A Star is Born…
I should have known that nothing reasonable ever comes out of lunch at Eddie’s work.
Ed and I have been giddy all week about new kitten Jawsie, who comes home tomorrow at noon after a very long wait (a whole 6 days). We were jawing about the Jawsmeister while in the kitchen at ILink, and Tom (who is very awesome) started joking about how he’s a crazy cat lady at heart, that his three cats are his kids, and he refers to them as such. Ed, who is still making transition from growing up as a “pet owner” to being married to a “pet mommy” gives Tom an emphatic “Nooooope! No! No.” He expects that will end the conversation (as if it ever does.) He despises the idea that people would call themselves “pet parents”. Of course, my take is, if I’m cleaning up your shit, feeding you, loving you, and not being earth-endingly pissed when you destroy my house, all for gratis? There’s little chance I’m anything else BUT a mom. Just sayin’.
So anyway, I got a little silly and said I was going to torture Ed by tweeting and blogging as Jaws, a trend which has become all the rage ever since Jason Scott started tweeting as his two cats Penny and Sockington. Socks has somewhere in the range of 575,000 followers. To give this some perspective, President Obama had about 300,000 devout web-worshippers during his campaign. Of course, President Obama didn’t joke about funny shit like chasing shakymice and fighting with Penny. Maybe if he threw in a dig about Michelle here and there, he would have bridged the gap. He just had to settle for being President of the free world.
So I get back to the office, and decide that yes indeed, Jawsie has to have some time in the tweety spotlight. She is our technorati kitten-kid after all. So I created a tweetstream for her. She immediately followed Ed, annnddd all of his co-workers who had been in on the conversation. She’s a very outgoing girl. Ed was suitably embarrassed. My work was done.
Here’s the thing about tweeting as your cat: It’s funny and all, and it’s cool I guess to jump on the Sockington gravy train, but there are some people who are obviously really into it. Perhaps… a little too into it. This can’t have been what the great democratic medium was meant to produce. Tweeting as your cat/dog/horse in any serious, continuous way, let’s not even mention building a network of OTHER fake pets, is… hmm. Well, I mean, I don’t want to burn any bridges with potential readership.. but I guess the term that springs to mind is “sad”.
Actually… tweeting as your pet - or tweeting as a fictional character from a TV series for instance - it’s a little like larping. What’s larping, you ask? Actually, it will be more effective if I show you.
This is LARPing
Now… in the interest of full disclosure. I have larped… but let’s qualify this. I was seventeen years old. Around eighteen, I graduated from high school, stopped working at a video game store, and started fucking someone who eventually went on to move out of his parents house and put a ring on my finger. There. Consider my deep dark past disclosed.
Anyway.. tweeting about your cat licking its own ass and breaking Great Grandma Bessie’s bone china as any sort of actual pass-time, for any sustained length of time sort of leads me to assume that being yourself (or even :::gasp:::: being human!) is just too taxing or conversely too depressing. This generalization of course does not apply to Jason Scott, who is going to make a dirty-fisted fortune selling the book “written” by Pennycat and Sockington to the probably-by-then million fans who light their incense at the altar of Socks and Mrs. P.
I’ll admit, if karma kicks in and my next go around is in a different form, sign me up for being a cat. I’d be a natural. My two favorite activities are A) Sleeping and B) Thinking everyone else in my vicinity is an asshole who lives to serve my whims. The cat’s life would be a perfect fit. I’m just not willing to use my five-pound brain and two opposable thumbs to imitate that life 140 characters at a time.
