You're Just Looking For Attention

An interesting discussion on Metafilter today got me thinking about the right to speak, and my own hangups when it comes to self expression. The discussion was about Jaden Smith, celebrity son of big time movie star Will Smith, and his strange pronouncements on Twitter. It actually wasn't that interesting. The kid has acquired a reputation for posting strange non sequiturs, and someone on Buzzfeed decided to take advantage of this by pairing Jaden Smith tweets with Garfield cartoons. The bit is marginally funny, but you could probably do the same thing with anyone's random Twitterings.

What interested me is when someone mentioned that Jaden had an Official Twitter account, and another Mefite said that his publicist probably encourages him to blast a quota of tweets out into the infosphere every month. Now that is strange. Heck, it's downright weird. His publicist thinks it's a good idea for a movie star to send unsolicited messages to random people? I mean, you can be on the bus or sitting down to a nice prime rib at AppleBee's, your phone buzzes, you see it's Jaden Smith tweeting You Can Discover Everything You Need To Know About Everything By Looking At Your Hands, and what... You smile like it's a good thing? Wouldn't that be incredibly annoying and make you hate him? Apparently not.

I just can't imagine doing this, and therein lies the problem. Deep down I've always felt that I'm unlikable, and people can only tolerate me in small doses. Twitter and its accompanying cellphone culture is weird and alien to me because I just can't believe on a gut level that people want to talk to each other that much. In our house phone calls were mostly received, not made (by a ratio of maybe a hundred-to-one), and even today I find it extremely difficult to call people. It just feels like an invasion of their privacy. I like talking to people on the phone, but calling them makes me feel tremendously guilty, because I know I'm bothering them with my unlikable self when they have better things to do. Tweeting things to a list of followers would ramp that guilt up to a whole new level.

This causes problems with writing, too. I started this blog as a storehouse for interesting things I've written elsewhere on the perishable Internet, but I've never once used it that way because deep down I don't think anything I write is worthy of preservation. I was going to post photos here, but still haven't done it. I barely post on Facebook. There are so many things I want to write, but never even start because I hear that voice (my father's weary voice) saying "You're just looking for attention." My mother had cancer for a long time, and Dad had to care for both of us. It was really hard, and I don't begrudge him anything. He did a great job, but that kind of situation messes you up as a kid no matter how much love there is in the family. Whenever I had night terrors or cried because I couldn't fit in at school, he'd say "you're just looking for attention" and I'd stop because that was the ultimate sin. You're not supposed to look for attention, you're supposed to just do your job and be quiet, like him.

But maybe that isn't the best approach to life for everybody.