Bea Ledesma SMS’d me last Sunday: “I hate my intern.” As the series of events about to unfold would suggest, Bea’s odium towards her new underling had nothing to do with her speculative, acerbic personality. After weeks of carefully selecting interns for “YStyle (yes, we had hundreds of applicants — no joke), Bea had to get this one. She cancelled on Bea the day of the photo shoot saying she had to enroll and that her mom would not allow her to go(on a Sunday?). When Bea tried to call or SMS her she didn’t reply. Bea, on a lark, checked her Twitter account and — lo and behold — the precious intern was indeed having a precious Sunday: she had tweeted “Having S&R pizza. So glad I stayed in Manila. Chllz.”
Chillz up and down our spines, indeed!
Twitter was the last frontier of my adventures in social networking sites. There was Friendster — that got creepy really fast. Then the pretentious A Small World, which proved to be a Craigslist for the gilded bovine lot. I’d get messages for secret aSW parties and, oddly, it would look like a shortcut for saying “asswipe.” I mean, seriously, it was hookup central for douches. Then the egalitarian Facebook, which was so much fun it proved to be time fellatio and the reason why I would miss deadlines. I killed my precious account on New Year’s Day. Resolution number one done: “Give Sunday articles on time.” With the Facebook party over I still had my wee Twitter account. I had 700 followers when I started paying attention to it and later it grew to the thousands. Wow… it was like high school all over again. Dinner conversation would be about how many followers people had. I realized my 3,000 was considered low. Once in the Pep squad always in the pep squad, and never a cheerleader. It’s nothing like Tim Yap’s account, Twitter Prom King, which has enough followers to overthrow a president. Presidentiables beware: Tim Yap could cause a movement with his Twitter account.
When I started I promised myself I wouldn’t be tweeting idiotic things like what flavor of ice cream I was eating. We have Tila Tequila to tweet about fake miscarriages so anything else pales in comparison. I shared news items, trivia and funny observations that I encountered throughout the day instead.
It was a quick downward spiral, the moment Georgina Wilson downloaded Ubertwitter on my Blackberry. Madness ensued. Well, first I was one of those annoying people who put a professionally shot photo as my avatar. My wallpaper was equally disturbing as well with a tile pattern of yet another photo shoot. Acceptable for print, troubling on Twitter. Bea looked at me with disgust, and I was shamed. Yet I trooped on. I started sharing photos of my dog (fairly innocuous) to photos of me and my friends having dinner in our Friday’s best (totally narcissistic) to recent fashion purchases (insane and annoying) peppered with 140 characters of poo talk. I became the person I swore I’d never be and more!
I was having fun! I was a career woman! I was living my dream! I was awesome! At least on Twitter world. It’s all lies, really. I was mostly in sweats serfing again at some photo shoot wishing in that Cinderella sort of way that I looked like the model I was taping clothes on.
Then I started actually having conversations and debates on Twitter. Only Lindsay Lohan and Samantha Ronson did that at 4 a.m. in the morning with really bad grammar! That’s it; I was over it. I had officially become a twit. It’s the ultimate shallow pond of TMI high horsing for the pseudo celeb lot. I mean, hello! I was following Khloe Kardashian and Nicole Richie on Twitter. Meanwhile I hadn’t finished reading my dusty novel from last month. I was too busy tweeting to my followers that I was having a pedicure. Sadness.
So I killed my account and said bye-bye to my followers.
Life after Twitter, you realize that you have become an emotional stripper. Pole-dancing all day with my unpredictable moods and one-dimensional fascinations. Who the eff did I think I was? More to the point, who the eff would care?
I saw a tweet from someone who I couldn’t remember for the life of me saying “Why do people have to flaunt their lives on Twitter?” Um, well, that’s kind of the point, right? Get off Twitter, then! It was followed by “My photo shoot went really well and I got to keep the clothes!” I love this evanescent stream of hypocrisy.
Well, there is a love/hate thing going on with these social networks. We hate it when people post photos of their recent vacations in Europe getting smashed in pedantic nightclubs but we can’t seem to stop looking. My friend even hired a photographer to take photos of her to post on Facebook. Now, that’s effort. It was like CNN for your small network. We found out who got engaged, who got married and — juicier still — who split up. Word to the wise: Do not go near that “Relationship Status” button and you’ll know that, even after posting photos of your outfit night in Embassy, you still have some dignity left.
The day I got engaged I told some of my closest friends. Next thing I knew it was on Twitter! I hadn’t even told my sister yet and some random dude already congratulated me. I had to ask my friends to take it off Twitter for privacy reasons. WTF was this conversation even all about? It was bizarre, but somehow in Twit land we all feel very important and relevant. I mean, who cares that I got engaged save for my friends, family and, of course, my fiancé?
As we all know, the Internet hasn’t really become a friend of mine. From fake blogs supposedly written by me (it uses the word “shenanigans” — puh-leeze!), to rather cool doctored photos of me in bondage gear to the run-of-the-mill terrorist gossip blogs that manufacture more lies than people in Senate and Congress and showbiz combined.
So there: the peep show is over. Information porn: done, done, done. I really want to do a food blog now. But after all this information trafficking I really don’t know if my recent visit to French Laundry will take a downhill turn back to what I wore… again.
Reboot.