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Authors: Celia Rivenbark

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BOOK: You Don't Sweat Much for a Fat Girl
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Twitter Woes: I’ve Got Plenty of Characters, Just No Character
A
s a Southerner, one of the hardest things I’ve had to do lately is learn how to “tweet.” Because everyone knows that Southerners lean toward being a bit long-winded, verbose, wordy, overwrought, and dense when it comes to written communication. So this means that I’ve had a tough time joining the Twittersphere.
How is it possible for me,
me,
to condense what I’ve got to say into 140 lousy characters? For the longest time, I thought it was 140
words,
which already cramped my style plenty, but then I noticed that every time I “hauled off and tweeted” (as we say in the South), the cursor wouldn’t budge beyond a couple of short sentences. Characters, it turns out, means letters. Who knew? Everybody did? Oh.
At first I just couldn’t do it. We Southerners are known
for telling long, looping stories stuffed with color and pageantry and pork fat. Twitter had me communicating with friends and family in something just a little more sophisticated than a series of keyboard grunts. I felt as if everything I typed was coming out like Karl in
Sling Blade
. Mmmm-huh.
Clearly, I’d just have to adjust. After all, brevity is the soul of wit, said Shakespeare, who, methinks, would’ve sucked loudly at tweeting.
After the first few weeks I started getting the hang of it. It’s all about self-editing. When I can convey the thought in exactly 140 characters, my day is off to a good start. Writing less seems like cheating.
I have lots of friends who tweet and most of their tweets are super boring. Some are high-minded, choosing only to tweet about things like (yawn) social justice and (bigger yawn) how precious their kids are. One friend recently posted:
Courage is being willing to walk in darkness while shining a light for others to follow.
That’s beautiful, isn’t it? Compare and contrast with my tweet that day:
Just rewatched St. Elmo’s Fire. Can’t believe Demi Moore really thought she could kill herself by leaving the windows up on a cold night
.
My very first tweet ever was equally shallow:
A little redneck girl in line behind me at Marshall’s pointed at my ass and said, “Look at the big butt, Meemaw.” My life is complete.
I’ve learned to appreciate the way Twitter forces you to choose your words
carefully. In that way, it is like haiku, the fine Japanese art of hair weaving in thirteen words, or something like that.
Another tweet informed my followers that when I die, I want my favorite words in the whole world to be inscribed on my gravestone:
Possession arrow belongs to Carolina
. I’m not kidding.
I tend to tweet about pop-culture trends and personal failings, not so much about what I just ate and similar rubbish.
As in:
Deliver me from one more headline telling me that Valerie Bertinelli lost all that weight “one day at a time.
”
Lots of people give great tweet but I quickly de-follow anybody who just posts those annoying self-serving messages about whatever they’re selling. That’s just tacky. Unless, of course, it’s me telling my followers that it’s time to ante up for the new book. That’s, somehow, different. That’s just savvy marketing, which is strongly encouraged by my tech-savvy publisher. And by “strongly encouraged” I mean that if I don’t, there have been idle threats that my next book will come out via fortune cookie.
I don’t have a lot of followers but I do so love the term. I like to picture all seven hundred of mine (so far!) sitting around their computers and smart phones wearing long flowing white robes and chanting my name over and over like a calming mantra … Celia, Celia, Celia … . Isn’t that what followers do?
My goal is to have as many followers (thirty thousand and
countin’) as celebrity-supermodel-turned-diet-and-decorating-mogul-turned-spiritual-advisor Kathy Ireland, who, for reasons I can’t imagine, was a follower of mine for a brief time. Apparently, Kathy was offended by one of my tweets, which was fine with me.
Not unlike professional loudmouth Kathy Griffin, I believe there’s no such thing as bad publicity. If a big-time spokesmodel for spirituality and finer accent lighting like Kathy Ireland slams me in the Twittersphere, that is A-OK, with me. In fact, it’s better than A-OK; it is awesome. This ranks right up there with the time I stayed in the room next to Cyndi Lauper at a Dallas hotel. What? I already told you about that? Well, no matter.
So Kathy got all Zen on me saying that I should lift up rather than put down or some shit like that. Oh, yeah? At least I don’t make my followers drink only fermented cactus juice and take on many wives or husbands like she does. Kidding! Kathy, this is the sort of thing we in the humor biz call “hyperbole.” It’s not pronounced the way it looks so don’t expect to go to Pottery Barn and find a set of hypercups and hypersaucers. It means exaggerating for effect.
I wish I could remember the exact tweet that hacked off the divine Ms. Ireland, who put me in my place while noting that she was just settling into her seat in first class and feeling all positive and gooey until she read something snarky that I had written.
Again, I’m way more tickled that she read it than the fact that she hated it. This woman tweets continuously, probably even while she’s answering nature’s call.
I’m sure Kathy Ireland is utterly delightful in a detached, obnoxiously slender kind of way but she might wanna not take everything quite so seriously. We get that she’s a model
and
smart. Strangely, this doesn’t surprise us as much as it seems to surprise her.
Anyway, I think I could learn a lesson from Kathy because she is just so damn chatty in her constant tweets. She’s not a lazybones like me when it comes to tweeting. Seems like she must spend her entire day keeping her followers informed of every nuance of her day and, at the end of the day, she always tells her “angels” that she’s going to sign off.
Goodnight, angels!
she’ll tweet. It’s nothing short of amazing that she can take the time to do that
and
find the time to be the face in front of the designs actually created by probably hundreds of highly talented gay males.
Besides becoming more active in the Twittersphere, it has also been strongly suggested that I should increase my Internet presence by writing a daily blog.
Sigh.
Sigh again.
And once more.
What can I tell y’all? If you write all day, writing a blog just seems like one more thing to do. Must we “stream” our
lives constantly? When you’re constantly telling everyone exactly what you’re doing (
Pot roast tonight!
) or how you’re feeling (
My boss is an arrogant twit
!) it starts sounding kinda samey, right?
Because we are all so conscious of blabbing our every thought these days, it’s no wonder some of us are saying a little too much.
Consider Twitter-savvy Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa’s suggestion that AIG executives should either resign or take a deep bow and
follow the Japanese example of killing themselves.
Grassley did this as easily and lightly as if he had suggested that he’d be happy to bring the lime Jell-O mold to the Senate picnic.
In a separate but related story, Judge Judy said recently that she was surprised that the loathsome Bernie Madoff didn’t kill himself rather than go to prison. I ask you: Is that any way for an officer of the make-believe television court to talk?
My point is that we might need to be more circumspect in the face of all this chattiness.
As one who receives quarterly “benefits” statements from AIG (which stands for “all I got” in my case), I should be as angry as anybody about dozens of soulless suits receiving millions of dollars in bonuses for doing The Worst Job in the History of the Working World, but I believe that the rules of polite society dictate that we should never, ever invite anyone to off himself, even in jest.
No, no. It would be far more gratifying to see a few AIG
bigwigs dropped off in
Deliverance
land dressed only in silver lame ’chaps and I (HEART) GUN CONTROL LAWS T-shirts.
I know—goosebumps, right?
Lately, in my real, not cyber, life, I’ve had an unusually hard time holding my tongue, and I believe it’s because I’m so used to cyber-sharing too much that I’ve forgotten how to turn it off.
And while I haven’t invited the lunkhead who double billed me for a repair and refused to refund the money to do the honorable thing and plunge a samurai sword through his chest, I did toy with the notion.
As a Southerner, this conduct is simply unbecoming. We are famous for avoiding telling people they have displeased us in any way and will go to outlandish lengths to dance around unpleasant scenes. Except we don’t anymore. And I’m a little freaked out about that.
So, yes, I will try to be more positive, just like Kathy Ireland said I should be. I don’t want to be the kind of person who only tells the clerk at the DMV that I’m an organ donor because everybody else is doing it. (Well, everybody else was saying “Yes!” with so much enthusiasm, I was afraid they were going to whip out their livers and lay ’em on the desk right then and there. I just said “Yes” so everybody else in line wouldn’t mutter “Selfish porkface. Can you believe she’s keeping her organs? Like they’re so freakin’ special … . Ooooh, like she thinks her spleen is all that.”)
I want to be a better person like probable-organ-donor
Miss Kathy Ireland! Perhaps this will lead to greater success; it certainly seems to have worked for her. I still fly coach, after all.
But, really, how does one define success?
I’ll tell you how I don’t define it.
I don’t define success by how much money someone makes. I don’t define success by how many trophies or plaques or awards someone has.
I don’t define it by membership in exclusive clubs or the ability to name-drop about someone’s famous friends.
I don’t define it by how many luxury cars or opulent homes someone might own or how many sumptuous vacations they might take in exotic locales all over the globe.
I don’t define success … oh, hell, I’m just kidding. Actually, all that stuff is
fantastic!
But enough of all that chatter. It’s time to say “Nighty night” to all of my angels.
Yeah, that felt weird.
Bitter! Party of Me
N
ow that Oprah Winfrey has announced the end of her long-running talk show, who, pray tell, is going to scream the names of celebrities in that annoying fashion? You know what I’m talking about: “Ladies and gentlemen … JOHN TRAVOOOOOLLLLTTTTAAAA!”
And who is going to give hour-long shout-outs to thick, thoughty novels that make my head hurt when I read them?
No one? Oh, OK.
As loyal readers know, I have sent my books to “Noprah” for many years now. Frankly, as native Southerners who share having grown up in towns so small they could best be described as “two stores, two whores, and a cotton gin,” Oprah and I should have a lot in common. I was expecting that at least she’d send me an autographed picture or something.
(“To Celia, from OOOOOPPPPPRRRRRAAAAAHH-HHH!”) But nada, bupkiss, zilch. So to Oprah, let me just say thanks for, uh, nothing.
O has clearly forgotten that Southerners always send thank-you notes. There’s more than a grain of truth to the old joke that the only reason Southern Junior Leaguers don’t participate in orgies is that there would be too many thank-you notes to write.
Oprah received a gift from me—several, actually—over the years and still no note. To put it in terms she can understand, there are “NOOOO EXCUUUUUUSES!” and that includes (but is not limited to) such afflictions as “Thoughtless Billionaire Syndrome,” “Yes I’m All That-osis,” or even “My Vah-jay-jay’s on the Fritz and I Can’t Be Bothered-itis.”
Oh, I just hate sounding so bitter. But
ten
years of mailing books to my Southern sister has taken its psychic toll. How I dreamed of sitting across from O on one of those big, puffy yellow chairs she uses for the cry-interviews.
How I’d envisioned in my fevered dreams of nonfiction stardom how our conversation would go:
O: “So tell us about your books, Celia.”
Me: “Well, I …”
O: “But first, did you know that your daughter has the same name as my beloved late dog, Sophie? Did you name your daughter after my dog? Did you? I bet you did! (
turning toward audience
) “YOU get a dog and YOU get a dog and YOU get a dog!”
Me: “Actually, Oprah, I’m more of a cat person.”
O: “Ladies and gentlemen, MAYA ANGELOOO-OUUUU!”
Me: “What?!?”
O: “She’s going to be our guest tomorrow. I’m just warming up.”
Me: “Yes, well, you see I write humor, some of it is pop-culture based but always with a Southern subtext and …”
O: “OK, here’s the part of the interview where I just start randomly interrupting you so we can talk about me some more. Hey! What does your poo look like? Dr. Oz says mine is perfect!”
Me: “Yes, I saw that show. You truly have no secrets.”
O: “Oh, but I do! I have
the
Secret! You just think your way to success by putting all the good thoughts out there into the universe.”
Me: “You know that’s a bunch of crap, right?”
O: (
sighing
) “Yeah, but people eat it up like pie on Sunday.”
Me: (
distracted
) “Mmmmm, pie …”
O: “Join us tomorrow when Maya Angelou and I will discuss the politics of being happy and dogs and Skype and child-molesting and holiday decorations for less … .”
I realize how petty it must sound to constantly complain that O hasn’t done me a solid.
But I’ve been in this writing business for a while. I’ve paid my dues and I’ve been a mentor for dozens of aspiring
writers. And by mentor I mean, I’ve told them not to be jerks and quit their day jobs.
The truth is that you don’t go into this business for the money. You go into writing because you can’t imagine doing anything else, because the words wake you up at night and, most important of all, because it’s probably the only job in the whole world you could do while seated on the toilet.
People often ask me, “How come you don’t sweat much for a fat girl?” No, no, that’s not what I meant to say. Although it is so totally true and, in fact, it is what I am most proud of in this life. I mean raising a child to be a kind, caring, and productive member of society is fine, but this low-sweat thing is a Really Big Deal, just saying.
No, what I meant to say is that they ask me how I stay so disciplined. Writing can be such a solitary business that it’s not for everyone. And you have to be prepared to steel yourself against all the inevitable distractions when you work at home.
For instance, just this morning, I have become preoccupied with trying not to take it as a bad omen that, for the past three hours, there has been a white, adult-sized casket sitting on the back of a flatbed truck parked right in front of my house.
It’s just sitting there. No driver, no sign of life,
ha-ha
, just sitting out there in front of my house, gleaming in the sunshine with its little carved white rosettes on the sides.
OK, I believe you can see how easy it is to get off-task unless
you use a few tricks to stay focused on your writing. But
you
try to concentrate with a casket staring at you all morning.
Oh, hell, here comes the garbage truck. If whoever belongs with that white casket messes up my once-a-week pickup and I have to smell these shrimp shells for another second, I’ll personally dig her up and kill her all over again.
Then again, it could be that one of my neighbors just bought a casket “for later.” You can get them at Costco and Sam’s Club you know. Right there beside the hundred-count packages of Pork-On-A-Stick.
Oh my God, where was I?
Yes, yes, disciplined writing. I think it’s a good idea to write at least ten pages a day. I mean, I’ve never done that but it sounds like a really good place to start, doesn’t it?
Once you’ve gotten published, it’s important not to let it go to your head. Don’t do dumb stuff like, if somebody calls you by your first name, say: “That’s
mister
Asshole to you,” or whatever. People hate that.
It’s very important, karma-wise, to always be willing to give a hand up to another writer whenever, however, you can. Naturally, this doesn’t apply if the writer is better than you. I mean, that’s food off your table, you feel me?
The truth? I’ve always wanted to be one of those classy writers that heaps genuine praise on all my published friends. I want to gush and ooze heartfelt wishes that their Amazon ranking never rises above a thousand. I want to be that person, but it’s hard. The truth is that I am always a bit jealous
when a writer friend’s book does better than mine. Which happens a lot, since you ask.
Sometimes, though, I try to do the right thing. I’ll give you an example: A couple of years ago, I was attending the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance convention in Orlando. About fifteen of us author-types were doing what amounted to speed dating. We’d already speed eaten a couple of tiny ham and cheese on yeast roll thingies before being told to work the crowd, spending exactly ten minutes at each table, charming and chatting up bookstore owners from across the Southeast.
All the other authors were familiar to me. We’d traveled in the same circles more than once. It wasn’t, as they say, my first trip to the rodeo.
But there was a shy, quiet fellow at our authors’ table. As we wolfed our minisubs and got ready to rumble, I decided it was my Christian duty to make this man feel welcome. I dragged him into the table conversation but he barely made eye contact. Poor lil fella, I thought. He’s so overwhelmed by all of us big shots. Clearly, he was a book-convention virgin.
Is it enough to say that I talked the poor man’s ears off, sharing my sorta-vast knowledge of all things regional book tour? Is it enough to say that he listened quietly and politely even, at one point smiling a tiny bit?
Is it enough to say that all of a sudden, the chairman of the convention walked up and began to talk to the poor soul, earnestly
complimenting him on his Pulitzer
and
his National Book Award?
Oh, I thought, now realizing that on top of everything else, I’d been talking to him with a big mustardy bread crumb affixed to my bottom lip. Just let me take my impossibly dumb ass and lumber across the room to charm the book buyers, who by now were all atwitter about having such a distinguished guest in their midst. Him, not me; pay attention.
I’m not being small when I say I can’t recall the man’s name. They say the mind forgets truly intense pain.
Since that awful day, I’ve chatted up a few famous author-types including David Sedaris and the late John Updike. And, no, I didn’t ask Updike to detail my car or mistake Sedaris for a hungry drifter and offer to buy him a Hardee’s Thickburger, which, let’s be honest, he really looks like he could use, bless his precious nicotine-ravaged heart.
I did give Sedaris an advance copy of my book and asked him if he would consider, pretty please, writing a tiny blurb. It would mean so much, I stammered. And by so much, I was already thinking ahead to how, if I sold enough books, we might finally be able to afford to close in a porch off our bedroom and make it into a huge walk-in closet because, as I told “Dave,” we have virtually no closet space in our ninety-year-old fixer-upper and I know how gay men can sympathize with something as heart wrenching as an abysmal lack of sufficient closet space.
He listened to this with an air of amused detachment, as though, in his mind, he was already back at his French villa with his lovah, Hugh, sipping Turkish coffee and pondering his next seven-figure advance.
Yes, just a couple of words from Sedaris and my life could change forever.
When I finally shut up, he, as nicely as any human could ever do it, looked me in the eye and said “No.” David Sedaris explained that, basically, he got requests like mine all the time and he only writes blurbs for two authors a year, and then only for people he knows personally.
“But I’m in your genre! You might even like it!
I will pay you whatever you want.
Do you want the shiny hairs?!” It was humbling to realize that, food chain-wise, it was my turn to be the woman with the listing Bumpit and the man with the shiny black pants.
And then, just as quickly as he’d appeared, David Sedaris was ushered away to his next book-tour stop and I stood alone in the lecture hall at the local college, feeling very small and insignificant. Rather like I imagine his wingwang to be.
Three years ago, my book made it to the final five in a national humor-writing contest. Sedaris won. Did he remember the nervous but curiously nonsweating woman from his very own North Carolina who had tried to press that book into his bony little hand-claws just one short year ago?
Oh, I’m sure not.
Ditto another book a couple of years later. Oh? What’s
this? You really think Jon Stewart and his gazillion-member staff is more deserving? Well, go on with your bad self.
This past summer, my most recent book made it to the top three in the category of Best Nonfiction Book of the Year in the South.
But what’s this? Another Pulitzer winner beat the snot out of me to take that one? And, yes, I hate him just a little bit. Kidding! I’m sure he’s a delightful fellow and there is absolutely no truth to the rumor that, below the neck, he is covered entirely in scales.
Oh, high road, you’re just so very overrated.
BOOK: You Don't Sweat Much for a Fat Girl
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