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SUNDAY JOURNAL

The many faces of my Internet alter egos

By MELANIE HUBBARD
Published July 9, 2006

Oops, I did it again. I Googled myself. It was strictly professional - I had to check whether a recent achievement was Googlable. If not, I'd have to trot it out in a cover letter. City folk now Google their prospective dates - replacing primping before the mirror with peering into the liquid crystal - so I have to know how I look.

I am pleased to report that we are a very talented, caring and good-looking bunch. We fearlessly collide with the opponent in high school soccer. We care for horses, write articles on dressage and apparently have gone on to judge them at the international level. We guru computers in New England, have volunteered to track runners with fancy equipment during the Boston Marathon, and have been thanked again and again for that service. In Mississippi, we lead youths in 4-H Field and Stream, restore rivers, manage our own wild acres for the benefit of turkeys and have two children who are crack shots. We defend against credit card fraud and teach yoga in England, we practice law in upper Canada, and we speak out on behalf of retailers, homeless youth and pranic healing in Australia.

We attended a historically black college, made the honor roll at Northwestern, graduated from FSU's film school, and finished a dissertation at Columbia. We've directed a short feature film, Rattus Maximus, involving human-to-animal transformations, and we're on the board of the Center for Ethics at Utah Valley State. We are mostly redheads with serious eyes, but you can tell we like a good joke. We're in the Army now, in Germany. We sell Mary Kay in Georgia - "the amazing TimeWise Microdermabrasion Set is now here"! We have an array of articles and poems out in print and online. We stand up before local governing bodies to resist reckless development. We are quotable. We teach college, elementary and Sunday school - and we are in trouble again.

"Melanie Hubbard, 41, former longtime employee of the Washita County Treasurer's Office who was convicted last year of five counts of embezzling county funds and one of violating the state's Computer Crimes Act, is in trouble again. Ms. Hubbard, a former Cordell Sunday school teacher, faces a new charge of possessing a weapon while in jail. She allegedly took a butcher knife from the kitchen of the Washita County jail while serving as a trusty. Authorities say the knife was used by Ms. Hubbard and a 20-year-old male inmate housed in the cell next to her to carve a hole through their common cell wall.

"Sheriff Ron Mazurek said today the hole was a small one, 'just large enough to pass a piece of rolled-up paper through.' However, it could be big enough to get each of the suspects 20 years in prison if they are found guilty. Mazurek said he assumed the pair carved the hole in the wall because they 'just wanted to communicate.' " Well, Mel, as Dorothy said to the Scarecrow, "That's you all over." I mean, us.

Oh, Melanie! Couldn't we have swindled more than 40K over those four years? The rest of us teachers and ethicists and filmmakers could've used the money, and with our highly developed computer skills and quantities of beneficial green prana - well, in for a penny, in for a pound. Hey . . . aren't we the director of the credit card security firm, Card Watch? Why didn't we just pull a little identity theft and then skip over to Australia? We did?

If we put all our heads together and think back to law school, we can get us back to writing poems and shooting turkeys in Mississippi in - about five years. Here's our advice: "Take a salt bath. Salt is filled with green prana that quickly breaks down dirty energy. Burn sandalwood. Sandalwood is the most cleansing as it contains much high quality green prana."

Thanks, Mel. But we're concerned. Who is this Master Choa Kok Sui anyway? How did we meet? Are we sleeping with him?

We think that, despite the good chakra, the horses and turkeys and the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, we are unconsciously compensating for the deep worry nagging at the back of it all. We are adopted. We were given the name of Karen at birth, but we were renamed Melanie Jo Hubbard by our adoptive parents. They also adopted our little brother, Jeffrey. We always knew he was adopted. And now we're desperate to locate our birth mother. Any information will be appreciated. PLEASE contact us at shag8Puma. We think it's time for a new name.

Melanie Hubbard is a frequent contributor to Sunday Journal.

[Last modified July 7, 2006, 11:07:09]