With Thanksgiving nearing I was reflecting on Thanksgiving last year. One of our family rituals before dinner is going around telling everyone what we are thankful for. One of my highlights last year was being mostly thankful for Twitter. Twitter changed my home here in Milwaukee seemingly for the better bringing with it a multitude of new friends. I had somewhere to go (that place being AJ Bombers usually) that I knew I could be around people who knew me and understood me.
In short this began to unravel. After months of counseling to try and head off yet another episode of alienating everyone in my circle I had to stop and turn to others to help guide me through. The most important part of being a friend is trust. I shared with a friend through Twitter about my dissent with AJBombers, and how I was going to stop going for a number of reasons; yes, kinda of a protest of sorts. I’ve stopped supporting businesses before, this was nothing new, but usually I forgive and forget and eventually return. Unfortunately the friend I trusted put my trust at risk telling another friend which took things to another level blowing the entire thing out of proportion. I later told that friend that this was the beginning of the end here in Milwaukee. I know myself too well that this would eventually snowball into something much worse because I knew myself that well.
Well here we are.
No, I’m not leaving Milwaukee because really I can’t think of a better place, but some of the steps I’m working on now may put me elsewhere, I don’t know. I have to be vague, sorry. Anyway my relationship with the Twitter community has sputtered mostly out control. I’m too honest sometimes, speak my mind, and don’t deal with stupid shit too well. I’m passive-aggressive about things, and I understand what that means better than I did 4 years ago. Here is the deal though, I’m anti-clique-y and found myself somewhat shrouded in it and I needed out. I tried to leave more abruptly, but that caused too much drama for some. So I had to make a point to leave strangely more radically, which was harsh, yet softer at the same time (unfollowing everybody).
I’m a bit more at peace now though comfortably well alienated in a foreign environment once again. I felt Twitter was doing the right thing from the start by not using the “friend” term in regards to your connections on their site, but ironically when hitting the unfollow button on Twitter it actually says in the status bar in my browser “friendships/destroy”. They somehow realize that this is the indirect social paranoia the human condition created, not Twitter. It’s unfortunate.
Just because I don’t want my feed gummed up with the noise of your detailed shopping experience, where you are every stinking minute, and all the app-generated updates of whatever your pleasure doesn’t mean we can’t be friends; to me it means to we need to find a better way to communicate. We need to get back to the basics, and find a better way to talk behind each others backs. I’m sure somebody is developing an “app for that” now that will push those updates to Twitter too. Eff.
