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Depression
Regarding Twitter: Where Is Greta Garbo When We Really Need Her?
Where is Greta Garbo when we really need her?
Posted October 23, 2009
An investor group has just valued Twitter--communication for our ADHD world--at $1 billion. No wonder, when even my Rabbi is getting in on the act.
Just before Rosh Hashanah, he sent me an email: "I've recently started twittering. If you want to follow me tweet, that would be sweet."
Among my spiritual leader's tweets:
"My kids say that to raise them Jewish and Redskin fans in Connecticut prepared them for all the vicissitudes of life."
"Getting ready for the high holidays."
I should hope so. For a Rabbi the high holidays are Christmas.
Speaking of which, although the Pope doesn't tweet, you can friend him on Facebook and watch him on his Youtube channel.
If you think about it, the Pontiff as a shepherd, is one of the few with a legitimate reason to have you follow him.
Now I'm not a technophobe. I'm even something of an early adapter, having had satellite radio for years, and a cell phone before everyone else decided they needed one too. I even had an Apple II, although I skipped the whole Mac thing. I waited until the second generation to get my iPhone, I've downloaded the pope2you app, and I've set up a network for four computers and an XBOX. And I have a variety of other gadgets, including one of those devices that claims-falsely-to sort all my coins, and another that I point at a star, and it tells me what it is.
I even have a blog and web page, but I'll likely go to my grave without tweeting or friending-along with setting up a spread sheet or visiting the Soviet Union.
And I have a book to flog.
I'm a psychologist and I write about my day job-visiting my portion of the sad millions in nursing homes. Institutions in which people live their lives in public in rooms with always open doors.
Most of the rest of us have at least one door we can close to the world. Nursing home residents have lost that door. Not that our frail, elderly are immune to a kind of tweeting. When you move your bowels, they write that down. When you don't move your bowels, they write that down too.
Reminds me of the old psychotherapy joke.
Patient: Are you writing down everything I say?
Therapist writes down, "Are you writing down everything I say?"
Can I blame this all on Eleanor Roosevelt? Her syndicated column My Day appeared from 1936 to 1962, interrupted for only four days by the sudden death of her husband in 1944. Many of her columns were about the big issues of her day-Pearl Harbor, Brown v. Board of Education, Women and Work-but many were not more than a string of tweets.
From January 4, 1941:
"Miss LeHand and I found ourselves at dinner surrounded by gentlemen."
"I couldn't help remarking how really unimportant it is to have our tables so carefully balanced as to an even number of ladies and gentlemen."
"The French rarely separate after dinner so as to allow the men to talk alone."
Perfectly respectable tweets. Put a Blackberry in her hands, and she'd be right up there with Ashton Kutcher.
But why?
When did the fashionistas declare exhibitionism to be the new black?
I recall seeing a chart of management hierarchy where the low level execs have telephones, faxes, and computers. But at the top, the head honcho doesn't even have a phone. If you want to reach the supreme leader you have to call someone else who decides whether to knock on the door.
I aspire to be the one behind the door.
My grandiose aspirational goals as a writer are to be J.D. Salinger or Thomas Pynchon not a talking head like Doris Kearns Goodwin or Gore Vidal.
Writing is among the loneliest professions in the world-right up there with light house keeper, anchorite, and serial murderer. Let's keep it that way. Although I defer to the world of the marketplace and write stuff like this, I'm happy when it's just me with the laptop on my lap, the dog on the couch, and maybe baseball across the room on mute.
I do fantasize about a Salinger tweet. He's reputed to be an old-time movie buff.
"I'm sitting in my underwear watching the Betty Grable."
I just want to be alone.
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A slightly different version of this under the title, "No tweeting: if you want to reach me, you'll have to knock," in the Hartford Courant, Sunday, October 18, 2009.
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My book, Nasty, Brutish, and Long: Adventures in Old Age and the World of Eldercare (Avery/Penguin, 2009) provides a unique, insider's perspective on aging in America. It is an account of my work as a psychologist in nursing homes, the story of caregiving to my frail, elderly parents--all to th accompaniment of ruminations on my own mortality. Thomas Lynch, author of The Undertaking calls it "A book for policy makers, caregivers, the halt and lame, the upright and unemcumbered: anyone who ever intends to get old."
