I Tweet, therefore I’m lame…I speak, of course, about Twitter. I’m such a mindless, easily duped lemming. I’m one of the 400 million twitter-heads with my own account, a couple followers, and a whole list of people way cooler than me that I follow. (Except for John Mayer. He’s not cooler than me. But more on that later.)
I signed up a few months ago because one of my favorite bloggers has a Tweet roll down the side of her blog, and I hate to admit it, I wanted to be just like her. And here comes the problem. She’s a fabric designer, a seamstress, an author, a creative genius…you get it. She tweets with interesting little insights into her life, all in under 140 words. And they’re interesting. The girl designs handbags, she sews peasant blouses (I’ve ruined about 3 attempts so far), she comes up with quiche recipes and witty lines of poetry to go along with her work. I mean, hello?
My tweets? For shame! I already knew I had a pretty hum-drum run each day, but Twitter exacerbates my feelings of inadequacy times, like, a million. Seriously. . Some sample tweet drafts of mine:
“Woke up late.”
“Woke up early.”
“I like chocolate milk.”
“I cleaned my cubicle. Got new stapler.”
“I need to pee.”
“Going to Wal-mart. Hate the long lines.”
“Ate pizza for lunch. Stained my shirt.”
“Baby hates me.”
“Bought new book.”
Really?
Is that what the 110 people (most of whom I’ve never met...the ones I do know, y'know, my friends, well I'm pretty sure I bribed them with a latte) really bargained for when they hit the “follow” button on my profile. Don’t get me wrong, I’m flattered. But have you seen my life? I work in a cube. I have two boys. I have a boyfriend. I drive a truck. That’s about as exciting as it gets these days…and yet. And yet I still fight back that competitive monster to finagle events in my life so that I might have some interesting tweets. For example:
“Held up bank. On the lam with $500,000 in owl figurines.”
“Ran away to Brazil today with P. Be back Monday.”
“Slapped a meter maid bc I felt like it.”
“Poked a bear in the eye with my knitting needles. Size 9.”
“Rode a moose to work.”
If Twitter gathers up little tiny moments in our lives like scraps and assembles them to make a larger fabric, well, my fabric is beige and boring and dull. It’s the same damn fabric, same damn stitch, over and over and over. Bah!
Following the TwitNits
I follow Ellen Degeneres. She’s hilarious. I follow Ashton Kutcher and I don’t know why (Maybe I just wanted him to beat CNN to 1,000,000 followers). I follow Larry King. He tries really hard to be insightful, but really you can tell he struggles with it as much as I do.
I follow John Mayer. His tweets make me to take those knitting needles back from the bear and stab my own eye. And that’s sad. I used to really like him. Smart, great lyrics, that sort of understated good looking guys get when they're not trying too hard. But he’s turned into one of those guys that tries really hard to be funny, but really sort of misses the mark...the guy at the party telling an unfunny story too loudly and continuing with it way past its mark? The guy you sorta nod and smile at as you make a beeline for the crab dip? Poor John Mayer. I can’t listen to “Say” without thinking about his tweet about socks and midgets and something else. (That’s not a direct quote, obviously. I’m not even sure socks and midgets ever made it to his tweets, I just remember they’re usually just plain out there and untethered. Sorta like him these days.)
So not only does Twitter lay bare all of my own boring minutia of daily life in Eagle River, Alaska, it’s actively killing the lofty, fairytale images of public figures that I’ve built up in my head. It’s akin to them burping out loud or leaving dirty underwear on the bathroom floor. Twitter is killing the romance for me...and once John Mayer's gone, what's left? I kid, I kid.
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