A Writer and his Needy Tweets

In previous columns I have admitted to being a very flawed individual.  I am lazy.  I lack the will power required to abstain from snack foods.  My avoidance of confrontation reaches pathological levels.  I’ll stop there because this column is limited to eight hundred words and if I am going to get to the point I really want to make I need to limit the list of my character limitations.  Which brings to mind another flaw, I am horribly long-winded. 

Now to the latest flaw I am trying to work through.  I am too needy of positive attention.  Everybody craves and appreciates compliments and accolades.  Where I may be different is I want it for too many things and in an unrealistic timeframe. 

Case in point is my existence on Twitter.  Twitter is a social network that allows people to share all sorts of information in bursts of 140 characters or less.  Some people use this internet contrivance to share important stuff like what they had for breakfast.  Others use it for promotion of their money making endeavors.  The people I choose to follow mostly write jokes, which is all I try to do.  This is where my neediness comes into play.  I will create a wonderfully crafted Tweet (that is what one calls the individual units distributed on Twitter).  Then I spend the rest of the day looking for validation, frequently, no, really a lot. 

There are two different ways to show approval for things written on Twitter.  If you particularly like one, you can click an icon which labels it a “favorite”.  A higher form of acknowledgement is when a person “re-tweets” something.  This means they liked it so much they then send it out to all of their followers.  Whenever anybody does one of these actions the individual Tweet is tagged with the number of favorites and re-tweets it has received. 

That is my problem.  I am constantly going to my Twitter page clicking on my Tweets hoping for favorites and re-tweets like a love starved puppy jumping up and down at his master’s feet demanding attention and belly rubbings.  No really, I am that pathetic, just not nearly as cute.  One problem is it doesn’t happen all that often, the favoriting and re-tweeting, that is, the neediness happens all the time. 

At the moment my Twitter account has 74 followers.  Last week I had 75 and went through an inordinate amount of grief when I lost one.  The defector was not one of my actual friends, meaning someone I have seen with my own eyes in real reality.  So the fact that I was emotionally jarred by the fact a person (a person I have never met, would probably never meet and may not have even liked if I did meet) took less than five seconds to intentionally “unfollow” my sporadically attended to and even more sporadically entertaining 140 character attempts at humor is not the healthiest of reactions. 

I have one follower who is a real life comedy writer and has over thirteen thousand followers of his own.  When he favorites one of my Tweets I have to squelch the desire to contact all the girls from high school who would not give me the time of day and inform them that I am officially a funny person and they sure missed out.  I am able to resist that urge for two reasons.  First, it would accomplish absolutely nothing and second, because contacting all the girls from high school who showed zero interest in me would require a very large amount of time and effort…days, probably weeks. 

A few months ago this cyber-buddy wrote a Tweet in which he suggested that people follow me and then said “He is a funny guy, a nice guy and he teaches kids and cares about them…We need more like him.”  I was thrilled beyond words and as I stated earlier in this column I am by nature long-winded.  I never would have thought I’d get my tombstone epitaph from Twitter especially one written by a guy who has also written words spoken by Homer Simpson.  It also doubled my follower total in less than twelve hours. 

Writers are often very needy people and comedy writers are the worst.  I want to take a moment to thank those of you who have reached out to me because of this column:  Janet, Dick, Joe, Letty, Sandy, Ann, Linda, Jennifer, Kim, John, Jim, and most especially, Doris and Larry.  Your kind words mean more than you know…and maybe more than they ought to because I am not a well man.

Christopher Pyle greatly appreciates everyone who reads his columns.  He can be contacted at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com.