Oh my God!
You guys!
In between all the craziness of...uh...sleeping and eating and taking like, THREE WHOLE SHOWERS IN FIVE DAYS, I completely forgot to tell you about the most exciting thing to happen to me ever in my whole life:
AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
PHHHHHHFFFFFFFFFFFFTTTTTBBBBBB!
...is pretty much what I said when I got the notification on my phone, right before involuntarily flinging the thing upward, like it was on fire (VOLCANO FIRE), where it collided with ceiling of my car, teaching us all an important lesson about Checking Twitter DMs While Driving, i.e. Don't Do It, It Could Be A Celebrity.
I drove home with this huge dorky grin on my face, composing hypothetical replies in my head that included the somewhat embarrassing factoid that I was a devoted Reading Rainbow watcher until the age of 12, maybe 13, SHUT UP YOU, and that I record the show for Noah whenever our PBS station decides to air it, and that a rerun this past summer was about composting and I sat there watching it BY MYSELF, with GREAT INTEREST, shouting to Jason in the next room about how we were TOTALLY gonna plant us some potato chunks in our backyard this year, because one potato turns into like, 45 potatoes according to Reading Rainbow, and think of how much money we'd save on potatoes? MILLIONS, probably. Also, yes. Reading was more of a strong point for me than math, as a child. Or ever.
Obviously, I planned on...editing all that down once I got home. Into one concise, non-crazy-fangirl reply, embodying both the reverence a Really Important Childhood Idol deserves with the grown-up understanding that we're all just regular people and stuff.
Then I call Jason and screamed into his voice mail: I JUST GOT DM'D BY GEORDI LAFORGE. JEALOUS MUCH?
(For the record, he SO WAS.)
Then I loaded up TweetDeck to actually compose my masterful reply and found that I couldn't. Because LeVar Burton doesn't actually follow me, because I am endlessly baffled by the Direct Messaging Rules of Twitter, always asking people to DM me and then they're all: I can't, Dipshit.
So I thought...well, maybe he plans to follow me and just hasn't gotten around to it. I should wait a couple hours and see what happens. Play it cool. Yes. I am cooooool.
Of course, he didn't follow me, because...why would he? I am a terrible Twitterer. Tweeter? Twit? I would probably use it solely to keep the world abreast of my children's bowel movements, if I could. I mean, I'm aware that I could, I just often forget that Twitter even exists for days at a time, while everybody else seems so much more...into it and plugged into the whole concept and @ @ @ RT RT #hashtagcakes.
My point is, Twitter makes me feel patently uncool, and we all know that my fragile vagina flower ego simply cannot handle that. So, when faced with the LeVar Burton Direct Message Quandary of Doom, I opted to simply ignore Twitter for a few days until it came to its senses and LET ME SEND LEVAR BURTON A DIRECT MESSAGE, DAMMIT.
Then Jason asked me why I didn't like, just thank LeVar Burton for his message on Regular Twitter, talking to him like everybody else does. And I fretted about that, because you know, he sent the message awhile ago, so I felt WEIRD bringing it up, plus wouldn't that seem kind of obnoxious, like I was BRAGGING to everybody else that OH HAI, LeVar Burton sent me a DM and not you, let's all bask in how AWESOME I AM?
Jason: Seriously, do you not get how Twitter works AT ALL?
Amy: Not really. But remember that time you asked me what the hell "RT" meant? I totally knew the answer to that one.
@LeVarBurton: *is just really wishing Amy had just sent the danged public tweet because OH YEAH, a whole blog entry about this is soooooo much less creepy*
Anyway. I'm writing this because today TweetDeck crashed and I opted to go crazy old school, using Twitter dot com...where I suddenly discovered that I do indeed have the option to reply to LeVar Burton's Direct Message, even though he doesn't follow me. And that I could have replied to him ALL THIS TIME. ALL ALONG, I had the power. And then I went back to TweetDeck to yell at it, maybe kick it a little bit...and discovered that I actually could reply there too, but I'd simply been looking for the wrong icon:
In my head, the lack of a little arrow box in the top left corner meant I couldn't reply. I checked the little gear wheel setting and all the little drop-down menus, but for some reason, THE BOX WITH THE ENVELOPE, THE ONE THAT SAYS "DIRECT MESSAGE LEVARBURTON" WHEN YOU PUT YOUR MOUSE OVER IT, never once came to my attention.
No. Seriously. This is the dumbest thing I have ever done. I admit that. Worse than getting off the train in Newark. Worse than the Not-Pregnant Mistaken-Identity Lady. It's failing at TWITTER. Topped off with a bonus of it involving a VERY MEANINGFUL CELEBRITY CHILDHOOD ICON.
But what could I possibly say at this point, because I would feel the need to explain WHY I hadn't replied earlier, which was so RUDE of me, because Oh Em Eff Gee, he's LeVar Burton and he took the time to cure me of a lifelong phobia and I couldn't even be bothered to come up with a single 140-character reply? Like, I don't know: "THANK YOU." That's only like, 34 characters, or something.
Clearly, my only real option was to turn to my blog and 1) tell you guys about what a freaking dumbass I am (again) (some more) (six bloggy years and counting!) and 2) go ahead and completely freak poor LeVar Burton out and get myself blocked on Twitter for the very first time.
So it is written, indeed.
