Stop the social media whirl, I want to get off

I'm not an early adopter of anything, never have been.

Didn't own my first pair of button-front Levi's til I was in college. Was certain rap music was a fad that would quickly die out with Devo. Regarded sushi as completely unappetizing until, well, until I got up the nerve in the late-90s to actually try it. And then only ate California rolls for two years.

You get the picture.

Yet somehow I've gotten sucked into at least wanting to join the dizzying din of Twitter and Facebook and whatever else some young MIT drop-outs are cooking up in their garages.

Problem is - I'm not very good at it. My Facebook status updates elicit yawns (unheard, but deeply felt my friends), my tweets seem to disappear into the void (if a twitterer tweets and no one retweets or responds, does it really exist?) and texting only works for me because no one expects me to be witty or charming - just specific. "On 6:02 to Hewlett. c u soon" may not be Haiku, but it gets the job done.

The thing about FB and Twitter is that we all yearn to be relevant and funny and retweeted, and followed on fridays. But I imagine many out there feel like I do when no one follows me on Friday - like the kid picked last for the team in gym, or the 12-year-old girl running aimlessly back and forth across the lawn during the kissing party because no one wants to catch and kiss her.

In a way, Twitter reminds me of the wire service, UPI, where I worked in the 1990s, before email and the Web. We had an email-type service between bureaus and it was great fun to instantly communicate with bureaus in London and D.C.

And whenever news broke, we all saw it instantly stream across our terminals in Twitter-like bulletin format if it was a really big, A-wire (national) story like the Oklahoma City bombing.

I remember how cool I felt knowing the news before anyone else did - before the all-news radio stations, before TV, and at least a day before the newspapers.

While much of the chatter on Twitter is about Twitter itself and social media in general, a lot of it is also about being the first to share a link to a story that no one else has read about yet. Or posting a picture that no one else has seen. And becoming the cool kid with 100 more followers because of it.

At UPI, we were all the cool kids (especially the guy who constantly listened to the police scanner), and I felt smug in the knowledge as I headed home that I knew exactly what was going to be on the local news that night - many times because I'd written it.

But then I got into trade magazines when UPI stopped paying my expense checks and contemplated a 5th bankruptcy, and then into marketing when I got sick of trade magazines and poverty.

And so now, here I am, the head of marketing for a professional services firm, the mother of twins who enjoy texting their cousin on my phone and exhort me to stop spending so much time on Facebook, and a near-total Twitter failure.

Maybe I haven't given it enough time. Maybe I just haven't found my true niche of former reporters turned trade magazine editors turned mothers of twins who would instantly bond with me and find my separated at birth jon stewart photo juxtaxposed with a Russian art portrait hilarious.

Or maybe, just maybe, I'm not cut out to tweet. Maybe essay writing is my milieu, and I don't need to be like Meet the Press' David Gregory, fishing for a lunch date from Team Obama as he walks near the White House. (Although the Page Six devotee in me gets a strange thrill from being able to eavesdrop in real time on celebrities' most boring or inane thoughts.)

Brevity may be the soul of wit, but it took Tom Robbins 288 pages to write Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (the first book I ever read that I wished I had written.)

"Sissy Henkshaw Gitch" is 20 characters right there, and she hasn't even stuck out her enormous hitchhiking thumb. So I won't feel so bad if my tweets fall flat, or if I end up withdrawing from the Twitterverse altogether.