My Twitter moment

Okay, it wasn't really my moment; I was just a part of the moment.

It started with a tweet in January from @_EmperorJustin_ (I don't know him): "Still haven’t forgiven Zooey Deschanel for what she did to Joseph Gordon-Levitt in 500 Days of Summer."

It did get a fair amount of likes and retweets, and he pinned it, which may account for Joseph Gordon-Levitt seeing it and quote-tweeting it on August 6th:

"Watch it again. It’s mostly Tom’s fault. He’s projecting. He’s not listening. He’s selfish. Luckily he grows by the end."

This resonated with a lot of people, but it is also something I had thought about a lot. I could see that Summer was being very insensitive and callous, but she had been honest about her intentions, and Tom was the one who'd said he was okay with casual. I added my two cents:

"It's true that he lied about being okay with casual, but I think a lot of people relate to that, hoping the other person will change their mind. It may be the realest thing in cinema that she doesn't."

https://twitter.com/sultryglebe/status/1026538687461351425

That got a lot of traffic. To date it has 104 retweets and 2077 likes. That is huge for me. I think it was still around just 1000 likes when I got the Twitter moment notification.

For some perspective, Joseph Gordon-Levitt's tweet got 45000 retweets and 177000 likes, but also he has 4.2 million followers to my 1322 so the reach is completely different anyway. Part of what made it interesting for me is that I don't think there are any of my followers in those numbers. If they are, they are a small percentage. But that's the thing, the moment is about that thread and movie, not about me. (It is a bit about Joseph Gordon-Levitt).

Currently there is a thing going on now where if someone has a tweet blow up, they will add a link to their Soundcloud, or if they don't have one, maybe they will promote a charity or something, because people are looking. I had just joked about that on July 30th, tweeting that I do have a Soundcloud but I wasn't sharing it yet because the protocol is to wait until a tweet goes viral. Ah, so this is what that feels like.

I still didn't share it. That is partly because I am not sure that the logic works out. Yes, a lot of people have looked at it, but by the time I realize it is happening it could be mostly over. If the momentum is still going, maybe more people will come, but them being interested in the one thing doesn't mean that it will carry over to other things.

(Also, at this time my Soundcloud has exactly three short songs that I did for the Music for Wellness class. At some point I hope to put up other things, but sending people there now is not likely to cause them to want to revisit it.)

What really made me interested in this moment - other than my normal tendency to notice something and be curious about various aspects (especially quantifiable things) - were the replies. I get that a lot of people relate to being more into someone, and hoping it will change; many likes were because of that. The other part, though, about how real it is that it doesn't work; that was more interesting. I didn't even realize how much I meant it until I typed it. That is not how we expect movies to work, especially when it's about a likable man in pursuit of his dream girl.

(A good reply from @_youngTenderoni has 865 likes and 14 retweets.)

There's a whole bunch there, including how dream girl sounds more natural than dream woman, yet man still sounds more right than boy. There are ways in which it might be perfect that the quintessential manic pixie dream girl herself, Zooey Deschanel, was cast as Summer.

For my own thoughts, I worried that forget the Soundcloud, I should post a clarification that I didn't endorse Tom's self-deception. I did not add any thing to it. That tweet did pretty well as was. I don't need to add anything to it, but I still wanted to blog about it.

What I am really left with in doing that is the importance of honesty in relationships, of course, but what is so necessary with that is to be honest with yourself. Tom certainly knew that he wanted a deeper relationship with Summer, but he also might have told himself that he would be okay with casual. It seems pretty clear that he did not stop to honestly assess how he would deal with the one-sidedness of the relationship. It allowed for great moments, and an awesome musical number, but there was also a lot of frustration and pain, and him being a real jerk on that other date.

It's not like it's off-brand of me to write about the need for introspection and honesty and really knowing yourself and then acting with integrity based on that. This still seems like a good chance to do it again. If you can know yourself and your needs and your limits, you can build a better relationship with someone else. If you can honestly know that the attraction you feel - no matter how intense - will not prevent some things from being miserable, then you can make honest choices about how to proceed. There can be less hurting of other people and less setting yourself up for pain. It doesn't mean there isn't going to be any pain, but it helps.

And tomorrow I shall write a little bit about where that has gotten me, not with all of the details but still with some juiciness.