I told Dick he better mention me every few minutes in Vienna

On Sunday night we went to dinner at my parents. Halfway through my mom said something about how we always end up talking about this, and I said, “Twitter? We always talk about Twitter?” And she said, “No, breastfeeding. We always talk about breastfeeding.” Which is really silly since none of us is breastfeeding right now, but I had just mentioned that a blog friend of mine (@TopHat8855) gave a speech about breastfeeding at BYU at the same time that I was talking about Twitter.

My point was that it’s a small world, and while I’m glad that I don’t always talk about Twitter when I’m with my family, I do apologize for always talking about the other thing, and I especially feel awkward that it seemed like last night Dick and I talked about ourselves nonstop. We probably do this a lot anyway, but tonight my sister is having weird stuff with her boyfriend (she’s been divorced 6 months, and very vulnerable still), so I’d like to think that we talked about Dick’s car buying process and Susan’s preoccupation with food and my relief at not having the frontal lobe disinhibition that was on House last week without pause in order to smooth the rough conversational patches.

Here’s a recording of my Twitter talk. Dick made it into a podcast, and introduces it, and I mention him too often in an 18-minute period to qualify as any sort of feminist, but the truth is that I rely on Dick for a lot, not the least of which is technological know-how, as evidenced by my embarrassing inability to fix the resolution on my laptop screen once it was hooked up to the projector for this presentation (in case you’re wondering, Dick says you right-click on the screen and go to properties. I don’t know what setting you’re supposed to choose then, though, so hopefully I’ll always have Dick beside me).

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(Click on the play button above to hear the Twitter podcast. And here’s the accompanying handout of links and references)

I’ve always felt comfortable speaking in public, probably because I started doing it in church at age three, and for my parents a couple years before that. When I was in college, I didn’t enjoy writing much. It was okay, and I enjoyed critiquing other people’s writing, but I preferred tests to papers. There’s something about the absolute right or wrong of a multiple choice question that trumps the subjective pleasure or lack that a written passage evokes.

But this past week I realized how much blogging has changed things. I volunteered to give this talk, and a few days later, as I was putting together my notes and links, I wished I could just write a post instead of standing up in front of people. Suddenly it seemed easier to express myself in writing rather than in speech. And isn’t that a kick in the pants?