Ope Pardon, No. 16: It's Me, Hi

Remember me? It's been a minute, hasn't it?

I don't really have an explanation for why it's been (checks notes) three (!) months since I wrote one of these, but the short version is that I spent much of July and August in one of those moods where you don't really enjoy doing the things you typically enjoy doing (IYKYK) and then September was like this very busy return to Doing Things (both for me but also the entire nation of France, IYKYK) and then I simply lost the month of October (don't know where it went! I can account the for like, 15 days out of the whole month) and here we are in November.

A brief list of notable things to catch you up on, if you were in this for the life updates:

• I dropped my keys down the elevator shaft of my apartment building but then I successfully retrieved them using a wire hanger as a hook, thereby saving myself anywhere from 150-500 euros.

• I got stuck in the very same elevator a month later for almost two hours on a Friday night and when the guy finally arrived, I had to lift my 50lb dog up out of the crevice of the cracked doors like the tiny helpless baby he is. I experienced neither a romantic meet-cute nor a lightning-strike epiphany about my life, values and relationships so I feel a bit let down by the whole affair.

• I gave up on the elevator in my apartment building for fear of what level 3 of the universe's messaging to take the stairs might be but I've made one (1) exception so far because I am not carrying Jack's billion-pound bag of food up three flights of stairs.

There were some other non-elevator things that happened too: I discovered an apartment in which the bathroom is open-concept in the bedroom and proceeded to tell everyone I've ever encountered about it; my friend Anna came to visit and affirmed we can happily be in each other's uninterrupted company for eight days (never in doubt but a little in doubt only on account of my own inclination for introvert alone time); I started a pottery class and realized that I both love and am terrible at the ... manual (?) arts (and I think it's probably healthy to love doing something you are bad at!); I went to Lisbon on a work (party) trip and learned I absolutely cannot hang with the French, these people are tanks, and also those little Portuguese custard things rule.

But mostly I have been fluctuating wildly between order and chaos in an attempt to find a semi-functional routine that allows me to do the things I need to do (work, walk my dog, go to the gym) and also the things I want to do (cook proper meals, write, socialize) and/or haven't quite figured out how to fit into my life in France yet (watch and follow American sports without laying waste to my sleep schedule).

It's funny — and more than a bit belated, possibly too belated — that I would include "tweet" on that last list. Even before the Elon of it all, my Twitter timeline was not always the lovingly curated blend of news and nonsense it was in the U.S. — the time change has done its damage to the algorithm and I feel like I miss more of the good shit than I used to. But also I personally stopped tweeting; I was never prolific but in the last year and a half I feel like I have receded even further into lurker mode, and to some degree, that makes me wonder if I'll cope with the platform's further degradation better than the more active users.

But also: I want to take a moment to eulogize Twitter for the lurkers.

Much has been (and should be) made about how Twitter brought communities together and the very real relationships and life-changing connections that formed on the platform. That's rad, and if I'm honest, I was always a little jealous of the people who found that on Twitter. Most of the people I interact(ed) with on Twitter were people I already knew in real life. I was never one to hop into the mentions of people I didn't know — which I largely consider(ed) a good thing, but it meant that in earlier, let's pretend less toxic, days of Twitter, I missed the boat on meeting and befriending strangers via mentions.

So it goes! I still love(d) it and in the hyperbolic style of anyone writing about Twitter this week, would go so far to say it changed my life.

So what did Twitter give me, if not a book deal or a husband I met under a Klay toaster meme? First, as mentioned but cannot be stressed enough, entertainment. Things so stupid and so funny but also occasionally brilliant and always a little ephemeral. Then, and relatedly: Curation. Of TikToks and funny dispatches from other places on the internet that meant I didn't need to be on those platforms, but also book recommendations and TV recommendations and music recommendations and an invitation to see what all the hub-bub was about with some new thing that strangers whose opinions I had nonetheless come to trust were talking about it even when no one in my offline life was (yet). Returning to Twitter after having watched or read something to do a filtered search to see what these people I followed thought about something was (is) a cherished part of my cultural consumption process.

I am also — and I genuinely believe this, as insane as it sounds — a better person for having spent untold number of hours on Twitter. It expanded my worldview and gave me access to discover writers, artists, athletes, theorists and activists I would not have otherwise encountered in my IRL circles but I could, in my own way, make a part of my offline life. It sounds obnoxious but Twitter was one of the best "listening and learning" platforms if you had the good wherewithal to actually just listen when people with different backgrounds or identities or experiences entered your feed. (That is an enormous "if" and the fact most users did not resist the urge to chime in is also the reason that Twitter very much could be a terrible place to be/tweet.) It was a privilege to be a fly on the wall in rooms I had never been before, but knowing I was a fly, I just took screenshots about better ways to make mac and cheese, patted myself on the back for washing my legs in the shower, and kept scrolling.

It's also not really an exaggeration to say Twitter radicalized me as a leftist. I am an appropriate amount of embarrassed by this. On one hand, it does not reflect well of the offline world of my younger years, but on the other: I mean, what else would have? I didn't do the reading in my college class on American labor history (in retrospect, that syllabus may have got the job done) and Mariame Kaba was not exactly on the lips of anyone at the advertising agency I first worked. But I had Twitter since college and because Twitter is not a chatroom divided by topic, when the people I followed for basketball analysis or TV criticism or Denny's jokes tweeted about other things, well, I learned about that too. There's a lot to be mocked (and wary of) about thread education and "Hi I am an X expert" culture but as an introduction to topics and ideas, you could do a lot worse than Twitter. Losing that exposure will be a bummer, to say the least.

(I am also very aware that my experience is, theoretically and in total inverse, the same one that fosters radicalization of the fascist variety. The difference is that, broadly speaking, the content that radicalized me holds up under most degrees of critical thinking and/or fact-checking and also the tweets that resonated with me, that aligned my values and instinctual understanding of the world with a sociopolitical framework and history, weren't dangerous conspiracy theories and uncut hate speech.)

I don't really know what I will do without Twitter. I think my politics are well-enough developed now that I don't need it to process current events, so that's good. Instead I mourn more the recommendations. And the jokes. And the harmless outrage cycles, by which I mean when the outrage cycle is about, like an atrocious short fiction story and not abortion rights.

I am absolutely a Twitter user who, in the immortal words of Dido, will go down with this ship — there until they start charging $8 for the plebes and then I'm out. And I am not actively looking for a new place, mostly I think because again I was never really on Twitter for the conversation. I lurked Tumblr in college and I may lurk it again, as it seems the closest to providing the abject absurdity and entertainment value but it feels like a lot of work to curate what I want to see so I will probably just ... become less terminally online, which, perhaps, isn't a bad thing.

But for now I'll wait and see. Twitter has always been the platform of reprobate cockroach people, so I am hoping we can outlast Elon's self-implosion.

(Also, riddle me this, Elon: If $8 verified accounts are going to be prioritized by the algorithm, but I don't follow any $8 verified accounts, will I still just see all my usual people?)

In the meantime, in the spirit of playing the violin as the Titanic sinks as well as getting back into the swing of media commentary, I think I am going to tweet through my viewing of the Bravo series, The Real Girlfriends of Paris because that seems like an appropriately end-times way to spend a rainy Sunday.

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More soon.