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Saturday, January 9, 2010

Twitterpated, or I'll Pay You NOT To Tell Me About It

I am firmly of the opinion that every move we make, every breath we take, every vow we break should be painstakingly sent out across the worldwide web 140 characters at a time.

Wait.

Do I really believe that? Do I really want to receive updates on whether or not someone has gone to the mall, has showered, has finally gotten the bacon just right?

I do not.

And I make no apologies, especially to Sting. That SOB still owes me $20.

I had a Twitter account for about 30 minutes before a friend of mine found out about it.

He called solely for the purposes of abusing me.

"Really? Twitter? What are you, Edward R. Murrow, reporting from the trenches?"

"Everybody's doing it," I muttered lamely.

"If everybody suddenly had a hold of the good acid, would you be doing that, too?"

"Why? What have you heard?"

He wouldn't tell me, of course.

Selfish, that's what he is.

So I never did twit. The world will have to go on without me, possibly wondering if I ever ironed out that issue with the medical insurance or whether or not I ever got off the couch the morning after the evening with the cash card and access to a taxi.

Guess I'll just have to blog it.

And that's way cooler than twitting.

47 comments:

http://howtobecomeacatladywithoutthecats.blogspot.com said...

Think of all the stalkers you're missing out on by not twittering. How will they know where you are at any given moment if you don't keep them up to date via Twitter?

Lana Banana said...

i totally understand what you're saying, BUT there IS one biiiiiiig advantage to twitting and that is that it keeps stalkers happy. and who doesn't want a happy stalker, hmmm?

Lana Banana said...

ah, great minds and all that . . .

Lana Banana said...

ps: by "stalkers", i mean me.

IB said...

I did the "Twitter" thing for about a week. It only made me realize my minute-to-minute life is really quite dull. I bored even myself.

You will fill me in if you get a line on that acid, right?

Suzy said...

I'm twittering but I'm kicking and screaming while I'm doing it. It's not just that one's own life is boring, it's that everyone else's life is twice as boring as your own.

mapstew said...

I hate pop stars who borrow money and don't pay back! :¬) Dolores O'Riordan owes me for two pints of cider!

Twitter? Twaddle!

xxx

BLOGitse said...

I tweet. My blog posts. My photos. I connect with artists, photographers.
I've got a lot of new readers for my blogs.
But I don't tweet about my personal things. Like 'having a lunch, see you soon' or 'what a morning, I'm so tired' etc.

I would never tweet with my own name, never.
I don't need all those who 'knew' me to come back.
So I do understand your point too...

Have a nice weekend!

http://BLOGitse.blogspot.com

anon said...

Haha, Pearl!
I'm laughing already.

Now I'll go read the post, I'm sure it will live up to its artful and inspired title. What a delightful sequence of words to see in my Reader this morning!

anon said...

You're my favorite : )

I used to have a right-hand-man at work. I always told him that he really didn't need to verbally express every single thought he had in a day.

I bet he Titters.

Lori E said...

So I guess you didn't want to hear about how I got one MF'n sliver under my pinky fingernail and how it is all infected and I think they will have to amputate?
Okay, nevermind.

Anonymous said...

Hear-hear!

kim said...

Pearl, I am SOO with you on this one. I caved one particularly vulnerable day and opened a Twitter account. I tried to get into the whole "have to tell the masses everytime I breathe" hype, but after about 15 minutes of constant updates and nothing ever was of any consequence from anyone I was following, I rolled my eyes and closed that crap down.

If I want you to know that I just farted or that my hair is in my eyes, I'll blog about it. On second thouht, I'll just come to your blog and comment to you about it.

kim said...

*thought...
had to correct that or else it would have driven me crazy the rest of the day...lol

De Campo said...

So let me get this straight, I have to lay the smack down on Dr. Spock AND Sting?! Cripes, how many people and/or alien life forms owe you money?

Do you have any idea how many tube socks this is going to take?

ellen abbott said...

I always thought twitting was for twits. Oh and the good acid? They still make that stuff? And he had to ask?

Doppelgänger said...

Well, Twitter is pretty useful. :-? In the right hands. :)) I mean, sure, it's a free country (wherever you people are) but that still doesn't mean we really have to know what that bloke (who you have just "follow"-ed two minutes ago and never met in your whole life) is doing in every single minute of his miserable life.

Fortunately, there is an "Unfollow" button. :)) The solution's quite simple, really. We can all do that, but they'll still do that.

I personally can't post every minute of my life on Twitter. First of all because I'm all too lazy, and second of all....who'd give a damn? :-?? I don't think anybody gives a damn about this comment, so why should I send it? :-??

Then again, we have to admit that no user who posts something like "Lol. Like, I'm going wth Becky & Anna 2 the Mall. Annas teling me bout her ex, shes boring." will ever have this battle with his/her conscience. :))

Thank God/Allah/Jahve/Jah/Flying Spaghetti Monster/Bob/Krishna/Shiva/etc for the "block" and "unfollow" buttons. :))

Pat said...

I have the same sentiment about Twitter as you, and also that sentiment about Facebook. What boring but insidious time-wasters! Now I just have to steel myself and cancel them. Will I be able to do that?

Jeanne Estridge said...

Waaay cooler.

Cal's Canadian Cave of Coolness said...

'Never a borrower or a lender or a listener of Sting be'

Twitter just gives people an excuse not to try harder than 140 characters. I like my posts like I like my women - meaty and with sauce. It's all about dumbing down the culture and building incredibly muscular thumbs. Soon we will be left with mutants who can't spell or express more than the rudementary of thoughts but can win every thumb wrestling match we have with the terrorists.

Douglas said...

What they said...

And it is "tweet", not "twitter" because (as one of the above said, "twitting [is] for twits." Which, I suspect is what the giggling geniuses are laughing about now as they happily stash their money away in a vault somewhere.

Doppelgänger said...

Well, every site comes from a good idea. Be it Twitter or Facebook. The major problem is that it's not Twitter's or Facebook's (or MySpace's, or Hi5's, or whatever's other networking site you choose)fault, but the people. I mean, Facebook has a great idea: "connect people from all around the World and let them be friends" (just like any other networking site), so does Twitter: "if something important's going on and you want everyone to know about, send a quick sms on the net and they'll know instantly". :-?? Too bad there are sooooooooooo many people to fuck these good ideas up. If Twitter were to be populated only by people who knew how to use it, it would have been quite different.

It's not the site, it's the people. :D At least that's my humble opinion. :-?

Mike said...

I pop on twitter every now and then, but I am only on there about 5 minutes a week. I just think that it is boring. I spend about 10 minutes a week on facebook and about 30 hours blogging! LOL!

Fragrant Liar said...

I say, F**K that twit.

I twitted ('scuse me) for about a week and then realized that most of the people who wanted to follow me were the horny and porny. So, done.

Psst, come over here. I'll tell ya what I heard . . .

Unknown said...

BUT, you'd be SO good at it! I want to hear those dry, witty bad ass things you have to tweet about.

Madame DeFarge said...

I couldn't keep myself within 140 words, so it would be useless for me. You stay blogging, it's like flares. It'll come back into fashion again soon.

SparkleFarkel said...

Yeah, I did the twitter thing. I look back on it as my midlife-and-then-some crisis. Now I only use the account when a blogger friend (<-- ?) is having a giveaway and they want you to tweet about it mostly for THEIR benefit (Retail exposure, I guess.) and to earn you another chance at winning whatever it is they think is so dang important of theirs that you'd want so badly that you'd be willing to give 140 of your own words, a couple of pints of blood, and sell your mother for, in order to just stand a remote chance of claiming the "prize" they everso humbly want to bestow, but by that time, I say "Homey don't play that no mo'" because Twitter's not the "out there" I want to be in (And anyway, that's a heck of a lot of elbow grease to wade through to git something I don't know where I'd go with it in the first place, even if I did win... Okay. So maybe I'd do it for a book, but it'd have to be a pretty darn good book-- one you can't put down. You know what I mean? I thought so. You'd do the same, right? For a book, I mean. I thought so.) Here's the total of what I got from my life on Twitter: Most tweeters are twits, and that boyfriend of Miley Cyrus' who insisted she close her twitter account, is a definite "keeper." Billy Ray, take a lesson. If only that Miley-beau had given his "fatherly" advice regarding young girls singing while dancing to the beat of a stripper pole on live TV, before it had happened... (Uh-huh. I admit it. I followed Miley Cyrus' Twitter. So sue me.)

Unknown said...

I did Twitter for a bit, but it started to become a lot like housekeeping what with the steady influx of porn spammers.

The Jules said...

I cheat and just have a feed so my facebook status is displayed as my tweet.

I don't really get Twitter though, if I'm honest.

Tempo said...

Twitting will die just as all the dumb ideas before it...only to be replaced by another totally dumb idea. That is, unless it's my idea! (makemerich.com)

Anonymous :) said...

It stuns me how some of these things take off.

Andrew Gerald Hales said...

Ya I've always had facebook so I never got a twitter, it was so pointless. Blogging's cooler I agree.

sage said...

being a twit use to be a bad thing... I've gone as far as Facebooking, but prefer blogging and controlling what I show the world.

Molly Potter said...

I simpletonly applied Facebook protocols to my brief encounter with Twitster. I thought I was adaptable but stoopitly my residual enthusiasm (FB is still relatively new) meant I tried to write a long statement about my overly emotional and not factual status, I tried to upload a photo of me having fun and no one asked me what my toes said about my starsign (I need that daily now) so it was simply a venture too far from comfortsvillezone.
Hey ho
We should probably have some control over how our horizons broaden.

Molly Potter said...

ing

Molly Potter said...

not ing...

Molly Potter said...

I am in control

Green-Eyed Momster said...

I started a Twitter account last year, deleted it because I talked about work there. I got over that paranoia and I started another Twitter account.
I personally find it a challenge to use up all 140 characters in one message. I'm pretty good at it too. Plus, a lot of my bloggy friends Tweet more than they blog. It's one way of keeping in touch with them.

Hugs!!

Nancy/BLissed-Out Grandma said...

I'm surprised at how many people actively HATE Twitter, rather than just considering it irrelevant to their lives! I think I signed on to follow a work-related thing, but I never went back. Not big on brevity. Or immediacy. (Or idiocy, for that matter.)

Molly Potter said...

I am here to help......

http://torturedcreative.blogspot.com/2010/01/map-of-blogsville.html

L.C.T. said...

Hi. Thanks for stopping by my blog. 3 degrees is freezing for sure! I have a twitter account, but I agree that I don't always want the world to know everything. I'm not on facebook for the same reason you're not on twitter.

Rachel Cotterill said...

I have Twitter but I don't use it as much as some people I know! But for some things that I'd like to share, but which don't really deserve a whole blog post, then I think it works. For me ;)

Anonymous said...

I vaguely remember an article arguing that Hemingway would have been good with twitter. I remember another that suggested it's the last thing he would be interested in. Interesting that Hemingway should have been used in both arguments.

Barlinnie said...

The missus advised me to explore Twitter. I did for about 30 seconds until I realised just what a complete waste of drinking time it actually is.

Facebook and Twitter...? not on my feckin watch!

People Who Know Me Would Say: said...

I don't twit or face or even cell! I'm surprised I blog, truth be told!

Sting may owe you $20, but that's wayyyyy better than what he GAVE me!

The Retired One said...

I am SO totally with you on this, Sista!
I haven't Twittered. But I confess, I have Facebooked.
:-}

Zuzana said...

I agree, I barely manage my facebook, but twitter makes no sense to me whatsoever.;)
Great post, but then all yours are.;)
Happy 2010 to you, a bit delayed.;)
xo
Zuzana