Who Is Googling Me

8 Million Stories: The Name Game

Before I started a new job at a stuffy nonprofit, a coworker Googled me. One of her first questions when we met was what had become of the hot-pink streak in my hair. Extended unemployment had inspired a wannabe punk-rock phase, and I had sprayed on a normal hair color in an attempt to keep this job.

So, with a bit of Catholic shame, I Googled myself for the first time. I was searching for photos of a debauched Coney Island Mermaid Parade for which I'd donned a starfish bikini top, large bubble sunglasses and blue body paint. The snapshot truth had landed in the Daily News, but fortunately, the evidence had been lost somewhere in cyberspace— or so my inexperienced Googling deduced.

But the more I did it, the bolder I Googled. Not just my full name but my nickname and descriptive bits. There was the pink hair. There were a few poems. And with a name like Font, you can imagine how many pages of code came up. It was around page five I came across a play called Roxy Font. Not just Roxy or even Roxie Font, but my actual name. For those of you with more common names, this may not seem like a big deal, but considering I spent most of the '80s pining for a barrette personalized with my name, I was shocked.

The Google find led me to the resumé of an actress who'd played the role of Roxy Font. After emailing her, I got the name of the play's director, and after emailing him, I got the name of the playwright, Liza Lentini. And so I emailed Liza to find out how she'd come up with the name.

It took Liza two weeks to write back, weeks in which I worried she thought I was some prankster. I Googled Liza and discovered that she was just a year younger than me and living in New York, which I'd recently left. And when she finally emailed me, it was with just as much wonder. Turns out she'd just invented the name, something she called "sassy and darling at the same time."

I told Liza I'd been involved in the New York theater scene in the late '90s, and later pursued an MFA in poetry at NYU. She wrote back that she'd started out writing poetry and that yes, she too could see the physical resemblance between us. For a minute I entertained the thought of relaunching my blip of an acting career by playing the role of Roxy Font on Broadway. (She mentioned a producer had recently called and the play had made it to the New York Fringe Festival.) We wrote furiously back and forth over several days, and then she sent me her play.

The Journey Inside: Are You Googling Me?

Every once in awhile I check the traffic sources in my blogger account to see where people are coming from when they read my blog. I get a lot of hits for things like 'Insanity challenge", "Insanity before and after", "the marriage bed", "carrie singh", "carrie singh journey inside", "sexually confident wife" or "prayer"... stuff like that. But, I often find myself giggling (sometimes because it's funny, other times because I just can't believe it!) at the google searches some have entered and then stumbled upon The Journey Inside. Here are a few of my personal favorites quoted verbatim: I am a mother to three beautiful children, a wife to a wonderful man and a child of a good God. Surviving postpartum depression and anxiety, struggling with unanswered questions regarding my faith and learning how to parent and be a wife are all things that constantly shape me. I'm inviting you to journey with me as I journey inside myself... not always an easy journey to be on.

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