Your Five Second Mid-Life Crisis, Brought to you by Twitter
April 17th, 2012 by Jeff TaylorI just had the most interesting five seconds of internal confusion. I finished skimming an interview on peegs.com with current 8th grader, and younger brother of former IU star, Eric Gordon, Eron Gordon all the while thinking, what a sad existence it must be to have to spend months going to AAU games, interviewing 8th graders and trying to write up those interviews as if those answers are in any way interesting or meaningful, when I stumbled upon a tweet by Christian Watford.
And before you bother pointing out that reading the tweets of college students cannot possibly provide any more insight into the human condition or entertainment than a full length interview with an 8th grader, I’ll just stop you there and stipulate your point.
Except this once. Because this is what Christian tweeted.
“Who in my sport blogging class wit me?”
This tweet speaks volumes on the human condition, as everything you’re about to read, occurred inside my head in under five seconds.
“You’ve got to be kidding me! IU offers a sports blogging class? I write for a sports website, that may on occasion be described as a blog. I came to this organically, i.e. having too much to say about IU basketball and only my wife to say it to on a daily basis, I found myself in need of an outlet and these internet weblogs seemed the place for such rantings. I came to this with no formal education in blogging, in general, or sports blogging, in particular, and it seems to be going just fine, thank you all the same. What an incredible waste of time to take an entire class on something that anyone with fingers can do with no formal training whatsoever.
Followed by:
“They clearly don’t cover tweeting in this class, or considering that Christian doesn’t know who’s in his class, perhaps it is the first day and they haven’t gotten to tweeting grammar yet. With a full allotment of 140 characters at his disposal and having used only 31 of them, the decision to forego, entirely, the verb and shorten the word “with” to “wit” provided no twittercific advantages, and thus made them strict grammatical errors, and a direct failing of either the syllabus, the instruction, or the attention of the learner. In any case, this class has done Christian no favors in the realm of sports tweeting, which is, let’s be honest, just a blog without the heavy burden of connect two thoughts in a row.”
Followed by:
“What kind of an old fart am I, complaining, even in my own head about either the grammar of a tweet or the fact that IU is offering a course in sports blogging? Sure, both seem worthy of my scorn and derision, but I seem to recall taking numerous classes in the history of Rock ‘n’ Roll during my time as an undergrad, and it may not be possible to fully articulate the scorn and derision my parents must have felt at the notion of spending money for me to take classes on the music of their youth. They came to their experience of that music in an organic method that is to my Rock ‘n’ Roll classes what Christian’s course in sports blogging is to my work here at indianauniverse.”
Followed by:
“Sweet merciful Tijan! I am old.”
As I said, the human condition of realizing how your parents viewed your youthful decisions because you had the exact some thoughts about these kids today and their stupid, wasteful, college courses.
All in five seconds.
