In most instances, the cases of cervix, breast and ovarian cancer are detected a bit too late when it has already reached a serious stage. viagra no prescription cheap You will soon receive your online viagra sales order at your doorstep within 24 to 48 hours. vardenafil canadian pharmacy Pleasures of sex could be reclaimed easily with a little help from Mother Nature and some important nutrients, men can decrease their chances of experiencing erectile issues. Erectile dysfunction is also such health condition which cannot be shared to anyone, even to the point cialis prescription of submersion. I just had a conversation at work with a young person who, after finding my public Twitter account on his own initiative — I’ll confess to having a second, private one that sees more traffic, but only because I use it to sign up for all the crappy spam that marketers try to force us to regurgitate for them — wondered why I didn’t post anything there at all. I think he suspected that I was somehow reserving my private thoughts for a more exclusive crowd, and I’ll admit that there was some serious temptation to let him believe that this was the case, that I’m actually a font of wit and wisdom who only rarely condescends to splash across the faces of hoi polloi. But it’s not the case. And in talking about it, and listening to him describe how he relies on Twitter to alert him to things that I use Google Reader for, I found myself wondering: what is the reason that Twitter fills me with such revulsion? Why, as Facebook’s news feed has become more and more like Twitter, have I started posting to Facebook less and less, and reading it once a day instead of hourly? Why is it that Google+ feels so comfortable to me, where Twitter and Facebook trigger my avoidance reflex nowadays in the exact same way that blinking Instant Message alerts do?
It can’t be that I inherently dislike nattering, because I am a born natterer. And it’s not that I don’t like pouring raw data into the hungry void inside my unhinged skull, because that’s certainly what I think the Internet is for — at least, the tiny part of it that’s not just porn and humorously captioned photos of cats (or humorously captioned photos of porn, as one site started by a friend has attempted to monetize). And I think it boils down to these things:
- First and foremost, I realize that I am not that fundamentally interesting. There are times I’ll have an amusing thought that I think someone else might want to read, and so I’ll throw it out on stage like a broken-winged dove pulled from a hat, but this happens less and less nowadays. I remember being as young as the “young person” above, and certainly I burned with a different fire then; every thought I ever had was worth the sharing, or at least the attempt to share it, and it certainly felt like I had more thoughts. I cultivated them, and sought out friendships with people interested in the same vanities: that horrible, small-town version of the Algonquin Round Table. Nowadays, though, I find myself struggling to express creativity through the written word, even though it was once a dream of mine; when given the opportunity, I’ll hammer some pieces of wood together or sculpt something in clay or even spend an hour at the loom. I find more and more solace in mental quiet and the work of my hands, in what I previously and derisively called MeatSpace. Deprived of silence at home, I have come to value it, where in the past it actually terrified me. I don’t want to be That Guy standing on the corner and shouting, and I don’t have time to listen to him anymore, either.
- I like to control my inputs. That is to say that I actively resent knowing anything about Kim Kardashian’s wedding and subsequent divorce despite the fact that I have never seen a single moment of any show she’s ever been on, have never read a single article about it, have never seen a news segment covering it, and have no interest in her at all. I don’t watch TV. I don’t read entertainment news. And yet I know she’s related to Bruce Jenner through marriage, made a sex tape, has brown hair, and married some guy in a $10M televised wedding who she divorced 72 days later. 72 days: I know how long her marriage lasted to within 24 hours of precision, against my friggin’ will. So the knowledge that there are marketers — I was going to write “people” there, but thought better of it — whose entire careers hinge upon shoving crap into our brains via short-form spam intended to bypass our natural filters actually incenses me. Every time I see someone use a hashtag that was almost certainly developed by committee, or hear someone talk about their video “going viral,” or am asked to spam my friends and family on Facebook to have a chance at winning a Kindle, my brain itches. It cringes in embarrassment. It writhes. Social media, in order for me to enjoy it, has to be heavily weighted toward the “social” and away from the “media.” I don’t care whether the Toyota Yaris is a car…No, it’s more than that. I hate that in order for me to watch someone drive a forklift into some wineracks, I am required to know that the Yaris is a car.
- Remember how I said that I burned with a different sort of fire when I was younger? Part of that was my determination to leave my name on the world, to etch it into the moon like Chairface Chippendale or, barring that, at least to pee on something enormous in a memorable and lingering way. I wanted to be remembered for my greatness, to have my life witnessed and its worth affirmed. And for some reason I thought that spewing things at people would help with that. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that this sort of desire comes in waves and shouldn’t be encouraged; when it passes, I realize that I genuinely don’t care what most people in the world think of me, and am shocked and occasionally dismayed when they seem to care what I think about them. I have a wife and two daughters who are dearer to me than anything else, and I cannot imagine any accomplishment I might ever achieve that will be more lasting; every second spent trying to chase fame or achieve some sort of fleeting “greatness” on Twitter, of all places, is a moment that I am not showing Sophie how to weave, or Haley how to read, or Christy how to be comfortable in her own skin. And I know that’s a false dichotomy and, to some extent, sour grapes; if the opportunity to do good on some larger scale were dropped into my lap, I probably would take it — but it’s not an opportunity I feel compelled to seek out anymore. I don’t want to present this as something I outgrew, as if my drive and passion were just regrettable symptoms of a misspent youth; it’s not a unequivocally good thing that I’ve become a laser-focused homebody. But I am one, nowadays, and as a consequence it means that I find more and more fulfillment within a literal arm’s reach.
So why don’t I just carefully consume Twitter, to identify those people whose insight and chatter would be valuable to me? I’m going to have to think about that, but it’s possible that a lot of it might have to do with the fact that it took me over a thousand words to elucidate this idea.
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