tweet this bitches!

I don't get Twitter.

Maybe I'll get it later. Right now, though? I don't want to be more switched on than I already am. My back hurts from the hours I sit at my computer every day. My brain hurts from the amount of crap I sift through to say what I want / read what I want / learn what I want from the electronic world.

Do I want more information flooding my phone or inbox? No, I want to read a book.

I get irritated every single time Facebook asks me what I'm doing right now. I ignore it except for last week when it was early in the morning and I broadcast to my network, 'Jessica is translating a spanish radiology report and thinks life is super fun.'

I keep my television back in the bedroom, out of the living room, for a reason. I walk into the Verizon store and say I want a phone that doesn't do ANYTHING except make phone calls. Do you know how hard this to get? I don't even like making phone calls. But I make them and I text and then I max out with blogging.

This is why you'd not expect to find me at a tweet-up. Yes, you heard that right. TWEET-UP. It's a live meet-up, for tweeters, I mean, tweeple, people, whatever. People who tweet each other on Twitter.

I went to this tweet-up at a local bar because my cousin Mary Beth tweets the hell out of her iPhone. She follows people and people follow her. Some of the tweets are personal and some are professional. She follows trends in her field - marketing - and networks through twitter. It sounds useful to her.

I went partially a) because she said I'd meet local bloggers but mostly and almost entirely b) because it's one of her things and she is very supportive of me and it would be a nice cousinly thing to do.

Matthew went for the free cookies.

Well, we didn't know there'd be free cookies but that ended up being major. We sucked at tweeting-up. Mary Beth was awesome: mingling, working the crowd, introducing herself to groups of strangers, if you can call someone a stranger when you know details of their daily life through Twitter. But I'm not knocking the tweet-up, it's cool that the tweeters went live.

I'd be somewhere else today if Mary Beth hadn't made me join Friendster. I met Ariel in New York on Friendster. Ariel became an in-person friend after he invited me to see Nancy Sinatra sing in a lounge. We sat in a booth, feeling kind of bad for Nancy who seemed bummed, if not totally drugged up, to still be singing about what her boots were made to do. That song came out in 1966, after all.

Ariel was generous with inviting me to dinners and parties and introducing me to his friends. I met his friends who work in music tour management. I helped Ariel with his application to grad school in Israel, he left for Jerusalem, and I started working on tours. He's a friend I made online who impacted my life FOR REAL.

But I still feel a disconnect with the idea of getting a regular Twitter-style update on what people are doing every second. I don't care what people are doing. Unless it's part of a story with some context or it makes me laugh, it's just another distraction. I have a hard enough time keeping up with the friends I already have.

Maybe tweets spark something for people that I don't understand because I haven't tried. Maybe it'll become a professional necessity for me later. Until 2001, I thought cell phones were frivolous. I don't know.

At the tweet-up last week, Matthew and I ordered drinks from the bar and stationed ourselves next to the cookie tray. One of the organizers came up to us, 'Are you here for the tweet-up? Are you on Twitter?'

Yes and no, I told her. But my cousin is on Twitter, I said, 'And so is he,' gesturing to Matthew. Matthew told her the truth, that he is indeed on Twitter but he doesn't follow anyone and no one follows him. (Takes another bite out of cookie)

This struck both of us as really funny. He is such a lame tweeter. We were already getting drunk. An hour later I was more drunk and talking to a blogger who told me I have to Twitter. I asked her husband if he tweets and he said, 'NO.'

'So you're just here to be supportive? I asked.

'Yes,' he said, taking a gulp of what I'm going to say was a double cocktail.

Matthew joined me at the bar and showed me the message he'd just sent to no one since no one follows him:

Tweet this bitches!

We snorted and started negotiating how long we'd need to sober up before one of us could drive home.