I spuddle.

So a long time ago, my man came home all excited about a job he was planning to take that involved social networking. I was floored. “It’s a blip!” I shouted. “Social networking will never last! It’s a job with no future! We’ll starve to OUR DEATHS! WE MAY AS WELL MOVE UNDER THE BRIDGE RIGHT NOW AND START DOING HEROIN BUT WE WON’T BE ABLE TO AFFORD THE HEROIN SO PROBABLY WE’LL BE OUTCASTS FROM UNDER THE BRIDGE AND WE’LL HAVE TO LIVE … SOMEWHERE ELSE!”

This is often brought up in our household as the time (and the ONLY TIME) when I was wrong. I’m going to have a shirt made up that says, “It is NOT a blip!” I will wear the shirt every day as penance, only the people who will really suffer from this are the people around me who think this is a good idea because after several weeks of wearing the same shirt, I’m guessing I won’t have any people around me at all. My husband may just wear his “I was right!” shirt every day though (and his sweat doesn’t stink, ask him), to rub it in, and he deserves to because honestly, I am 99.9999% of the time the One Who Is Right. Statistics are available on request.

I was dragged into social networking through obligation. My husband-like-person/sugar-daddy took the job and I agreed to get accounts on all these STUPID SERVICES like Facebook (a blip!) and Twitter (TOTALLY A BLIP!) I used them because he often needed to test features and I needed to have a username to be the recipient of these tests. And I am nothing if not eager to please and v. supportive, so after six months of him begging me to GET AN ACCOUNT ALREADY, I did.

Then, one day, I started to use these services for real. Mostly because I am massively insecure and I realized that both Facebook and Twitter were a way of keeping score. I could get more “friends” that my husband! I could WIN! It may be a blip, but I’m a competitor and I will compete to be QUEEN OF THE BLIP! I will win at all costs! I will CONQUER the BLIP! So I started accumulating Facebook friends and I accidentally got sucked into the world of actually, you know, caring what these people were doing and saying. I started USING THE BLIP. I did. It started to feel less like a blip. After all, I used it, ergo EVERYONE must be doing it. It was awesome! Facebook rawked!*

But Twitter? NO WAY. Twitter gave me flashbacks to AOL chatrooms (A BLIP) and I didn’t get it. And then.

Then.

I tweeted.

And!

I liked it.

I liked the blip. I wanted more of the blip. I GOT VALIDATION FROM THE BLIP.

I’ll admit it. I’m addicted to the blip. And in many ways, the blip that is Twitter has saved me from myself. Let me explain! Because I’m going to anyway! So you can’t stop me! When I picture Twitter in three dimensions, I imagine that it’s like one of those pictures where you have one person standing still in a crowd and the crowd all moving by so fast that they are blurs. I’m like the person standing still. And the 1000+ people that I follow are rushing by. Every once in a while, I can press a button, like in a book I once read by … Nicholson Baker? Nick Hornby? Someone whose name is Nicholas? … and stop time. And when I stop time, I can hear what the twenty or thirty people closest to me are saying (as opposed to randomly humping them, which I think is what happened in the book I’ve forgotten). I can eavesdrop or I can actually TALK MYSELF and people will LISTEN.

“So what?”, you might say, especially if you don’t use Twitter because you think that it’s stupid because in theory it IS stupid and so you are right about that but wrong about it in general.

Here’s the thing. I have pretty terrible social anxiety.** I’m kind of a trainwreck when it comes to social interactions. I am a massive misreader of friendships and am either madly oversharing (assuming you are my best friend in the world) or totally undersharing (assuming that you secretly hate me). In crowds, I’m either having the TIME OF MY LIFE! Or am a quivering mass of nerves, ready to bolt (and possibly break my leg and have to get shot) at any sign of, well, anything. Such as suddenly finding that NO ONE IS TALKING TO ME. Or, sometimes worse, that people ARE talking to me but I cannot come up with witty responses. Or just random things, like thinking I can’t feel my feet. This can cause panic attacks, and my panic attacks are particularly stupid because they come replete with a “OMIGOD I’M NOT BREATHING PROPERLY AM I DYING? I AM DYING, NOW I HAVE HYPERVENTILATED, I’M GONNA FAINT AND DIE! PROBABLY DIE!” sensation (hey, just like everyone else’s panic attacks!) which manifests in compulsive yawning. I know. You’re like, what? It’s true. While I panic, I yawn. One day, I’ll be trying to outswim a tigershark and I’ll yawn and drown and he’ll be like, “What?” But then he’ll eat me anyway. Probably the video will become viral on Twitter and I’ll — at last! — be a trending topic.

ANYWAY. My point is that I have social anxiety and panic and it doesn’t fit well with my life where I am BUSY and often SURROUNDED BY PEOPLE and I can’t run away and hide under my bed or in my bed or really anywhere near my bed, a place I rarely see. Like, ever. I am so tired. But that’s another topic.

I’ve tried drugs, years ago, and then I got weirdly addicted to Paxil and it scared me so that I was having more panic attacks on it than off it and as it turns out, I can’t really metabolize any drugs properly, pot makes me super hyper and paranoid and no, I don’t smoke pot or advocate it, but it’s an example of how everything I do does not work out properly as it says on the bottle, or in the case of pot, as it says in popular culture where everyone just gets mellow and eats Doritos. Probably the only time I SHOULD operate heavy machinery is under the influence of sleeping pills. Anyway, now I have kids, and my panic attacks and social anxiety are like #509 on my list of things I have to think about, so I don’t think about them but the other day I was realizing something crucial, which is really the point of this entire post.

I use Twitter to manage my panic attacks. It’s true. I do. Because when I’m standing in the middle of Safeway or alone in my office or in a playground or wherever, potentially having a cardiac arrest, if I take out my iPhone and take a gander at my @replies or whatever, invariably there is something funny or kind or interesting and I just read Twitter for a minute or two and I find that I’m calm, I’m distracted, I’m not freaking out. My reasoning is that if I care enough to see a video of a GREAT WHITE SHARK BITING ANOTHER GREAT WHITE SHARK IN HALF then I’m probably not actually actively dying. TWITTER SOOTHES ME, DAMN IT. It makes me feel a part of something when I’m actively feeling like I’m falling off the EARTH. It anchors me like like like like… I know! LIKE A BUNCH OF BIRDS HOLDING UP A WHALE! But I am the whale! I AM THE WHALE, DAMN IT! And all you little tweeters, you — my friends — YOU are the birds.

Ha ha! My god, I sound crazy!

Oh wells. I mean, we’re all crazy, aren’t we?

My advice to you is to try Twitter. It has all the soothing effects of Zoloft without the unfortunate sexual side effects or whatever Zoloft does that’s bad that I cannot immediately recall because although Twitter makes me happy, it does not do a damn thing to improve my memory.

Oh, the other thing I was going to say was that there seems to be a trend where a lot of bloggers are just no longer blogging and sites like Regretsy (BEST SITE EVER) are taking over the hit counters of the nation. I don’t have much to say about this. (Blogs are a blip!) I just wanted to write it down so if it comes to pass that blogs fade away and spoof sites take over the interwebs, I can say “I WAS RIGHT!”

I like to be right.

I’m doing NaNoWriMo this month, as you know if you read my blog and care about what I say, so posting may be light, but HAHA that’s sort of ridiculous because NaNoWriMo is no different from my regular job so actually I may just use it as an excuse to post less, but actually I don’t even want to post less because I have a LOT TO SAY and so disregard this entire sentence. This sentence is a blip.

* Facebook rawked until the quizzes took over. Why are the quizzes not a blip? Apparently they are not a blip. I do not understand the quizzes. I do not like the quizzes. I do not like them, Sam I am.

** If you’ve ever seen me public speaking or if you know me, you’ll be like, “WHAT?” because I realize I don’t operate like a person with paralyzing social anxiety. I like public speaking. I love it. It doesn’t fit. I know it doesn’t, but that’s me. I’m a paradox, damn it. AN ENIGMA. Like a mystery wrapped in an onion shrouded with secret sauce.

Filed under: Health, Me, Myself and I