“There is nothing wrong with using Twitter in any way at all, of course.
“No, apparently there is.
Adam, I think you’re so brilliant and funny and you have been nothing but kind to me. I will continue to adore you long after you’ve had enough of my crude Twitter behavior.”
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOPS.
Let me clarify.
Ooooooooooooooooooooops.
I guess you always run the risk of having to explain yourself when you call someone out, someone you really like and admire, for doing something that’s bugging you.
It’s quite simple really. I wrote that thing in my Birdhouse a few weeks ago when I started to notice a pattern. But I held off on publishing it because it’s bitchy and I try to KIP keep it positive. Then there was another instance of having to shuffle through a bunch of not-necessarily-engaging side convo in my Tweetie and I might have had a cocktail in me and I thought, “well, here you go. Here’s some uncharacteristic negativity from @lonelysandwich. Hopefully my friends will understand that I still like them.”
I could’ve gone about it in a number of different ways. I chose passive aggressive bitchy. I hurt some feelings and I started a secret tumblr to work some shit out.
But maybe it’ll help if I explain myself? Probably not. Never does. But here I go:
I love a room where everyone gets a chance to be heard. I’m someone who has a hard time speaking up loud when there’s a chance to talk, so I’m sensitive to anyone or any group dominating an environment.
It’s taken some time to cultivate a list of people I follow wherein no one speaks that much louder (more often or with more urgency) than any others. It helps me pay attention to what every one of the people I follow has to say. I love it like that.
But when two or more of the people I follow start responding in long chains to each other, it might be hilarious and thrilling and more topical and urgent for them, but to me, it creates a large imbalance that wasn’t there before. It becomes “The @user1 and @user2 Show”.
If I were in a group session, say for therapy or activism or something, and two or three or four people started talking louder than everyone else and not saying much of any interest to the rest of the group, I’d sit there and stir for awhile, and then I’d say fuck it and I’d speak up and tell them there are other people in the group and pipe down but thanks for bringing the cookies, I love the ones with coconut, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, stop scowling at me, was that a cookie that just hit the back of my head? Who throws a cookie?
This is a personality quirk of mine. I know the analogy is imperfect because we’re not all actually in the same “room” or “grouping” and it’s not my party to moderate, it’s everyone’s. I can only assume, using the powers of empathy, that if it’s bothering me, it’s probably bothering somebody else.
See, that didn’t help at all. And the end result of this is that people might be hesitant to do the chatty conversation, and that would suck, because you guys are really funny.
