I wanted so bad for twitter to fail. I thought it was doomed because of the media’s coverage. The cool kids played with twitter but then fading stars and reality TV celebs tweeted nude photos, unhip politicians tweeted during important speeches…it was only a matter of time before the cool kids jumped off the bandwagon. I could hear the cool ones saying with that condescending I’m cool and you’re not attitude. “Nobody twitters anymore.”

I couldn’t wait for it to go down like pets.com. And then, there is a stolen vote, an oppressed people dying in the street. When twitter was about to be abandoned by the masses of cool young kids, a country whose population (60-70% under 30) created a revolution. They didn’t text their injustice. They didn’t Facebook their status. Nope they tweeted.

I think it was John Stewart (or maybe Colbert) that said America had it all wrong. Twitter didn’t save the Iranian Revolution…the Iranian Revolution saved twitter.

And now, we all will have to tweet. We all will have to know what twitter means. If we don’t, then how can we pretend to be cool and young?

     I am in the process of going through a plastic tub filled with old photographs. Most of the photos are damaged from heat and humidity. That’s kind of what happens when they are shoved from old boxes to trunks to plastic bins for 40, 50, 60, or more years—from person to person, generation to generation.
     At first, I was a little sad to see so much history lost. All those images smeared, peeled, cracked and faded away. Most of the adults in the photos are gone, from the planet as well as the daily thoughts of surviving loved ones. The babies and children in the photos, well some have passed, while others are now grandparents and great grandparents. These photos were all that was left youth, their life. And for the most part they are gone.
     But then, I started looking at the surviving pictures. Photos of backyard swimming pools and swing sets tucked away inside the chain-link fences that separated one waspy cookie cutter house from the next. The people captured here were the stereotypical version of Leave it to Beaver, or My three sons, or the Patty Duke show.
     The mothers were dressed in nice dresses and aprons with hair all done up. The men wore dress shirts and suit pants…not Dockers and polo’s. The kids (the poor things) wore their Sunday best or nice not-so-dress clothes. (I don’t know what to call the style).
     It’s been kind of weird actually seeing these pictures—weird and scary. Which leads me to believe that it just might be ok that so many of these artifacts are now lost. It’s time to let them go. If they hung around any longer, maybe some people would get nostalgic for the lifestyle, and change things back to the way they used to be.