So, I had a run-in with a cop tonight. I was driving around with my girlfriend tonight, she was in town, so we hung out for a while. If you know marshall, I took a right off of Quality Lime Road onto Sycamore St. There's a spot on Sycamore St where the speed limit drops from 55 to 35. I got pulled over about 30 seconds after entering the 35 mph zone. I thought nothing of it, sure it may look a little suspicious, two young people riding around country roads together, but I figured everything would be ok. The cop came up to my window, asked for my license, my girlfriend's license, and my proof of insurance. A typical stop so far. My girlfriend didn't have her state ID with her, so she had to give her name and birthdate, and apparently I have 2 insurance cards in my car, and one of them is expired. I went into my glove compartment for my other insurance card, praying that I actually had it, and I found it. At this point, the cop had not yet told me why I had been pulled over. I politely asked him why I had been pulled over, he informed me that I was speeding in the 35 mph zone. I still say the sign was not there. The cop looked at it and asked me to step out of the car around to his passenger side, I found this kind of strange. As I was walking back to his car, he asked me if I had anything illegal on me, such as a pocket knife or a lighter. This is the first time, that I knew of that a lighter was illegal to carry. I told him that I had a pocket knife that I always have with me, and he asked me to put it in the car. What am I going to do with a 3 1/2" pocket knife? Whip it out, cut seven major blood vessels, and steal his gun? I sat in the passenger side of his car as he ran our stuff, that was awkward. Apparently police use Panasonic Toughbooks with the IP address labeled on the laptop, go figure. After the cop ran all of our information, he gave me my warning. He then said that he saw some little cigars in my glove compartment, they were old, and probably really dry. I used to smoke them on occasion. He asked me if I had any rolling paper or canabis in there. I told him no. He was more inquisitive after that, and he asked me if a drug dog would have any problem with walking around my car. I told him no, because he wouldn't. And then he asked me a third time if I had anything illegal in my car. I told him no at that point, starting to get kind of irritated. I think that part of it was that my girlfriend was black and I have a hemp bracelet on.
I learned a few very important lessons tonight, one, don't have cigarillos in your car, lest you get accused of carrying canabis. Two, don't drive around Marshall with a black girl in your car. Three, don't wear hemp bracelets. Fourth and final, don't speed in front of cops.
For those of you that care, it was a state cop that pulled me over, and his name was J Robinson, ID # 5752
So, I've been thinking about a blog that I read a while back, it's about our fractured online identities. I've noticed that as we all grow closer with our social networking, e-mail addresses, and Instant Messaging, we're growing farther away from ourselves. Right now, I have a crapload of accounts that each contain part of a description of me that I can't even keep track of. Here's the list of all of the online accounts that I can recollect off hand:
- Gmail
- Church e-mail
- Myspace
- Digg
- Vox
- last.fm
- Anywhere.fm
- About 20 different forums
- IM
- AIM
- MSN
- Yahoo! (I have 2 of these)
- Skype
- ICQ
- IRC
- Games
- Team Fortress 2
- Yahoo! Games
That's all that I can remember off hand, theirs about 40. I'm sure that their are people that have a lot more accounts than that for various reasons, but what is this doing to us and how we see other people? Pretty much everybody has an e-mail address that they sign up for different things with, then we meet people in real life. We then look at their myspace/facebook/whatever your socail network of choice is. And we start to make judgements about the people that we look at online. A webpage can't tell you everything about a person. But this generation has become a generation of computers. We find somebody's name, then we research them and index them by adding them to our friends list. Whatever happened to meeting somebody face to face and finding theings out that way?
People can look at my myspace or facebook right now and tell that I have a girlfriend. How do they know, because she posts a lot. But the only thing they know about her is what she has on her page. She has a whole bunch of likes, we all do, or at least what we want people to think that we like. But that doesn't really tell someone who you are. It is physically impossible to keep all of those profiles up to date. We can never show everybody everything that we want to show them about ourselves.
I loved social networking when it first hit; I was one of the first people on myspace. But now, I'm wondering, is it really networking us, or are just trying to collect friends and interests like pokemon cards?
