Don’t Tell Me, I Don’t Want to Know

February 10, 2012
By PAMELA PAUL
NYT

UNLESS you are my best friend or my husband, I don’t need to know the macabre symptoms of your gastrointestinal virus. I don’t need to know about how much candy anyone, other than me, has eaten. As for my ex-boyfriend, I don’t need to hear about his wife’s ability to Zumba.

There are things I’d rather just not know about you.

Yet I, like most people, have become inundated with Too Much Information about the people I know and the people I wish I didn’t know but am now acquainted with. It’s as if we’re all trapped at a permanent reunion with everyone we ever bumped into at a street fair or waved to mistakenly in the cafeteria.

“The entire world has become this Dickensian series in which you are not visited by three ghosts but by eight million ghosts,” said Sloane Crosley, author of “How Did You Get This Number.” “I feel as if I see things about people that I don’t necessarily want to see, and then it’s lodged like a piece of corn in my subconscious.”

(More here.)