Twitter-pated (or Starbucks is following you!)

The delicate, withered, dwindling amount of attention span I had left to my credit after falling prey to the siren calls of Facebook, blogging, Flickr, texting, MySpace, Goodreads, e-mail and occasional online dating has been wiped away. Obliterated.

Enter Twitter.

One of my favorite insult words (besides the now-beloved "dunderhead") is "twit."

And now I'm a twit. Or a tweet. Or a twitter. er. Er ...

I don't know. I'm too distracted to learn the lingo. I'm behind the curve in the Twitterizing of America, anyway. There's too much to know that I'll never catch up on, but I like to think that my cripplingly ignorant use of ever-evolving social media is endearing and adorable, rather than lame and pathetic.

There are at least a dozen fake twitter posters (and maybe possibly a few real ones) for any celebrity you can imagine, and if you're desperately persistent enough, they (the fakers, at least) will be happy to progress your delusion that Matt Damon (or ... ahem, Robert Pattinson) is really, really talking to little ol' common you. Pick a band - they're probably tweeting (twittering? twitting? who knows!) at you (well, you and 20,000 other twitterer-ers).

You can follow them (sound creepy/cultish yet? ... nah, I didn't think so, either).

Cyberstalking has become the vogue and acceptable thing to do.

You can follow anyone you like. And they can follow you.

In 140 characters or fewer, you can gush pathetically at/about your Hollywood heartthrob du jour; keep up with the news/gossip/hearsay; potentially get yourself fired with your succinct sassiness; diss your newfound enemy with super-scathing text lingo; catch up with your siblings; and lament the state of the world, such as it may be in that five-second span of time ... just in time for you to be distracted by something - SOMETHING SHINY!

It's crack for anyone with ADD. Or anyone interested in developing ADD. Heroin in bits and bytes with pretty backgrounds and "tinyurl" links.

Starbucks is following me (and I'm following Starbucks).