My big mistweet

I'm a schizophrenic poster today. But I need to mock myself publicly before I can sleep.

I'm not very good with anything new. We're talking anything from trendy clothes to electronics...I still have the suits I wore when I worked in an office, almost a decade ago (DOWN! midlife crisis). My brother bought me a DVD player a few years ago because he was so embarrassed that I still watched VHS tapes. I don't own a laptop. I'm surprised I replaced my Walkman with an iPod.

So I'm sure you can imagine that most of my friends didn't know who I was any more when I got a Facebook page. I made every stupid mistake (one friend kept saying, "Do you want the whole world to see that, or just me?") but I persevered. I even learned how to defriend people (insert evil laugh).

This blog scares the crap out of me. No clue what I'm doing. Still don't really know what a blog is. In fact, it took me a week to add the "follow by email" button to my blog because I kept searching for WEDGIES rather than widgets. (I like thinking that was an honest, if not common, mistake.)

Still, I persevere.

Until someone told me I needed to get on Twitter to promote my blog (okay, since I'd rather have strangers read it than people I see in the carpool line).

Holy Mother of God, Twitter confounded me. So many @ signs and it's just this scrolling list of random thoughts (hey, kind of like my blog!! Maybe I do get it!). And they didn't use complete sentences. You had to decode everything. It almost brought on seizures when I looked at it. I had to get out of there.

But then I found out that an old college friend, who is now a newscaster in Atlanta (and, frankly, really cool), gave my blog a little shout-out on Twitter. So I tentatively crept back into Twitterdom to see what she wrote.

And like the biggest freaking dork on the planet, I hit reply (I know what that means!) and sent her the goofiest message. It was like a Twitter hug. But I, of all people, can't limit words to some crazy number. So I got flustered and hit send or post or whatever and then I couldn't take it back but I could imagine her sitting at desk going, "Okaaaaay, loser."

Oh, the humiliation. The stress. Twitter to me is like being dropped in the middle of a bullfight -- it's fast, everyone but you knows what they're doing and you feel like a donkey. Or, and this is not a stretch, like a horse's ass.

So here's my pledge: if I ever have something heart-stoppingly brilliant to say in 140 characters, I'll try to tweet again. But until then, my twitter trap is shut.