EXTRACURRICULARS: That One Person on Twitter Who Tweets Constantly is Worse than Puberty

I admit it, I caved, and I'm on Twitter. And I know that the majority of what people tweet is drivel - studies, apparently, have even been devoted to proving the issue. But I don't mind the drivel - most of the time, it's either from a friend, a (semi)-famous person you find hilarious, or, at the very least, a source that is worth hearing drivel from much, even most, of the time, because of the value of what it gives some of the time.

But no person, I don't care WHO you are, is interesting enough that I want to hear 20+ tweets from you an hour. Every hour. Day after day after day after...

Inevitably the constant-tweeter falls into repetition; one constant-tweeter who for some reason I still follow makes up fake-news headlines, so this morning, for example, I woke up to day four of fifty tweets from him, posted since 6 AM (why start tweeting at 6 AM??? SLEEP!), featuring mostly-lame jokes about the balloon-boy snafu. There is humor to be found in the whole "I-sent-my-kid-up-in-a-weather-balloon-in-hopes-it-would-get-me-famous-and-somehow-not-be-discovered-for-what-it-patently-was,-namely-dangerous-amounts-of-vanity" vein, and no doubt, if I were able to truly evaluate each of this person's tweets about the affair separately, many of them might be, taken individually, quite funny.

But they're not taken individually, they're taken as a collective: @___ : halloween idea - wrap yourself in mylar and puke on TV -- too soon? about 1 hour ago; @___: TLC promotes Jon & Kate vs. The Heenes cage match this Saturday - who cares less about their kids? Decide it in the ring! about 1 hour ago; @___ : really, by naming their kid Falcon, you have to assume the Heenes were planning this for at least 6 yrs about 1 hour ago; and they go on, and on, and on, right up to the present moment.

I've had this problem with friends, too, though. I don't mind hearing about what's happening at your office, about what you ate for lunch, about what you heard on the radio just now, at least not every once in a while; I very much DO mind hearing about each and every one of these pedestrian events, and 37 others I haven't listed here, that have happened in the last 45 minutes since I refreshed my twitter page.

How can you have so many observations about your workplace when all you do is tweet? Can't you set up plans with so-and-so for Friday night via text, e-mail, or regular-old-phone calls, rather than direct-messaging each other back and forth 22 times, each of them showing up in my feed? If you want to chat it up about the intricacies of tax code to other tax-code-obsessed "tweeps," can't you have one account for friends and another for interested business-related individuals? Believe it or not, I don't care about the new thing you learned about displaying 1040 forms that has significantly reduced pointless questions at your desk today, or about the old man you helped who was "so cute" a few minutes ago, or about how you're changing your filing practices.

Yes, one can unfollow, and I finally did, for the first time, a week or two ago. Ah, blessed silence...and then the next schlub who thinks I need to know the state of every mental or physical sh*t s/he churns out starts up...

-Posted by Jilly