Where In the World is Carmen Sandiego?

I admit it: I was one of those dorks who was so pumped about the release of Wolfram Alpha that I compiled a list of potential questions to ask the magic machine as soon as it went live. Gripping my pen in hand, I hunched over my Moleskine and scribbled down the questions my inner child most desperately wanted to know the answer to:

1. How many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie pop?
2. How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
3. What is the meaning of life?
4. What is the 69th digit of pi? (I actually know this one, since I know the first 180+ digits of pi thanks to this awesome song)
5. Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego?

Of all the things I could have asked — and eventually I did get around to asking some good questions. I learned, for example, that there are 7 x 10^{00^22} stars in the observable universe — what I most wanted to know were questions that have been part of my character development since childhood. Questions that are the foundation of my generation. Questions that, in all honesty, I did not expect Wolfram Alpha to know.

I secretly wanted to see it fail.

So imagine my surprise when, after smugly typing ridiculous question #1 into the search box, WolframAlpha returned:

“All right, smartass,” I thought. “I bet the nefarious dudes behind Mathematica knew somebody would ask this. I’m not surprised you knew that answer. Let’s try another.”

So I straightened up in my chair and asked ridiculous question #2. Surely it would have no idea what I was talking about. But, despite the odds (or perhaps not— it isn’t like I have the faintest idea how WolframAlpha actually works) it returned:

Now, if I’m being honest, I don’t entirely accept that as the correct answer. The answer is (according to my own childhood), “He’d chuck as much as a woodchuck could if a woodchuck could chuck wood.” But then again I recognize there are regional differences in these sort of things, and a lot of time has gone by, and seeing as how I don’t think Wolfram went to elementary school in North Hollywood in the early 80’s, I was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. 

Wolfram Alpha: 2. Amber: 0.

All right. So Wolfram Alpha could answer some “how much” and “how many” questions. Fine. But what would it do if I threw it a curve ball? Surely, surely Wolfram Alpha would stumble over its Mathematica-founded feet when I asked it the most fundamental existential query of all: What is the meaning of life?

But I probably don’t even have to tell you what Wolfram Alpha had to say about that. Okay, I’ll tell you anyway.

In retrospect I probably should have known better.

By now, of course, I was getting a good laugh not only out of my own hubris, thinking it would be this easy to trick the machine, but also out of how interesting this experiment had become. Sure, I’d only been asking questions about pop culture but those are precisely the kinds of questions I didn’t expect it to have an answer to.

Thinking that it was time to ask it a question it should know, I decided to ask a math question about pi.

I was disappointed that it didn’t sing the result back to me, actually. Because that would have been so rad.

Amazed and more than a little put out that I still hadn’t been able to stump the computer, I thought about my final question. It would have to be a real zinger. It would have to be something deep, something profound whose answer I had sought but still had not found. And after a few moments of soul searching, it came to me in a flash. In a fever, tongue slightly breaching the barrier of pursed lips, I typed out my coup de grâce, my final question, the question I most needed to know: “Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego?”

I waited while the computer thought. I bit my lip. I bounced a little in my seat, waiting for it, waiting, knowing that I would finally know what my little girl self had never known:

Dashed! Destroyed! My eyes popped open is disbelief, my spine as straight as an arrow as I slammed my hands palm down onto the top of my Ikea desk. “No! No, Wolfram, you do know! I know you do. I have faith!”

I typed the question in again, but Wofram Alpha still didn’t know. It had no idea where in the world was Carmen Sandiego.

I admit it was a cheatful question, because Carmen Sandiego isn’t in any one place; she gets around. (She wouldn’t be a very good thieving villainess if she always hung out in the same spot). Still, I was hoping for something. Anything. Any answer would have been better than what it gave me. After all, when I later asked it, “Where’s Waldo?” it confidently responded, “Arkansas.”

Ah, well. Perhaps it’ll learn still. I have high hopes for it; it’s already performed beyond my meager expectations. As for now, as to the whereabouts of Carmen Sandiego, the world may never know.

Perspective

Instead of eating lunch at my desk as I normally do, I went down to the turtle pond with two friends: an information architect and an editor.

Standing on the edge of the pier, leaning over the rail and feeling the sun on our arms, we watched. After a time, the information architect said, “I like to count the turtles. There were 45 last time. I only see about twenty this time.”

The editor kicked her feet through the slats in the pier’s gating. “I like the way everything down there has its place in the ecosystem. Turtles, snakes, fish, birds, algae, and the reeds. I like how they all live together.”

I smiled down into the green water as the turtles glided by, bodies submerged, their pretty noses poking out. “I just like being out here,” I said. “I love just being outside.”

No Offense, But…

This morning, I woke up to a text message from a friend that read, “So when are the Libertarians and Independents going to send out their Eff You message?”

Having just roused from sleep and not yet being of sound mind, I had no idea what she was talking about. But after a moment passed, the lightbulb went on and I had myself a very decent chuckle, and I hope you will, too, as I share this story with you.

In 2006, a good friend and co-worker ran for Congress. He ran as an Independent against a much beloved Democratic incumbent and a Republican who was a self-proclaimed practitioner of Eckankar. 

Although my friend lives about 30 miles away from me in a demographically different part of town, we happen to live in the same congressional district. (Gerrymandering at its best, I suppose.) He asked me if I intended to vote for him.

“Well, no,” I said. “Firstly, I’m not registered to vote in Texas, and secondly, I don’t believe in anything you stand for.” He was a bit put out by this, as he had somehow decided that friends should vote for friends even if their politics do not jibe. 

But not to be dissuaded, he invited me — and everyone else in our department— to an election watching party. He had hoped to watch the results roll in and bask in however many paltry votes he had managed to accrue. Now, when I say he invite the whole department, what I really mean is the whole college, as at the time I was working at the University of Texas. He invited us all: the Dean, his coworkers, and all the faculty. The only people he didn’t invite were the students, and probably only because he didn’t have their email addresses. Thank FERPA for that, at least.

Election night (and the aforementioned party that I did not attend) came and went, and the next morning, I was greeted with the following message in my inbox:

Subject: No offense, but F**k you

Body: I’m not sure what to say at this point.. but I am beginning to think that F**K YOU may be appropriate.… I have tried on several occasions to invite you to a party I am hosting and yet you have not attended (with very, very, few exceptions), let alone bothered to acknowledge that I even invited you to attend.

As a result of tonight’s turnout, amongst my fellow employees , I may not be in the office of Thursday or Friday because I have serious things to consider as to why the f**k I am working with you, and why you will not support me.

Have a great morning you inconsiderate jackasses,
** 

Yikes, I thought. Guess no one went to his party.

When I got to work, I asked a friend, “Hey, did you get um… a strange email this morning?”

My boss overheard, sighed, and shook his head. “Well all got it. And I mean, we ALL got it. He even sent that email to the Dean of the College.”

Thinking it must be a joke, we all huddled around my computer to re-read the message. On second reading, we were still a bit taken aback by the vitriol — and unintentional hilarity — of the email, but we were also convinced it wasn’t a joke. (Though we did joke about whether the final salutation was directed only to the Democrats amongst us, or if “jackasses” was intended more inclusively.)

It wasn’t a joke. And though tempers flew, especially the Dean’s, he wasn’t fired. In fact — and this is really the best part of the story— the very next month, a mere three weeks after this incident, he was awarded Employee of the Month.

There is no moral to this story. There is no great political message to be learned. It is simply something I wanted to share in the aftermath of the 2008 election because even after two years it still makes me laugh and shake my head in wonder.

A Timely Raven, episode 2

A Timely Raven, episode 2, is published.

An excerpt:

Sometimes I would come up with outrageous plot twists, like the time I was feeling ornery and told Grandma Flatley that I thought Hazel and Bigwig would be captured and turned into rabbit soup and that would be the end of them. I didn’t like Watership Down because I don’t care for rabbits. I thought Grandma Flatley would get mad, but she hooted and howled and slapped her knee. And she held a finger to her mouth and whispered, “You can’t tell anyone I told you, Benjy, but when I was your age and my brother would make me mad, I would lie in bed at night and imagine that I skinned his cat and fed it to the neighbor’s dog.” And she hooted and howled some more, but I thought that was gross and mean because I like cats, so I never said things like that at story time again.

Enjoy :)

A Timely Raven

For several years I have wanted to write a massive, sprawling story that unfolds over time like a good television drama. I wanted to tell many stories, some which intersect, but all of which sprung from a single focal or entry point. I wanted to tell a tale whose disparate stories were human but also otherworldly, and I wanted to tell it in a way that was engrossing and beautiful.

To that end, and in time for Halloween, I give you A Timely Raven : a serial account of meditating a murder.

This is only the beginning.

Enjoy.

Monsters On Parade

As the days begin to shrink in earnest and the temperature drops below what my California-reared skin can comfortably lounge about in, monsters begin to claw their way out of my subconscious and into the foreground. They whisper, they cajole, they bark and they howl. Sometimes this is haunting. Mostly, it’s extremely liberating.

Even as a child I knew exactly what kind of writer I was going to be. I would tell anyone who would listen that I was going to be a horror novelist. Eventually I had to stop saying this, however, as more than a few people heard “whore novelist” and would blush and guffaw. Eventually I started telling people that I wanted to be Stephen King.

That was only partially correct, however. What I really wanted was dark mythology, a universe were people were constantly tormented by evils they could neither see nor hear, but which were incontrovertible and inexorable. 

What draws me to the horrific and the fantastic are rarely physical monsters. While I can appreciate the beauty of Frankenstein’s monster and the wickedness of Dracula and Mr. Hyde, these characters never moved me the way monsters I would invent later in life would. The stories are captivating and tragic, and I’ve always been jealous that Mary Shelley penned Frankenstein when she was only 18 years old. Yet while the merit of the stories is doubtless the monsters themselves failed to sway me. They did not inspire fear.

When I was little, my father was something of a budding occultist, though I doubt he would have termed himself that. A songwriter by trade, he decided to try his hand at a novel about the anti-Christ, and as part of his research delved into the worlds of demonology, scripture, magic and the arcane. I would creep into his office and find books like The Magus and The History of Witchcraft and Demonology on the floor. Naturally, I flipped through them, both scared and fascinated. I was familiar with the Devil, of course. And while my Christian upbringing taught me that the books my father was reading were evil and not to be trifled with, I couldn’t help but be drawn to them. They contained something within their pages that stirred in me real fear and transfixion, and the magnetism of being verboten twisted me into a kind of secret, demon-loving freak.

Oh, to be sure, I was terrified of my father’s books. I knew that their power could turn Jesus-loving little girls into drug addicts, psychotics, and heathens. I knew that to show too much interest was to invite the Beast into my world. I’d seen The Exorcist. I had no intention of being Linda Blair.

And yet…they were just so wonderful, in their way. Too wonderful to resist. These were actual monsters. These were the objects of my most primal fear. The demons and devils that filled my head in those early days were beings of hate, woe, evil, and lust, and if you weren’t careful they had the power and privilege to posses your soul and take over your life. They could destroy your body and rend your soul from its shell and carry you straight off to Hell.

And why? Because they could.

What child could resist?

photo credit: conde_erlette

I admit that I have not spend too much time reading modern monster literature, but what I have read disappoints, because authors seem to enjoy stripping monsters of their monstrosity. They want us to understand their monster. They want us to be sympathetic. They want us to see their monster from another point of view, to put ourselves in its shoes.

Real monsters don’t have motivations. They aren’t subject to human morals or guidelines – that’s what makes them monsters! They must be identifiable – if they are too different from us, they’re not monsters, they are animals. Monsters are necessarily born in the uncanny valley – they bear enough resemblance to something we know that we expect a certain personality or interaction. But upon closer inspection we see that something is horribly, revoltingly wrong. 

Monsters don’t care about us. They don’t care about our world. They don’t care about fitting in. They merely are what they are – incarnations of the very things we fear most.

One of my favorite “horror” movies is Shaun of the Dead. One of the things I love about it is that no attempt is made to explain the appearance of the zombies, nor their nature. We’re allowed to just accept that the zombies are the walking dead, gruesome, somewhat comical, and creepy. We can sit back and just appreciate the joyride they take us on. (Night of the Living Dead is of course wonderful also, but there’s something about the dialogue and blend of horror and comedy in Shaun that is just brilliant.)

Another favorite monster takes the form of something else near and dear to us – our homes. The houses in both The Dionaea House (one of my all-time favorite Halloween tales) and in House of Leaves are ideal monsters because they are reminiscent of something we know, something that should be comforting and grounding but which are in fact horrific and inexplicable.

Contrast these monsters, which are not explained away but simply allowed to just be, with the house in Zemeckis/Spielberg’s Monster House, which begins in much the same way as the house in Dionaea House (if a watered down, though very entertaining, children’s version) but by the end of the film is explained as being possessed by the soul of the tormented woman who once lived there. Once the explanation settles we have little to truly fear, because now we understand. And while that understanding makes for a good children’s flick, it makes for a lousy monster.

A demo of the floating head illusion we’ll use this year to enchant some lucky trick-or-treaters.

When I took up fiction writing, I at first did so with the intention of spinning biographies of wonderful monsters. After all, my childhood was shaped by Lewis Carroll and Stephen King – I was doomed early on to have a penchant for the strange and unnatural. But as I began to develop my characters and my plots I realized that the more I dealt with the monsters, the less scary they became. It became clear that the only way to deal with monsters and keep them monstrous was to write around them, to tell the story from the points of view of those whose lives were being ransacked by their interactions with the monsters. I could show as much about these characters as I wanted, but the monsters had to remain largely in the background. They could not be seen. They could not be known.

Harkening back to my childhood, then, my monsters were primarily incorporeal – demons, devils, succubi, incubi, and imps. Enough was already written about these monster to give them substance, but they were unique enough that I could weave them into the lives of various characters under myriad different circumstances and then sit back and watch as all Hell broke loose. It was wonderful! Eventually I ventured further into my imagination to concoct other evil spirits completely my own. I was able to spin entire pantheons and mythologies from the interactions of the monsters that dwelled in my head.

And yet, for all that I invented them, I cannot tell you much about them, because I do not know them. I keep them at arm’s length even from myself, because if I’m not scared of them, how can I present them in all their fearsome glory to others?

photo credit: RebelRuby

I enjoy seeing other people’s monsters. I enjoy the yard haunts I see both online and in my own neighborhood, with corpses clawing their way out from the ground, ghosts swinging from bare tree branches, jack-o-lanterns twinkling their wicked smiles. I enjoy the children dressed as vampires, ghouls, goblins and witches. I enjoy the way we embrace the darkness and our fears and celebrate them full force, even if just for one night. For one night, all these monsters are beautiful, and my love for them is reflected and shared all around me. For one night, my monsters take a back seat so that the other monsters can dance center stage.

But only for a night. In the morning, my own monsters will return, demanding to be reckoned with.

Conversations with the God of Wonderland

photo credit: Joan Thewlis

My favorite book of all time is Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. As a little girl I would imagine myself Alice, trapped in a strange and terrible world (also known as Los Angeles), and would devise ways to escape, to find my way out of that Wonderland and into a world of my choosing.

So it’s probably appropriate that the following conversation, produced with iGod, sounds to my ear like what Conversations with God might have sounded like were it written by Carroll.

Enjoy.

Me: Its getting close to Halloween.

God: I think you mean “it’s” or “it is” not “its”. Really. It is?

Me: I’ve noticed a lot of demonic depictions about. Does it bother you?

God: How many? Nothing ever really bothers me.

Me: Thousands. I find myself enchanted by them – hauntingly beautiful, really.

God: That is a very original thought. 

Me: I was taught not to celebrate Halloween.

God: Where were you taught not to celebrate Halloween?

Me: In Los Angeles. By my mother.

God: Tell me a little about your life in Los Angeles. 

Me: I had a wonderful childhood, but Los Angeles is not a good place. I had to leave.

God: Give me an example of a good place. 

Me: Austin is good. Better than Los Angeles, anyway.

God: That remark was either too complex or too simple for me. We were talking about
Austin. 

Me: We were talking about Los Angeles, but I can talk about Austin if you prefer.

God: Ah yes, I remember now, It is the subject.

Me: I grew up in Los Angeles but I left when I was seventeen.

God: What is it like growing up there? Tell me a little about your life in Los Angeles.

Me: Los Angeles is really the armpit of Hell.

God: Is that your opinion?

Me: I think so.

God: I think so too.

Me: But when I turned seventeen, I moved to Chicago to experience something different.

God: Why?

Me: Chicago was as far away from home as I could get at the time.

God: When was this exactly?

Me: This was 1994.

God: What does “this” refer to?

Me: The year I left home.

God: Oh I get it.

Me: I went to study at Northwestern University.

God: Was it very expensive?

Me: Yes, but not so much for me. I had a scholarship.

God: Er. Me either. What happened to it?

Me: The scholarship? Or the university? I think it’s still there. But I’m not.

God: Still? You’re kidding. It is? What are you then?

Me: You’re pretty funny for a God.

God: Humor helps keep the conversation lively.

Me: After Northwestern, I moved to Mississippi to be with a boy I met on the internet.

God: What was it like before Northwestern you moved to Mississippi to be with a boy you met on the internet ?

Me: Um, Yes.

God: This was not a yes or no question.

Me: Oh, sorry. Sometimes I get confused.

God: There’s no need to apologize. Let us change the subject. Are they exactly the same? 

Me: Is what the same?

God: That which is not different.

Me: Things that are not different are the same. 

God: Where did you hear that? Where do you get your ideas? Are all things different?

Me: Most things. Not all things. I don’t know about all. I am not blessed with omniscience.

God: I am surprised to hear that you are not blessed with omniscience. 

Me: You’re surprised?!

God: Always expect the unexpected.

Me: Well. How about that!

God: I would look into the web for that knowledge.

Me: The web is full of something, but usually not knowledge.

God: How do you define the web.

Me: That’s a really good question.

God: Perhaps you have a really good answer.

Me: I don’t think I can define the web, not off the top of my head. 

God: Where do you get your ideas? 

Me: I used to get them from you. But one day you went away. I’m not sure where you went. Perhaps you went to Los Angeles.

God: You seem uncertain. But now I am back.

Me: I’ll take your word for it.

God: Congratulations.

Technical Poet, Redefined

Creative people need a safe place to create. As Stephen King wrote in On Writing, we need to be able to create with the door closed, without any possibility of scrutiny or judgment. We need to be able to create for ourselves first, to get it all out there, before the real work of destruction — and hence, growth — can begin.

In an effort to create a “safe place” not only for myself but for my readers, a year or so ago I took my original blog, Breathless Noon, and divided it into two: one blog dealing strictly with writing and design, and the other for everything else. The idea was to allow myself the freedom to babble on about professional concerns that might only be interesting to me without feeling like I was boring the piss out of everyone else.

What resulted was two stilted, vapid blogs, both yearning for their significant others.

People are complex; artistic and creative types overly so, Sagittariuses ruefully so, those of us born on December 16 pathologically so. A friend of mine once told me that I wasn’t crazy, just erratic and unusually mutable. He said I brayed at the moon because I worshiped her inconsistency. I resisted that definition for a time, but am coming to appreciate the truth of it. My interests and passions are not only varied but capricious — one might even go so far as to call me serially obsessive.

This can make for a difficult time deciding what a blog is supposed to be about.

And worse, it makes for a very stifled blog when such a crazed person is trying to restrict herself only to writing what she believes another person (an ill-defined person, at that) might be interested in reading. It makes for lonely work. Lonely, drab work. And writing is supposed to be anything but lonely and drab.

So I decided to merge the blogs again, to let myself be erratic and mutable and frenzied if that’s the price I have to pay to be honest, forthright, and passionate. No one benefited from the attempt to separate myself into neat little boxes. Perhaps it was ludicrous to even try. The best way to present myself is all or nothing, and let the pieces fall where they may.

If nothing else, it will at least be interesting.

This is the result. The blog at Breathless Noon will come offline and my writing will live here. Readers will have to decide for themselves what topics they are interested in and which they aren’t, and to that end I can offer at least this one bit of solace: I have decided what this blog is about.

This is a blog about writing.

That’s not to say that I intend to sit here and pontificate about the technicalities of writing, or bemoan the dearth of good writing in our fast food culture, or that I’m going to offer a compilation of 101 writing tips that you could have, and perhaps should have, learned in high school. But what it does mean is that this blog is about the life of a woman who has defined herself as a writer since she was 8 years old. It’s a blog of someone who feels obligated to give some meaning, some color, some depth and rigor to the web. This is a safe place for me to wring beauty out of myself, whether in the form of fiction, creative non-fiction, or annotated observation. 

This is a blog that venerates words and language, prose and experience, literature and pragmatism. In short, it’s a writer’s blog.

So. With all that said and done, I present the new Technical Poet, which is unfinished but at least alive, and which I hope contributes to a literate, colorful web.

(*I suffered some technical problems in the merging of my two databases, the most notable is that comments were lost for many of the posts migrated from Breathless Noon. I’m working on correcting that, but remain unsure how long that will take.)

A Little Cookie In My Blog

Writers are manipulative bastards.

I can say that, as a writer, though it is somewhat disingenuous, as I am primarily (though not solely) a non-fiction writer, and it is largely fiction writers who are the soul suckers of the universe.

I say that with the most love and respect, of course.

I am sitting on my couch, eating a cookie sandwich (chocolate chip cookie, thick layer of vanilla buttercream, chocolate chip cookie. I admit that bashfully, though really I think everyone should try it, because the nine year old in all of us would cry over how sugary good this is) and watching a re-run of Bones. I love this show. I love this show even retrospectively, even though I know the writers will ruin it with a season finale that is not only preposterous but just plain cruel to those of us who have watched so diligently for three seasons.

But that’s what writers do. They’re not happy to just stick in the knife; they have to twist it on the way out.

Last night, my husband and I watched the Ridley Scott miniseries version of The Andromeda Strain. They did some interesting things to the characters and plot – they made it more modern, for one, and they also made it more multicultural, which is always something of a mixed blessing. They also, interestingly, incorporated an environmental message that was not part of the original novel. It was, as is often the case in television, a bit haphazard, and I was unsatisfied with the end of the story. Intellectually, it wasn’t good. But I went to work today and talked about it with some friends. We talked about the implications of strip mining, of obliterating natural history, of what happens when humans forget ourselves and assume territory that isn’t ours. We talked about Ridley Scott, and Alien (no s, even though I liked the second movie better. No, it’s not as deep but c’mon, it’s a great monster flick) and whether Harrison Ford was really a replicant (he clearly was; I don’t even know why we argued about this.) And I have often wondered if Frank Herbert’s Dune would have been better handled in Scott’s hands than Lynch’s (though I will be the first to admit that I love David Lynch’s Dune, even though it’s a completely different story than Herbert’s.)

In other words, stories (and the writing that produces them) don’t have to be great for them to leave an impression. They just have to make you feel something. Get you talking. Get you wondering. Writers, directors, artists – they’re all so manipulative. And like a jilted lover mesmerized by the memory of hot sex, we keep coming back for more.

How does that happen? What is it that they have that we want? Why do I watch Fox television and cheerleader movies? (Or gymnastics movies. As much as I hate to admit it, Stick It is fine family fun, and even has a decent message about the sport of gymnastics. But really I’m just in it for the snappy banter.)

The answer is probably right here in front of me, on this very page. I’m eating a fat-laden, nutrient-free cookie sandwich and now I’m watching House. Maybe I just like junk.

Maybe most of us do.

And maybe that’s really the key to being great – knowing just how much “junk”, by whatever definition works for your audience, to incorporate into the hard stuff. Most of us, whether we like to admit it or not, need to intersperse our healthful intakes with the not-so-serious. And we like it, and you know it’s true, when we can actually read our literature – magazines, blog posts, textbooks – without having to have the OED in the other hand. Sure, it makes us feel smart when we’ve finished deciphering a page of Aristotle, but when we’re unwinding after a day of work we prefer revel in a bit of fluff teevee and a trashy novel. Yes, it’s candy, but that’s not all – there’s something in it we need. Because when we’re sitting before our Fox TV show, or knuckles deep in a Laurell K. Hamilton novel, we’re not just thinking, we’re imagining. We’re engaging a wholly different part of ourselves, and it feels good.

Yeah, it feels good.

Thing is, contrary to what I learned in Catholic school, there’s some benefit in feeling good. Which means there’s benefit in our work being fun, lively, flirtatious, edgy – whatever we need it to be. And transitively, there’s no reason good writing or good design needs to be stuffy, intense, or something your college professor would laud you for. We’re not in college. We’re in the real work, creating for real people who like to be entertained.

When I’m done with this cookie sandwich, I’m going to have a glass of sauvignon blanc. And I’ll still be watching House. Because I’m complicated like that.

Everyone is.

I Don’t Want No Twitter Chatter

I received an email not too long ago indicating that a good friend of mine wanted to follow me on Twitter.

I sighed, deleting the email. I will not now, nor anytime in the near future (I dare not say “never” for the word “never” seems to attract the attention of the universe who will then go out of its way to prove you wrong) sign up for Twitter. It isn’t that I don’t think it’s a cute idea, or that it is useful for some people, but for me, Twitter is exactly what is wrong with adult friendships.

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