So Here’s the Thing…: Notes on Growing Up, Getting Older, and Trusting Your Gut(31)

About twelve hours later, I had forgotten about it. But then I checked Twitter. And he had responded! The way anyone would respond to something like that, which is to say he tweeted something like “go home, Grandma,” to the mild approval of his fans.

In the grand scheme of things, this was not a big deal. But I felt totally blindsided—the idea that my reputation, even in this small, relatively insignificant way, could be morphing unbeknownst to me while I was going about my day offline gave me a compulsion. I felt like I needed to constantly check to see if anyone had said something bad about me. Which is not usually how it starts—usually you’re checking for likes—but it’s all part of the design.

Now, I try to keep most of my stuff positive, unless it’s about Donald Trump and the crew, in which case I try to keep it extremely negative. It’s a little disappointing that the negative stuff gets an exponentially bigger response—every viral tweet I’ve had is angry or upset—than the nice stuff, which it always seems about eight people care about. It’s much easier to drum up an impassioned pack mentality about something infuriating than “This person’s charity project is awesome!” Still, I always check all my mentions because I like to wade through to find the nice stuff, and to talk to people, which is supposed to be the point of Twitter, and if I’m going to use it I feel like I might as well get something out of it. When random strangers say terrible things, it’s usually about my appearance—guess what, assholes, I know I’m not skinny!—or the fact that I have more than one cat. (What is this, 1915?) The meanest tweet anyone ever sent to me was when I thought my cat Petey went missing and tweeted a photo, to which someone replied, “Check Weight Watchers.”

These kinds of insults are much easier to ignore than attacks on something I’ve actually said. That’s why if I have a thought that’s even slightly controversial—except when I’m live-tweeting The Bachelorette, when I shoot from the hip—I always fact-check. I have a lot of followers, which is heady and something I see as a responsibility: You see so many people tweeting out blatantly untrue or misinformed takes to hundreds of thousands of followers, and I don’t want to be one of them. What Trump has done with the official White House accounts is so depressing to me and dangerous to everyone—people should always be able to look at those and see facts, not gossip or propaganda. Even if they know, deep down, that what they’re being presented may not be 100 percent the truth, they haven’t made the mental leap to accepting that something the White House posts online may not be true. It works on reality TV, but not with the actual news.

In other words, even though I tweet funny things—or what I think are funny things—I take social media really seriously, and I think everybody should. It may have seemed like a fun way to waste time and talk to your friends when it first started, but its power is now obvious and undeniable. You can either use it to your advantage or let it use you.

1 I can’t believe I have to explain this, but I also know I probably have to for some of the young readers (no judgment): A “tape” is not a roll of adhesive you use to wrap presents or fix torn sheets of paper, but rather a cassette tape, a physical, post-record, pre-CD method of listening to music. Please don’t tell me I have to define “CD”!





In Praise of Monica Lewinsky



I remember the fall of 1998 very clearly. I was twenty-two and living in that one-bedroom on Prince and Thompson in Manhattan that I always talk about because four of us shared it and, come on, that’s pretty intense. It was some of the most fun I’ve had in my life. We got up early and took turns getting ready in our single bathroom so that we could all be on time for work at 9:00 AM.

At the end of the day, we’d all get home, discuss what we wanted for dinner—usually Wasa crackers with tuna and mustard, a half of a turkey sandwich from M&O’s on the corner, or, if we were splurging because someone got some overtime money on her paycheck, pad thai—and then flip on the antenna TV. Regardless of the meal, we were either watching the final season of 90210 or Bill Clinton’s impeachment proceedings. Only three of us could fit on the couch, so one person—usually me, not because I’m a martyr but because lying on the floor felt good sometimes—would lie on the rug. We didn’t have space or money for a vacuum, so the rug had seen some things, but it was fine.

I don’t mean to harp on this, but the news would play out so differently now in terms of public opinion—not necessarily in outcome—that I have to mention it: We didn’t have any form of social media back then, so any news we got was usually at home, from the TV, during designated and contained time periods. Now we take to Twitter to get little hits of what’s happening all day, and those concentrated dispatches aren’t just straight news: They encompass a huge amount of opinion. Back in the day, Tom Brokaw or Dan Rather would give you the news, which was presented as facts, unadulterated by subjectivity. Of course, there’s no such thing as pure news—any way you present something is going to color it one way or another—but it was much more straightforward than it is now. So instead of glutting yourself on what other people thought online, only to grow so sick of hearing interpretations of the day’s events that by the time you get home you never want to hear another opinion again, you would usually have conversations with your friends about what you saw on TV.