Hi Darling Ones,

How goes your holiday season?

Mine started early this year when Sister #2 arrived on December 10 to help me around the house and hang out in Minnesota visiting her MN friends.

Max arrives tonight. Jaycie comes in tomorrow and then we’ll be holidaying it up — a Very St. Martin Christmas, Christmas, Boxing Day Lunch, and Rock & Roll Bookclub Dirty Santa. Everyone leaves on December 31st and by then I’ll be ready for a long winter’s nap with Wendell & Los Gatitos.

ANYWAY, Sister #2 is the reason I’m finally giving up Twitter.

My Twitter days have been numbered since Elon Musk started stinking up the joint. But, I kept making excuses not to leave because I love Twitter.

I joined Twitter in March 2007 and didn’t see much value in it until the 35W Bridge collapsed in August. I remember checking Twitter constantly, watching for my friends to check in.

Since then my love just grew. I looked forward to watching award shows with Twitter. I mourned losses with Twitter and celebrated with them too. I’ve watched some of these people get married, have kids, go through divorces, and loss of parents. I love the little clutch of weirdoes I follow on twitter.

Twitter has always been my social media choice. I don’t like Facebook and I like Instagram, but it’s not Twitter.

Why am I quitting Twitter? Because my sister asked me to.

When your Jewish sister (she converted) asks you to quit an anti-semitic hate farm, you quit.

It is, after all, the very very very least I can do. I can’t keep her and her friends safe. I can’t obliterate anti-semitism. I can keep my thoughts off a breeding ground for hate filled with people who want to bring harm to Jews.

It’s terrifying out there for her and Jewish people, so I quit Twitter.

It makes me sad to leave, but not as sad as anti-semitism makes me.

If you want to find my random musings and cute cat pictures you can find me on Bluesky. If you’d like an invite, hit me up — jodi@iwilldare.com

I’m jodiwilldare there and pretty much everywhere else, except here, where I’m just Jodi.

Love,
Just Jodi

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Over Christmas vacation Jaycie and Max were here at Supergenius HQ with Sister #4. They were trolling through Hulu showing her their favorite sketches. It was mostly Stefan and Gilly. Sister #4 told them about her favorite SNL characters, specifically Mary Katherine Gallagher, and how she really liked that sketch of the Miley Cyrus show with Steve Buscemi and Maya Rudolph as Whitney Houston.

A lot of the humor of the sketch was lost on Jaycie and Max. They had no idea who Whitney Houston was or why someone would make fun of her. I immediately transformed into an 8th grade version of myself. I rambled on about how Whitney was this beautiful amazing pop singer in the 80s. How she had a ton of #1 hits and it was controversial when she married Bobby Brown who used to be in New Edition and then went solo and he was kind of a bad boy. I’m pretty sure there was some really bad singing included with the lecture. It was effusive and quickly bored my audience. I tried to bring it back to a Mary Katherine Gallagher sketch featuring Whitney in her prime, but we couldn’t find it on Hulu (there’s a shitty version on YouTube).

The short lecture was given by that 8th grade version of myself who thought it was important for posterity to write down that on March 2, 1986 one of my favorite songs was “How Will I Know”.

It was also that 8th grade version of me who shed a few tears last night upon learning of Houston’s death at the age of 48. But it was grown-up me who got pissed off at the callous and, well, just plain meanness of people on Twitter last night.

Now I understand that not everyone is going to care about Houston’s music or her career or her death. That’s fine, different strokes and all that. However, you have to be some kind of cruel, mean-spirited asshole to crack jokes about someone a few minutes after their death is announced. It pissed me off when people did it after Amy Winehouse died and it pissed me off last night.

I just don’t get what motivates people to do that. Sure, I expect the jokes to come eventually. It’s inevitable. I grew up in the 80s, I remember the Christina McAullife jokes that were whispered in the hallways after the Challenger exploded. But it was probably months after the tragedy when I first heard a joke. And it was whispered because we knew it was wrong.

But now, people shout their derision at the moment of death. Are they so desperate for attention that they want to be the first one to make a joke that they can’t even wait an hour, a minute before cracking that joke? What does it say about us as a society? Other than we are cruel, heartless assholes.

I was stunned by a lot of the men (it was all men) I follow on Twitter last night. Usually I take great pride in the progressiveness and sensitivity of the people I follow. My heart swelled when they cheered about the overturning of Prop 8 in California, and when they were outraged by Planned Parenthood being defunded by Susan G. Komen.

Last night I saw a new side of them and it was sad. It was as though the thought of just shutting up about something they didn’t care about never occurred to them. Their jokes about crack being whack and #TooSoon? were not cute or funny. In fact, it just showed that deep down they’re assholes, and that’s really disappointing.

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But lately I’ve noticed that some of the stuff I was reading on The Twitters was making me feel a little bad about myself, or at least my reading habits. I follow a lot of bookish people (surprised?) and they are all the time tweeting about the books they read. They read a lot. A LOT. Like a two or three books a week. Some of them read a book a day. I have Internet acquaintances who’ve already read 40+ books so far in 2011. How do they do it?

I often wonder how much they remember of what they read. How do the stories have any chance to make an impact when they’re so quickly crowded out by the next book?

As someone who considers herself a bookish person I was feeling a little less than. It’s not so good. I thought I should be reading more, talking about books more, and not spending so much time with the real housewives of some place else.

Right at the apex of my self-flagellation I remembered a comment a friend of mine made. Warning: I’m about to be purposely cryptic about the identity of this friend. Why? Because he/she has written actual books and as a published author espousing this opinion might be seen as impolitic. I don’t want to out him/her in public over a comment made in a private setting. Got it? Ok.

This friend was talking a few months ago about book bloggers who read more than 100 books a year. “Oh gee,” he/she said. “Thanks for spending thirty-six minutes with my book. You probably got a lot out of it. I’m sure to put a lot of stock in your opinion.”

Remembering this conversation makes me feel better about my turtle’s pace. I’m the type of reader who reads every single word (except in the case of Freedom because if I had to read one more sentence about the damn Cerulean Warbler I was going to do bodily harm to myself or someone else). Sometimes if the sentence is clunky or beautiful, I’ll read it two or three times. If I don’t understand what happens in a paragraph, I read it again.

I like to think I’m a conscientious reader. Which is not say that the speed readers aren’t conscientious, perhaps they are. I don’t know. I’m not one of them.

This isn’t meant to be a dig on the speed readers. Hell, it’s obvious I envy their focus and dedication. This is more of a reminder to myself (and anyone who feels a little less than because they don’t read/party/drink/go to concerts/listen to records as much as someone else they follow/know) that this is not a race. She who dies reading the most books doesn’t win anything. There is no prize for reading the most books, buying the most new records, or going to the most concerts.

It’s ok.

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I’ve been reading Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead. I’ll probably finish it up tonight. I’ve only got forty or so pages left. About 100 pages ago, I was doubting Whitehead. I wondered if there was going to be any actual story in this novel. It all seemed to be a riff on being a teen in the 80s (something, being about the same age as the main character, I could relate to). Today, the novel got really, really good. I could see where it was going and I was enjoying the journey. You can see what happened after that.

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