Saturday, March 20, 2010

I’ve Joined the World of the Tweeters

I’m a late Tweeter. I never bothered until now because I frankly couldn’t think of anyone I wanted to follow. But recently, I stumbled across the tweets of an American business owner I am acquainted with who was tweeting from Vietnam. I was so mesmerized by the things he was writing, about touching down in Ho Chi Min city (Saigon) and standing on the Ho Chi Min trail and actually physically touching and looking into the tunnels that the Vietcong used to get around us in the Vietnamese war and eventually win it.

I felt compelled to comment on his tweets and tell him how much the Vietnam war affected by teen years – that coming of age period when your school teachers start pushing you to give your own opinions about things and to study current events. “Well, do you think this is right or wrong, what they’re doing?” I remember hearing a hundred times, and many of those times it was about the Vietnamese war.

I was in eighth grade when Time magazine published its famous cover the naked girl running down the street covered in napalm with her village burning in the background. I can still see that photo like it was yesterday.

And my mom dated a guy for 7 years who was a tunnel rat. You get to be a tunnel rat by being a small skinny guy – someone similar in stature to a Vietcong who could fit in the tunnels and shimmy through them and kill anything in their path.

An ex-husband of mine is a Vietnam veteran. He has an album full of Polaroids taken in places he was stationed such as Phnum Penh and Da Nang, and we used to sit and look at those photos for hours with their tents made out of parachutes and men everwhere dressed in camaflouge with their shirts off. I remember how much it felt like I had just stepped out of Apocalypse Now or one of those other Vietnam War movies that were so popular in the late 70s and early 80s.

So when Alan started tweeting about Vietnam I felt compelled to start a dialogue and tell him my memories and how he was causing me to relive them. But then I thought, isn’t that the weirdest thing about Twitter? This man doesn’t know me. I’ve never met him or interacted with him before. But all of a sudden, because of this one thing I felt we had in common, I felt the need to interact, and even more importantly, I felt like I had the right to. But why would it matter to him? I thought. In the end, I decided my tweets would offer no value to him, and I never did comment on his. But it really left me wondering, what is the purpose of tweeting anyway? Is it a dumping ground for miscellaneous thoughts? Who wants to follow anyone around and hear every little thought in their head? I mean really, what is the point of it?

Then recently, I needed to start tweeting as part of a job assignment. So here I am a tweeter. I follow Alan now, but still wonder, will I ever talk to him?

Completely on the other end of the spectrum, a neighbor/girlfriend immediately found me on Twitter as soon as I joined and decided to follow me. Why? Simply because she can and because she’s curious about what I will say!

So now I feel that tweeting is part of my daily responsibility. It’s something I have to do. Not only that, but I need to write something that offers value to those who follow me. As a writer for allvoices.com, I expect to have more followers soon, so I’d better write things that they’re going to want to hear. It’s a whole new learning experience for me, and one that I am very excited to take.

Please check out my novel, In Fashion's Web on Amazon.

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