Day in the Life 13071: The very nearly Twitter mistake + taking stock of possessions prior to our non-move which is a double move

BLOT: (13 Mar 2013 - 03:20:11 PM)

Day in the Life 13071: The very nearly Twitter mistake + taking stock of possessions prior to our non-move which is a double move

I don't have many rules on Twitter, as any sort of cursory glance of my Twitter feed will show. I try to be generally humorous. I try avoid insulting living people or their pet projects. I generally avoid "retweet for a chance to win!" promotions. I try to be descriptive with my links, unless the point is to trick you into one. Beyond that, it's a hodge-podge of multitweets, random drinking anecdotes, tips on being an awesome librarian, rants about book culture and DRM and how old I am, and occasional pictures of cute cats I send my wife. Topped off with mad flirting with Twitter friends of all ages and genders and creeds. I'm polyflirtatious.

There is one rule, though, that I try to uphold: never mention large, contentious keywords unless I can do it in an unequivocally unimportant way. A generalized write-up for this rule-for-one would be: Avoid the Bigs unless you can make yourself look small in the same tweet. So that True Believers™ understand I am not so much talking about them, but around them, and mostly about me, and that makes all the difference. Such words include, but are not limited to, Republican, Democrat, President Obama, President Bush, The Simpsons, Christians, Baptists, Catholics, Agnosticism, Atheists, South Beach Diet, Sun Ra, and Homeopathy. It is not that I am afraid of upsetting some delicate snowflake's deeply personal belief, I just don't want to put up with it. As long as I can say something like [actual Tweet], "Washing down a cocktail of painkillers, multivitamins, and allergy meds with beer. I'm so #Paleo. Also, must be 3:30 on a Sunday afternoon," then I'm pretty sure that people who actually read it will understand I am being unimportant and a little snarky. Sure, a couple of bots dealing with the Paleo diet followed me, and I blocked them, because damn a bot, damn a bot to hell. Those real-human-types who read it will perhaps be a bit offended, but I also give Paleo dieters an immediate out: look how horrible my lifestyle is. Congrats, you win, I am saying.

I, however, made the classic gaffe of using a Big Important Word in a tweet that was not immediately throwaway. A couple of nights ago, I looked up lyrics to a song. This song dealt with death and atheism. The comments to the lyrics were strongly of a type: "I'm an atheist and I'm terrified of death." Fair point, and I don't mean to imply that atheists shouldn't be scared of death or anything, because there are very few modern people who aren't living their whole life, to some degree, in an attempt to mitigate death, to hold it at bay just a moment longer. Even people who tend to believe in infinitely long, glorious afterlives seem to be taking the long road home. I just found it a bit odd to see that same rough comment over and over, alike not just in color but shape and angle as well. In fact, I half wondered if this was some sort of astroturf, but I did not tweet that portion, because of something like Hanlon's Razor. What I should have said was something funny. Something about flowers or teddy bears, but not a half-thought half-speak about two Big Deals.

I ended up lucky, for even though I was retweeted by an account that maybe looks for contentious bits near and around atheism on Twitter (at least she regularly engages in Exchanges that are Heated), the only real responses I got tended to be humorous, warm, and actually concerned with discussing, in 140-characters, the issue. It was a good experience. Had this Facebook, I would still be taking crap over it. Had this not been the middle of the night, even on Twitter, I would probably still be taking crap for it. Being middle-of-the-night Twitter, though, I barely paid for my mistake, but still. Unimportant irreverence is ok. Thoughtfulness and opening up for discussion? Who has time for it? That way leads to paperwork.

At any rate, the other half of this post (or well, the last third) is that Sarah and I are about to play the parts of Sisy & Phus (she'll be Phus, I'll be Sisy). Our carpet is being changed out for a new, better carpet. While this is a good thing, this means that everything currently sitting on a patch of carpet in our whole apartment will have to be moved. And since there are only tiny parts of our apartment that are not covered in carpet, you can guess where this is going: we only have to move it for a bit, and then after the floor is fixed and the new carpet is lain, we will put it all back, again. A younger me once said that moving is punishment by God for owning possessions, which is true, and for us doubly so. Pity the poor Boldens who have to pick it up and put it back. This kind of thing makes you take stock...

Which is what our next three weeks will be. Taking stock. Do we need this book? This DVD? Do we need to have it readily available? How heavy is the entertainment center? All in all, I think we can manage to lose up to a third of possession's to storage and givings-away. 1/3 now is 2/3s we don't have to move then. Which is vital. The biggest personal bother for me is not the utter exhaustion, but the trying to figure out how to handle the week or so of connectivus interruptus, which probably says bad things about me. The danger of moving entirely online as a source of lifestyle, using The Cloud to handle even things like reading, is that when that Great and Bountiful stands just inches from you—data data everywhere and not a drop to download—there is not much you can do but interact, with people, nearby, and all the limitations implied. I suspect my wife isn't HTML5 compliant. Bother.

Doesn't help that by the nature of this beast that books and games will be generally packed away. Ah, if only there was a resource full of books free to browse that I might turn to instead.

Me in 2013, Me versus the Net