Can Someone Explain the JOY OF TWITTER?

PLEASE

I took a while (an understatement) to appreciate the connective powers of Facebook. I mean, the first few years I had a page, I looked at it so rarely that my daughter gasped at the un-answered friend requests accumulating on my notification bar.

“Mom, these people will think you don’t like them!”

Who knew that a number next to an icon meant there were messages I was supposed to click on? It wasn’t on the manual. For that matter, I don’t recall being handed a manual for how to facebook in the first place.

But I learned. Slowly but surely, Facebook became a place I check regularly. Facebook groups are water-coolers of surprising high quality. Messenger turned out to be the great connector for one whose phone is not smart.

But Twitter’s charms elude me. The hashtags and twit-speak feel strangely affected, like valley-girl speak of the 1980s. When I post there, I’m in a jungle where I have nary a chirp of evidence the forest animals heard me. You know the old question: if a tree fell in the forest and no one heard it fall, did it make a noise?

Back in the days when my kids thought Facebook was cool, (apparently, since our kind has joined it isn’t so much anymore) they also explained to me that Twitter only makes sense for celebrities. The rest are just riff-raff hangers on, and really, Twitter was for old people. In kid-speak that's professionals in their thirties.

I was not a celeb, and my thirties had passed. But at someone else’s urging, I finally dipped my toes and joined.

And to this day, I’m there but never really there. If anyone cares to explain to me the country called Twitter and how I might like visiting it more, I’m open. Please.

A Facebook Group for EVERYTHING

In an ever-changing world, living half a world away from where I grew up, I found myself thinking about one particular restaurant my parents took me to with some regularity. It disappeared long ago, and we stopped going there long before it vaporized.

It was such an oddity that there were times I wondered if I had really been there, or it was something I dreamt.
The name my parents used was “The Cooperative Restaurant.” It had only two entrees to choose from— meatballs or boiled chicken. If you didn't want either, then no food for you. The servers were burly grumpy folks, who hurled the plates on the tables with such force that the meaty juices sometimes sprayed the customers. The servers either yelled at you or yelled at each other. The sounds of crashing dishes and blood-curdling cursing that echoed from the kitchen behind the swinging doors, were part of the ambience.
It was cheap, and the food was rib-sticking good, in a homey sort of way.

It was so peculiar, and didn’t fit the rest of my memories. Did we really go there? Was there ever such a place?

Turns out there are others who remember, and I found them in a closed Facebook group for folks who grew up in west Jerusalem. More than a hundred commentators in the group waxed nostalgic over the place, first called “The Workers Restaurant,” then “The Cooperative,” and finally “Sovah,” before it met its inevitable demise. I, who was four and five years old when I ate there, knew little of its history, and the older commentators input surpassed the riches of my memory.

Which takes me to this final thought for today's post. Anything and everything that interests you is likely to have a group of others who share your interest. I already belong to a few writerly groups. There really is a Facebook group for everything.