Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Embarrassment by Twitter

Blog Hop!!
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!

26 comments:

  1. Oh my goodness! I'm too naive to catch onto the dirty things I may have implied. I told my cp just today that I love deep critiques. The deeper they go the better. Thankfully she has a sense of humor about it all and chalked it up to another crazy rambling from yours truly. :)

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  2. I don't know of any embarassing Twitter moments...yet. My day may still be coming, but thanks to your reminder, I'll try to keep it clean! Right now, my embarassing moments are left to "live" moments, unfortunately. Thanks for sharing!

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  3. That's a great story, Cassie! I don't feel so alone now! I think most people are kind, but it still feels so horrible to misspeak.

    Cindy, I hate the live moments, too. And they do still happen to me. I usually just beat a hasty retreat, trying to keep as much of my dignity as I can. :)

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  4. Okay, I read the headline and expected much worse. Very funny though! And I'm glad it wasn't worse! ;)

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  5. I'm glad it wasn't worse, either. I always have the potential, for sure! I'm wondering what "worse" might looks like. Hmm... I better not go there!

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  6. Okay Lara, I already love you!

    You poor thing. It sounds like something I would do and that is why I am so paranoid about all of social media. I have my husband practically read everything before I post. Last week I misspelled a work in the title and my son immediately sent me a text to let me know. It was the first thing I woke up to. Great way to start the day and get the blood flowing.

    But I must admit girl, what you did, takes the cake. But Colin is such a sweetie! He was a guest on my blog a few weeks back and what a gentleman.

    Thanks for sharing this Lara! I look forward to getting to know you better! If there is anything that I can do to help you, you let me know, okay?

    Great Post!!! :)

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  7. Thank you so much, Karen. One thing this post has taught me is that I'm not so unusual, at least with the fear of saying the wrong thing. And I'm really glad you enjoyed the post! I'll be looking for you on twitter!

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  8. This is hilarious :) I love that Twitter gives us just another platform to embarrass ourselves on. Great story!

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  9. Thanks, Angela! And welcome to Motivation for Creation!

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  10. I haven't done they foot in mouth on social media yet, but I know it's coming. It's inevitable. Glad he was nice about it.

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  11. I'm glad you survived the tweet. I've tried to stay safer around social media. That stuff gets carved in stone. :)

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  12. That would be something I would have done. I feel for you! Thanks for sharing your story.

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  13. I'm with ya, smiley faces and a million exclamation points are my only (very lame) weapons to get my sense of humor through emails, texts, etc. They need mood fonts or something :)

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  14. That sounds like the kind of misstells I got on World of Warcraft...where two people were having cyber sex and then accidentally messaged me out of the blue. It was sooo funny.

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  15. I use those smiley faces all the time. :) I'm with Hope. Mood fonts!

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  16. LOL! I hate when this happens! It's so hard to understand at times what a person really means in a comment or post. (The readers don't know you are laughing about it). At least you apologized to clear your name. Great story!

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  17. That is so funny! I love that it was an accident. Although if you'd done it on purpose, I think it would be even more funny. (New follower.)

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  18. Oh my goodness! Thank you all for coming by and visiting MfC, and welcome to those of you who decided to join in on the fun! Blogger is being goofy, so I can't yet thank you by name (except for E.R.!) but I will, once it settles down. I really appreciate it.

    Hope and Kelley, I am totally with you on the mood fonts. I tend to use exclamation points and smileys and then feel like I come across as a twelve year old. I think mood fonts are the perfect solution!

    Thanks to Jenny, Jennifer, Crystal and E.R. for the empathy. It makes it a little easier to be me knowing there are kind people out there who understand!

    Yes, Laila, it truly is carved in stone, isn't it! That's why I freaked when I realized how awful it sounded! And there just isn't a way to clear your name with everyone!

    Michael - I hope you come back. I'm wondering how long it took before those people realized they included you in their virtual party! And if they did anything to correct it, or just pretended it didn't happen! That sound like a great story, too! Oops, there's the exclamation points again :)

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  19. Hee hee...not to worry, I am an expert at making myself look like a pervert. When girls do it, it's hot. When guys do it, it's perverted.

    You can count me in as a follower! I'm also participating in Cassie's blog hop. Hope you can drop by my blog

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  20. You know, Kristy, I never thought about it like that. I think that's a nice attitude to take, though - better than always being embarrassed! I will definitely stop by!

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  21. Hi Fellow Awkward Person! I, too, embarrass myself regularly. lol. Nice to meet you <3 a new follower

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  22. Wow - my own blog didn't take my comment! I just wanted to say thanks to A Daft Scots Lass and welcome to Kelley! Thanks for stopping by!

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  23. Ah...

    The embarrassing moments of learning to use Twitter. I sometimes want to go back and delete those early tweets, but then I remind myself that nobody is going to go back and read my early tweets! Unless of course that corpse that I buried back in 2009 shows up somewhere with my DNA.

    J/K!! lol

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  24. Thanks, Diane, for stopping by, and for the reminder that it isn't all that big a deal in the long run! And the fish thank you, too!

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