As a minister’s child, I ran in minister child circles. I was not bad at cussing, but it took work to get cussing out of me. Some kids could not cuss at all. You could hear the cussing wrestle its way out of them. One friend believed that non-profane cussing was also problematic, so even his “gawl-dangs” and “bullcraps” sounded like hostage videos.
Now in middle age, I am not really a prolific or accomplished cusser and it turns out, like a particular billionaire, I am also not really a poster.
Like, if I write 1,000 words on the Portland subreddit about the homelessness crisis, I can rake in 150 upvotes pretty easily. If I go low and toss off something short and spicy, I get downvoted to shit.
Twitter? I delete a solid 10-15 percent of my output because I sit for five minutes and feel guilty for being reductive. I like Tweetbot because it makes it hard to see how many updoots I’m not getting when I do finally manage to fire off a take.
Not great at understanding emojis: Which heart color is okay to not seem creepy? Dunno. I used a brown heart recently and sat around waiting to be corrected.
Hate to traffic in memes unless it’s the Steve Buscemi “fellow kids” one and I’m attacking myself.
In middle age, I am now the children I knew who could not cuss.
One of the nice things about The Current Period is that I have so. much. time. to think about how I feel about the things I see myself doing when I find myself idle and able to do whatever.
Like, “Finally! Time to get good at posting!”
Then I post and they don’t really come out right.
I do like chatting with people! I am down for doing that more.
But I also deleted all my reddit apps today, and felt like it was good to just share some pictures and a few longer ideas with people.