How Cat Blogging and Restaurant Twitter-Stalking Are Related
Two things:
1. It is an extremely effective trick to keep your cat awake all day so that he’ll leave you alone at night. I once spent a whole week keeping the cat on a diurnal schedule by poking him with a stick all day, every day, because he was in a period of being a huge asshole every night. The trick is to keep the lil’ fucker awake by any means necessary. The look on his face when I’d poke him was the best too. Probably the same as the look I would give him when he’d claw my scalp at 4 a.m. ANIMAL OUTRAGE. (Update: You have to really commit to the process! Like with cat toilet training, which starts next month. Oh yes, there will be video.)
2. This from alexanderbasek:
Allow me to be vague—you’ll see why in a few sentences.
Last night I had dinner with the gf at a new restaurant. This restaurant just opened on Friday in a year-old hotel next to the Cooper Union building. I think that narrows it down sufficiently. Ya with me so far? … We hung at the bar, and I noticed the chef was in the building, so I tweeted this.
About halfway through the meal, right around the time that we were served our pasta course, the manager came over. “The chef thinks your stubble looks great,” he said. “We have email alerts, even for Twitter.”
This is the worst thing in the history of worst things ever. A while back I very carefully put something on Twitter that was just “Overheard at X Restaurant: ‘Quote quote quote.’” Nothing scandalous! Just mildly sweet/amusing to me. And the next time I was at the sister restaurant of that place (a place I love very much, a very wonderful place), the (also totally wonderful) general manager (who I adore unreservedly) came to our table and was basically like, “Look out, tweeter, we’re on to you! We know when you say anything about us!” He was totally teasing me, I’m sure, which is totally within his rights. I was eating with two people, one who is always like “What the hell is this stupid Twitter thing anyway?” and another who is celebrating his 70th birthday right now and so who (stereotype but true in this case!) was like WHAT ARE YOU PEOPLE TALKING ABOUT. (And who can blame him?)
This experience was both funny and super-modern and also so totally worse than that always-funny/embarrassing thing of having a friend bring up things you’ve blogged about in the company of other friends. I felt both very mildly humiliated and also sort of teenage-defiant—I mean, it’s not like I was like “OMG THIS FOOD AT X RESTAURANT IS GARBAGE” or anything. I’m well-behaved and cautious on the Internet! Mostly. Still, shouldn’t I reserve the right to say anything I want???
Anyway, to bring these two things together, this is why my entire personal (ie, non-work-related) Internet output is about 1. making fun of myself and how stupid I am and 2. my cat. Cats can never talk back when you talk about them on the Internet. At least not yet. In some horrible future both the cats and the restaurants will talk back to you about what you put on the Internet and then I will pretty much be done with it for good.
