Tweet?

I have had a Twitter account.  

My younger daughter set it up for me last summer.  I have looked at it once or twice, but I: 

1. don’t get the point of it.
2. can’t not read every entry. 

I was an English major in school;  what a wonderful major it was for someone who loves to read. While math majors were busy puzzling out calculus and trigonometry and who-know-what, while science majors and history majors were memorizing, I was reading. And writing.  Heaven for a reader.

Years and years later when I was subbing in my daughters’ school, another teacher in the break room asked me what I was reading.

A biography of Isak Dinesen, and it’s really boring.

She asked me why I was reading it since I didn’t like it.

It had never occurred to me to not finish reading something I had started.  I had never done that.  Sacrilege!!!  But who would have thought that the biography of someone who could write such a beautiful story as Out of Africa and who had lived such a fascinating life could be the subject of such a boring biography? I had finally made it to the part of the book where all the author wrote about were dinner parties Dinesen had attended and whom she had been seated near, what they had eaten.  Dinesen at this point was old and ill from syphilis and perhaps attending dinners was all she could do. Either that or a mediocre writer was making a mess out of good material.

I put the book down and never finished it.

But therein lies my problem with Twitter.  My daughter selected people for me to follow, and apparently all of these people tweet many, many times a day.  I felt obligated to read everything because that’s what readers do.  I would be scrolling down through all the tweets, noticing how long ago they had been tweeted, and OMGah, 2 minutes ago???  And there’s a whole 24 hours left?  Maybe even days left???

The only solution was to delete the account.  I hated to disappoint my two followers (who are a mystery to me since I had never tweeted anything. What on earth were they following?) but I clicked on the delete account key.

I haven’t resorted to shouting in the streets yet.  I’ll save that for when I’m senile and confused. 

Which I don’t plan to be.