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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,