Wednesday's Words for October 21, 2009

How am I supposed to keep up? How am I supposed to keep everything straight in my head and figure everything out?

First there was MySpace. Now, MySpace is just plain difficult. It is! I can’t figure it out. I don’t know how to update. Someone set my MySpace up for me, but they’ve been gone (um, not in the ultimate sense, mind you, just not around the old cyber space any longer) and I don’t know how to do anything on it! I was very proud of my MySpace at one point because I thought I had Pierce Brosnan as one of my friends except I think it turned out that it was an imposter because one day he was gone. I do, however, have Kay Hooper as a friend (the real Kay Hooper) and she invited me, and all because I listed her as one of my favourite authors.

Then came BlogSpot. Okay, I kind of get BlogSpot. After all, my publisher has one and I can access it, and if I can access it, and do it right every Wednesday, then I should be able to do mine, and not only mine, but another one I am involved in with my OWG alumni (oh no, wait, that’s Word Press. Oh dear.) But…I forget to do it. Seriously. I have two BlogSpot pages, and I never remember to update either one!

It’s this darn time thing. I never seem to have enough of it. And don’t tell me I’m retired and should have lots of it because I know I’m retired, but I have less of it now than before when I had a full time j-o-b and was busy raising three kids!

Then there was Live Journal. Ha! I had one of those too, but very quickly after I got it I forgot how to do it. I even forgot my password. And, most of the people I know who did do it don’t do it anymore. Live Journal, that is.

Then came Face Book. That, in the beginning, seemed at least to be “old person friendly”. I made a face book page for myself, and began to add friends. And then friends of my friends. And then…the friends started poking me. They wanted to send me cakes and quests, they wanted me to join groups and mafia wars and farmsvilles and test to see how smart/sexy/funny/elf-like I was. They sent me invitations to concerts and to become their fans and all manner of things that I simply don’t understand in the least.

Ah, our next gem of modern technology is a little birdie, Twitter. I feel like a character on Batman, “Twitter me this…” Yes, I have twitter. How often do I go there? Hardly ever. Again, it’s this time thing. I have to write my novels. Then my essays. I need to promote every once in a while because, although I write because I can’t not, and I write because I just plain and simply love to write, it’s kind of nice to sell a book or two every once in a while. And then there are chats, which I don’t attend nearly as often as I should, or even as often as I’d like. And believe it or not, I have a bit of a life off line, too. Not much of one, but some.

One of the people I’ve added as a friend on Twitter is one of the DJs from our local radio station. Did you know there is something called a “Tweet Deck”? I just realized it. I have a question: is the “Tweet Deck” anything like the “Holo Deck” on Star Trek?

So I guess you can tweet (the correct verb for the act of posting on Twitter) from your cell phone. Well, you can, maybe, but I just got another new cell phone a couple of months ago. I have mastered the text message, and I downloaded a ring tone, and that’s all. Have mercy. I’m 55 years old. What more can you reasonably expect from me?

So, I wanted to respond on Twitter to something this local DJ had said. I go to his Twitter page, and there is the message and a link. The link takes me to his web site where another link awaits. The second link I clicked took me to something called blip.fm.

In my day when we had a blip, we didn’t tell anyone about it and we hoped like heck it went away before anyone noticed it.

So now I’ve got the Twitter, the web site, the blip – oh my.

I keep recalling that my first computer was an abacas. And I really, really wonder how I’m supposed to keep up.

Love,
Morgan
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