I haven’t figured out how to insert my Twitter feed into the sidebar yet (I did break my template quite spectacularly in the process when attempting a while ago), but it tends to be the place where I put little random and daily thoughts. In case you are more in need of those than, say, epic amounts of sorry-for-self-feeling.
I really like Twitter, especially because I can see what my friends are up to from my phone now. I follow several friends on there who don’t blog, and with whom I frequently used to lose touch, so it’s wonderful to feel connected to them on a day-to-day level. Also, my friends are funny, thoughtful, and awesome, way more than most normal people you encounter in a day. Nothing perks me up in the middle of a crummy mood like firing up Twitter and getting glimpses into the lives of these amazing people.
Something about the format seems to invite tacit statements about humanity, and I’m sure I’m not the first to have addressed Twitter as a pithy way to make agonizingly concise all the complexities of living today. Small statements add up to big proclamations, and I like that. It suits both my attention span and my (undemonstrated yet deeply held) affection for the elegantly-expressed thought.
I’ve always liked Jenny Holzer‘s art, this way of letting simple words embody a concept and then stay there, physically present and tangible. The more you stare at the words in one of her truisms, the more inescapable – even through abstraction and deconstruction into bleary shapes and movements of letters – the significane of putting words together becomes.
It is therefore no surprise than Jenny Holzer would take to Twitter like, well, it’s the format made for (or from) her work. When a new Jenny Holzer tweet pops up on my home page, I get ecstatic. How often do you get direct, new content from an artist, as they’re making it?
Today she posted “ENJOY YOURSELF BECAUSE YOU CAN’T CHANGE ANYTHING ANYWAY,” which carries several layers of meaning for me. The way I first read it was in the sense of enjoying who you are, the self that you fundamentally possess, since that is the immutable aspect of your sensibility that makes your experience special. This dovetails nicely with my embracing of all things absurd and ridiculous and loving things and people for their intrinsic characteristics, without seeking to change them.
Then I considered the more literal (and maybe intended) reading: you have no power to change things, so you might as well enjoy yourself. Both ideas work for me really. At the other end of despair is exquisite happiness anyway, so why not cut to the chase?
Enjoying Myself. What a novel concept.
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