simple kind of life

I’ve gotten completely pissed off with the idea of Twitter. I’ve casually used it for over six months and I’ve just realized how much of a time waster it is. It isn’t simplyfying anything for me, if anything it’s overcomplicating my life. Do I really need a feed of posts from a website I check regularly? No. Do 85% of the “tweets” (ugh seriously) I read contain anything interesting or personally relevant? No. So why am I wasting my time checking this thing twice a day? No good reasons.

I’m a busy person and I would hope if people really needed to contact me it wouldn’t be Perez Hilton style ala Twitter. I thought text messaging was bad enough, but Twitter has whittled down our connection to something so vague and nondescript I don’t see much of a purpose unless you’re promoting anything.

What I find even more disturbing is that as I’ve given more and more time to social media over the last 5 years, I haven’t gotten a lot back on my investment. Do I know a lot of information about people I don’t regularly communicate with, yes. Do I have stronger and better interpersonal skills? Hell no. There have been far too many times I’ve tried to convey an important event via text messaging only to resort to “you aren’t getting this, let me know when I can call you”.

Considering the following breakdown of human communication:

Person to person: Communication through the means of body language, eye contact, facial expressions, vocal tone, word choice, and the conversation is unlimited.

Phone: You still got vocal tone, world choice, and the conversation is unlimited as long as both people have phones and good phone plans.

Facebook: An unlimited box to leave comments, but you don’t get tone or facial expressions.

Text messaging: Limited number of characters, no vocal tone. Maybe a smiley face at the end of it will help you convey what you’re trying to say.

Twitter: Very limited number of characters, can’t really get specific and maybe you’ll have enough room to tack on an emoticon.

Considering that the vast majority of communication is based on the interpretation of nonverbal cues, I think we’re screwing ourselves over.

things i’m kinda over:

twitter

impulse buying shit

intolerance of gay people

being 21 and a half

feeling like i don’t know one of my friends anymore

having to deal with the bureaucracy of my school

telling the truth but it feels like tattling

trying to convey important things over text messaging

not having a clue where the last seven weeks of my life have gone

furchesl:

So…I have this issue.

I still believe I’m invincible. Like all “adults” say about “young people.” But seriously. I’m twenty-one years old. I’ve never been admitted to the hospital, never had a serious illness or been injured. I was diagnosed with asthma when I was eleven, and didn’t have it anymore by age twelve. In eighth grade, I mysteriously went from having 20/20 vision to 20/30 vision, and in ninth grade, I was back to 20/20. I did a LOT of stupid crap in college, and lived through it all (miraculously). 6 of my friends that year got arrested the one night I wasn’t hanging out at the usual place. I never get caught.

All of this is dangerous. I feel as if I’m going to be faced with some serious irony soon. I feel like something terribly awful or tragic is going to happen to me, just for one of those “gotcha” moments that writers thrive on. I feel like it’s going to catch up to me. I’ve had too many lucky breaks in my life.

Guess I’ll just be constantly filled with paranoia until something terrible happens and I can say “I told you so.” Dammit.

Or maybe I’m just invincible.

 This sounds like me and driving. 3 years of driving, not a single ticket. Never been pulled over.

Three weekends ago I was thinking to myself “I guess I’m never going to get pulled over!”.

Fourty-five minutes later I’m on 285 with a Clayton County police officer in my window telling me I was going 83 in a 55.

But then he just gave me a warning, so now I just think I can’t get tickets ;)

President Clinton opened the second day of the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) Annual Meeting by reciting damning statistics about women’s economic marginalization, including that only 30% of the world’s workforce is made up of women. Women do 66% of world’s work, make only 10% of world’s income, and own only 1% world’s property. He said investing in women “can unleash an estimated $15 billion in annual productivity.”