Keeping Myself in Check (Part 2)

I was on twitter before it was even popular. Does that mean anything at all? I don’t know, but all I remember was my sister telling me to text “follow steph23” to the number 40404 and create my own account for her to follow. If I remember correctly, we treated it only as a joke at first, texting the stupidest and most monotonous things to 40404 to which the other sibling would receive the update. Later, after I found out more friends had it and we started to weave our web of twitter friends and followers, I didn’t notice that this 40404 thing seemed to grow into a tool that I along with lots of others used often for purposes both good and bad.

It was the new perspective from Kevin’s blog post about twitter that really made the difference. As I got more friends and a few kids from the youth group (who I also consider to be friends) to follow me on twitter, I think I let it go to my head a little bit. I don’t know what it was, it’s not that I was proud that I had a whopping 12 followers. Steph has much more than I do. Maybe it wasn’t pride at all. Maybe it was just a little boredom throughout the day mixed with a direct feed from my life to the phones of my friends. Maybe it game me a sense of empowerment, I don’t know, but something about how I used it doesn’t sit right with me and it has revealed a bad flaw in the way I view my relationship with my friends.

I updated my twitter a lot. I would do it before class at school, on my way driving to places, in the library while I was reading a book, several times while I was at work, and in many more of each day’s circumstances. Like I said, a lot of it probably had to do with simple boredom. Sometimes some older “tweeters” would get a little upset because the younger “tweeters” were updating their twitters so often that the older “tweeters” got tired of their phones going off every 30 seconds with new text messages. This is understandable, but when some of the older “tweeters” (let’s just call them Aimee Gilbert and Stephanie Benton) sounded off via twitter about a younger “tweeter” (we’ll just call her Kaylea Roberts) updating too often, I spoke up by saying that I liked getting all their updates and I thought that everyone should update more often. It never annoyed me because I always liked it when I was in a boring lecture or at work doing some monotonous task and my phone would go off, telling me what a friend was up to or what they were thinking at the moment.

In this sense, I love twitter because when I go to work or school I still feel in a sense connected to my closest friends. I don’t feel like I’m going off into some foreign world all by myself. I can at least send and receive messages so that I know someone is still out there.

But the negative part of this, the part that Kevin hit on in his post, is that I let twitter fuel my narcissistic tendencies. This is one reason I like to read a lot, because it never hurts to get someone else’s take on things. I used twitter as a sort of “bully pulpit,” sending my opinions about Christian radio or politics or just anything out to my followers. I did this often in the heat of the moment right as the thoughts and emotions came up in my mind, and I think it put off my friends a little bit. Being able to send out little 140 character messages completely about me made it easy for me to slip into a selfish tendency to view myself as the center of the universe and be less considerate of others. It wasn’t like I didn’t care about anybody else, but it led me to take up a “me first” attitude that is never good.

Since I realized what I was doing, I feel like I have grown up a little bit. I’ve taken a step back, examined myself, and looked at what I was doing closely. Now, when I update my twitter I try to think about the people who are receiving my updates and not just the “me, me, me” attitude that I take up all too easily. I try to include them somehow, and sometimes I don’t update at all but rather text one of them. Truth is, it’s so much better that way. I realized that for a while that in my own little world I was looking at my friends as fans or followers and not friends at all, which is scary. In a sense, I placed myself above them, and I shouldn’t have done that.

Of course, half the time I was still just a bored guy with 5 hours left to go in his shift, or a bored guy in a library who missed his friends and would like to send out some sort of something to communicate, or somebody with a great joke or quote and nobody to tell.

Also, nothing beats being able to hijack someone else’s phone and update their twitter for them. There is just something satisfying about letting another person’s followers know that said person is:

“cannibalizing children”

“taking a dump in the yard”

“gay”

"in love with Chris Lombardo"

“eating baby fetuses and drinking embryo juice”

“eating zombie brains”

“pregnant”

And finally, my favorite…

“pooping in the turlet”

If you know somebody who has a twitter, never miss an opportunity to steal their phone and use it to completely ruin their life. You won't regret it.