google Earth and Google Reader weren’t enough, they now have Beta versions of Google Transit and Google Mars (which is going to be TOTALLY useful).

All of which was sort of big brotherish and strange enough until I started noticing something funny about my Google Homepage add-ons.I have customized it just the way I want it: Daily Einstein quotes, Quotes of the Day, Horoscope, Buddhist Thought of the Day, Weather, Recipe of the Day. Yada yada yada.

All good add-ons great for a few minutes of diversion while I transition from morning blah to powerhouse Minerva Jane.

The weird thing is over the last few days the content of these add-ons have all strangely coincided with the tenor and current of my life.

An example? Last night I write an email to my friend, long known to readers of this blog as SFMark, about the fact that I want to make apple pie during our Friends Thanksgiving next month in the Catskills and what should the recipe o’ the day be this morning? Apple pie.

But wait. It gets stranger. More complicated even.

My horoscope today said, among other things: “You stand to gain much in your casual relationships now, but you'll have to go out of your way to be a part of the group, rather than remaining outside of the castle.” Now I have a long history of letting my shyness and naturally reserved nature isolate me. And since we moved to NYC I’ve made a few friends, but not a whole lot. We’ve got our own media company, headquarted on the sofa with satellite offices in local coffee shops like Tazza, Tea Lounge and Think. It’s been great and business is actually growing at a pace we never thought possible, but it means no real colleagues and office friendships. Rod, since he grew up on Long Island, has a ton of family and friends and while I love them all, they’re still a part of his past, his world. I need my own realm so to speak. And it’s just been pretty hard for me to move outside my comfort zone.

Saturday afternoon on our hike in the woods back behind their Virginia farm, my Dad and I talked about this at length. About how I tend to hang back. About how that might not be good for me in the long run. And then, this morning, on my Google home page, there’s that prediction: you'll have to go out of your way to be a part of the group.

See?

But the clincher was the Quote of the Day, as follows: “When a man is wrapped up in himself, he makes a pretty small package. - John Ruskin” Which was exactly the point I’d gotten myself to by the time I opened up my laptop and clicked on the Firefox icon. All this talk of confidence and introverts versus extroverts and social networks and feeling isolated and wishing I was more—I don’t know—more some how had tornadoed in my brain to something more intense than it ought to be and I was feeling more than a little obsessed with my own schtick . But that quote snapped me back. In the end, being wrapped up in yourself is worse than being a little shy and feeling a little lonely in a city as vast as NY.

The bottom line? I need to get over myself. That and chill the fuck out. Easier said than done, but there you go.

A complete existential crisis resolved in the course of a few minutes, courtesy of Google.

Which begs the question: who the hell are these guys?