Column: Alexandra Kloster, Pass the Hot Dish

Holy, Tippi Hedren, I can’t run much farther in these shoes! My kitten heels are on the verge of going paws up when I spot a phone booth. I leap into it and slide the door closed as the birds catch up with me. Their blue, faceless profiles peck against the glass. I call for help, but the 911 operator hangs up on me because I can’t compose a rescue plea in less than 140 characters. Then I wake up.

For a year friends, acquaintances and the peer-pressuring zeitgeist have encouraged me to get on the Twitter. It’s great for networking and keeping your finger on the pulse they persuaded. On the pulse of what? From what I’d read of Twitter, Kanye West’s choice of breakfast cereal and Kim Kardashian’s chipped nail polish emergency were standard fare. It would take a lot more than that for me to embrace what seemed like the ravings of a 5-year-old with a sugar high.

If I ever did join Twitter, there would be no updates from the great mundane, no posts about how my homemade cake fell and caused a major frosting drift or how I slipped on the ice and bruised my dignity on the way to the mailbox. No one needed to know the embarrassing minutiae of my life. Besides they can read about it every Sunday in the newspaper. No, if I were going to be part of the tweeting masses I would use the forum for occasional and infrequent quips. For me, Twitter would be Quipper and I would queep.

With the exception of cable TV, I’ve always been slow to accept new technology. Cable was a good thing. When you grow up in an area that only intercepts four stations and one of them static, you grab that ESPN and MTV and never look back. A begrudging resignation was the best I could offer other advancements, however.

This Christmas I bought my husband, Graham, a Kindle. I had to give him four paper-and-ink hardcover books along with it just to make up for such a discomfiting purchase. A beautiful KitchenAid mixer stands on my counter, but I won’t let it knead my bread dough when I can do it by hand just like God and Caroline Ingalls intended. I didn’t even like the idea of CDs when, after all, my record player and 45s were broken in just right. Why disturb a needle so cozy in the groove, I always say.

The problem is, I am always wrong. Computers, cell phones, GPS, Facebook, they’ve all increased my quality of life and even gotten me jobs. So this time, I put my reservations aside and joined the flock, but I know I’ll continue to have nightmares until they give that bird a face.

Twitter’s insistence on brevity can make tweeting a frustrating, thought-thwarting exercise. When I have an opinion, rarely is it shorter than 140 characters. I like to participate in the top trending topics, but when things like “the six-word novel” come up, the best I can do is, “If only I had seven words.”

We windbags would be wise to enlist Twitter as writing tool. Tweets, at their best, can teach economy of language, and when employed economically, language emerges at its most elegant and profound. To illustrate this point I pulled a post from one of Twitters most prolific tweeters. On Feb. 10, Ashton Kutcher writes, “Can you have lunch at dinner?” Now wait a second! Let’s give this a chance to sink in …

All right, so Twitter may not produce buckets of profundities, but already I’ve found it to be quite useful. I’ve read very good articles that Roger Ebert has recommended, which I would have never seen were I not following him. Two weeks ago, when potential disaster lurked in my hometown, the local news websites crashed. Because of Twitter, I was able to get minute-to-minute updates on the situation and find out that my family and friends were safe.

The notion of “following” people on Twitter is still a little creepy to me. I continue to struggle with the mental shift from “Stop following me or I’m calling the cops” to “Follow me! Please follow me!” I’m not even sure how people come to be followers. There’s a boat store following me, and while I’m glad to have them, I don’t understand their presence in my tweeting life.

When I search my full name in the Twitter files, the only person who appears is a German girl with my name who goes by the handle, “Princess Baby.” That is until this morning. Somebody did some Twitter magic and now when you search Alexandra Kloster, it’s Princess Baby and me. I guess that means I’m for real in the Twitter universe.

Maybe I should tweet about it: “As of this morning, I’m finally holding court with Princess Baby of Deutschland. Do you think she would cry if I take away her orb and scepter or would that be rattle and blanky?” Darn it! 146 characters! See? I told you this was hard!

Woodbury resident Alexandra Kloster appears each Sunday. She may be reached at alikloster@yahoo.com, and her blog is Radishes at Dawn at alexandrakloster.com.