Embarrassment by Twitter

The Easily Flushed Blog Hop, hosted by  Cassie Mae at Reading, Writing and Lovin' It, begins on December 6th.  She is hosting the blog hop to celebrate attracting over one-hundred followers on her blog (Yay, Cassie!) and then also will be giving away a $10 Amazon gift-card to a lucky participant of the blog-hop.  Click here to learn the details of how to participate in the hop, or to go ahead and register your blog.  You can also click the picture of the embarrassed polar bear.

One of the participation requirements of this blog hop is to share an embarrassing story of yourself, or of one of your characters.  Initially I had planned to write about the heroine of my novel, Hazel, but I don't think it would translate well out of context, so you will all have to settle for my own story.

This is where it gets hard, though.  You see, embarrassment is a way of life for me.  It is so much a way of life that I have stopped getting upset over the typical, run of the mill embarrassing situations.  I regularly say the wrong thing, trip over my words, or just plain trip, for that matter.  I have learned how to mentally wave it off, make a joke of it, or to take preventative measures by keeping my mouth shut in most social situations.

I have moved my embarrassment into new and different realms.  Twitter, Facebook and even blogging provides a whole new arena in which I have no choice but to open my mouth, into which I unfortunately end up inserting my foot.  I try very hard to think about how what I say might sound to the receiver, but every once in a while a poorly turned phrase slips past my carefully constructed defenses.
A couple of weeks after I started tweeting, I encountered an author by the name of Colin Falconer.  He has written more than thirty books, writes historical fiction, and lives in Australia.  His blog is Looking for Mr. Goodstory, and I recommend checking it out because his posts always make me laugh or make me think.  On Twitter he was one of very few people who followed me early on, and I enjoyed the links he posted about history.  One of those links was to a web article about the Romans. 

I laughed, I cried... Well, not really, but I did enjoy the article.  I tweeted back to Mr. Falconer that "I especially enjoyed number one."   

Number one is an extremely vulgar, sexual poem that Catullus the XVI wrote in first century Rome. It was only after I hit send that it occurred to me that I had just commented to a man I barely knew that I had "especially" enjoyed a poem with explicit sexual content.  Granted, I certainly didn't enjoy it for the sexual content.  The sexual content is so over the top that it totally cracked me up, which is why I tweeted that I "especially" enjoyed number one.  It made me laugh.  However, Mr. Falconer wouldn't know that from the tweet, and neither would the hundreds of his other followers since I had replied in such a way that everyone could read it.  I felt a little sick, I must admit.  Here I am trying to build a platform, and I start off by looking like a pervert.

I was so embarrassed that I couldn't even talk to anyone about what to do to repair the situation.  I couldn't tell my husband, who is my social filter much of the time, what I had done.  It wasn't that he'd be mad, but he'd be embarrassed for me, which would heap burning coals upon my own embarrassment.

I decided to direct message an apology.  I am happy to say that Mr. Falconer was quite gracious, for which he earned my undying loyalty on Twitter.  Since that incident, I am extremely careful about what I say in my one hundred forty characters.  I also stick to G-rated retweets, no matter how funny I find those with a rating further down the alphabet!

Do you have an embarrassing twitter story you would like to share?  Feel free to do so in the comments section!