Tag Archives: social media

I Tweep for Humanity

Alternate titles:

  • What a Tweerp
  • While My Guitar Gently Tweeps
  • That’s Twinge

Some of my favorite tweets weren’t my tweets at all, they were conversations between me and my best friend. We were both on Google Buzz–I think we might have been the only ones–so we were able to comment on each other’s posts privately. Here’s a few of our briefer exchanges:

Me: “Every writer is a frustrated actor who recites his lines in the hidden auditorium of his skull.” -Rod Serling

BFF: But the acoustics are amazing!

Me: So are the sets!

The casting is good too, but the scripts are usually just embarrassing.

Me: Naaails to the left, duct taaape to the right–here I am, stuck in the middle with gluuue~

BFF: You’re describing how I mounted my computer monitor to the wall

To this day I’m not 100% sure he was joking.

Me: If mathematics is the study of pure logic and abstraction, then philosophy is the mathematics of language.

BFF: ?

Me: Could you please be more specific

BFF: ??!

…I have no idea what I was saying, either.

BFF: Anytime I say anything worth quoting, you should attribute it to Mark Twain instead.

Me: -Mark Twain

Like any good hacker, when Mr. Twain learns a new system his first instinct is to try to break it. Sometimes I call him the “anti-mnemonic” because this instinct kicks in without fail any time I’m trying to remember something (No, no, no, it’s “righty light-y, lefty heft-y!”), but he’s expressed the urge in other contexts, too. Such as, for example, lame jokes on Twitter:

Me: I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is, there isn’t really any bad news.

BFF: …the bad news is, I was lying about there not really being any bad news.

The other bad news is, I’ve got one more for you. Don’t worry, I’ve saved the most self-indulgent best for last, complete with commentary:

Guess what? Chicken butt.

Ah yes, a classic. But wait, it gets “better!”

Guess why? Chicken pie.

Uh oh. I sense sleep deprivation…

Guess when? Chicken pen.

All right, I think we get it now.

Guess where? Chicken hair.

*sigh*

Guess who? Chicken poo.

I’m surprised I held out that long before resorting to poop, honestly.

Me: Guess how? Chicken cow.

BFF: You are such a menace on Twitter!

-Mark Twain

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Filed under My Life, Reviews

Further Tweminiscing

Yesterday was my birthday! To celebrate, I’m going to take a break from all this boring old fiction and get back to something more self-indulgent exciting: tweets I wrote 15 years ago!

A lot of my old tweets were reposts of other people’s blogs, articles, and essays, or sometimes even just quotes. This one is special because the person I’m quoting is my dad:

“Home is where people get your jokes.” -Dan McCrimmon

Love you, dad ❤️

Some of my tweets reminded me of moments and ideas I’d nearly forgotten. Usually this was a good thing.

Watching an…interesting movie called “Tank Girl.” Confused, but in a good way. This must be how dogs feel.

Tank Girl is a cult classic, one of the earlier comic books to be adapted to film. Recommended. I still think “confused, but in a good way” probably is how dogs feel, but after I got stoned for the first time I decided that was a better approximation. (Watching Tank Girl while stoned would be like how dogs feel on the 4th of July.)

Some reminders were more mixed.

Last night I sewed a ripped seam in my pajamas; it was the most accomplished I’ve felt all semester. Why am I in school, again?

Honestly, sometimes I still feel like this is among my top ten achievements in life.

Re-reading papers I wrote in high school. Man, the old me was so awesome. What the hell happened?

Yeah…college did things to me.

Then there were the reminders of things that haven’t changed at all.

Times change, but people remain insane.

Sometimes the insanity is more…prominent…than others.

“Where is my watch?” *searches* “Hmm, that’s odd, I can’t find it any–oh. It’s on my wrist.” #22andgoingsenile

Still just as senile at 37. That’s…good? That’s a good thing, right?

Oh yeah, I was gonna eat dinner at some point. #oops

Oops.

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Younger Me Was A Twiit

I’ve been feeling nostalgic lately–y’know, catalouging all my life’s deepest regrets, just your ordinary early-onset midlife crisis–and I ended up going through some of my old Tweets. Here are a few gems I thought were embarrassing enough to be worth sharing.

I posted this sequence while reading Harry Potter #7 for the first time:

Neville Longbottom is a f***ing badass.

If I were a girl, I would be crushing on Neville Longbottom.

Look at your man. Now look at me. Now back at your man, now back at me, now…back at your man. Sadly, your man is not Neville Longbottom.

He is totally pimp, is what I am saying.

I’m particularly amused that I wrote “if I were a girl” instead of “if I were gay.” In retrospect, I probably should have noticed something odd about that.

Here’s another one on a similar theme:

I’m perfectly comfortable with my heterosexuality, but if A**** Diaz ever came up to me and said “Will you marry me?” I would be like “HELL YES WHEN CAN I START”

This one is doubly funny because not only did the artist in question turn out to be a super hot girl, I also ended up marrying a guy.

Here’s a couple about sleep deprivation:

Today’s word of the day is: FARTCHKNACKER

(I didn’t get much sleep.)

That’s an understatement. Here’s another:

Dreamed I stayed up till 4 doing reading for class. Didn’t actually stay up till 4, but now I feel like I did and my reading still isn’t done.

I think that between them, those two tweets sum up the majority of my college experience.

Here’s an attempt I made at a 140-character poem, just after shaving my head for the first time:

Commit! the imagined is strongest becoming real. Unrequited acts are ghosts of shadows: a memory of warmth beside the moment before sunrise.

It’s not a great poem, but it’s a sentiment I could stand to be reminded of more often.

One more for now. I wrote this one while working a part-time construction gig over the summer:

Boy, I just love using my caulk to plug holes.

Sorry, that one’s still funny.

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Microblogging

When my youngest child was about two, I turned off all my phone’s Facebook notifications. Back then Twitter was still bearable, so I lingered there a little while, but it didn’t take long for me to quit social media entirely.

It was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made, but there are some things I miss. The biggest and most obvious was staying up to date on the lives of people I hadn’t seen in years but still cared about, but I also missed the writing. A tweet is definitely not an essay, but the process of writing both is remarkably similar. And just like with my essays, sharing my little thoughts, jokes, ideas, and meditations publicly was much more fulfilling than keeping them inside my head, even when the audience was small.

Writing an essay may be similar to writing a tweet, but it is also a whole lot more work. Crafting a good essay was often a weeks- or even months-long process, and after having kids I simply didn’t have the time or spoons to keep at it. For a while I was still able to write smaller things through social media, but that was one of the things I had to give up when I quit.

Recently I was going through some of my old tweets and Facebook status updates, and I noted wistfully that many of them were quite good and that I missed writing them. That’s when I finally realized what should have been obvious years ago. I’d been thinking I couldn’t write tweets anymore because I’m not on Twitter, but a blog post can just as easily be 140 characters as 1400 words, can’t it? (Did you know I have a blog? You should check it out!)

I won’t be microblogging exclusively. Now that the kids are in school and becoming more self-sufficient, I’ve had more energy to devote to the big ideas, too. But as a way of dipping my toes back into the water I think tweet-length blog posts will be a great way to start.

One last note: I’ve disabled comments for now. I remember moderating and replying to them to be far too much like social media–lots of investment for very small or rare returns, yet addictive enough that it’s easy to spend hours on. If you want to comment or reply to something I’ve written, I encourage you to put something about it on your own site! (Even if your site is just your Facebook page or YouTube channel.) Pingbacks are still enabled, so I’ll likely see it.

To everyone taking the time to read this, thank you. See you out there.

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Filed under Essays, Microblogging, My Life