"If you are what you say you are..... a Superstar....."

I have a confession to make:  I'm jealous of you all.

Yes you. And you. And you and you and you.  You out there in the blogosphere, you out there on Facebook, and especially you people out there with all your tweets on Twitter.  Just green with envy.

Every single day I read about all of you who are getting up to go to church, on your way to your workouts, cooking your all organic whole grain co-op grown vegan meals, telling others how to have a dating life as fabulous and exciting as yours, espousing your positivity and wisdom and goals to save all the children of the world while getting your PhDs in astrophysics, the fabulous vacations you're going on, the designer clothes you're planning on wearing tonight, the hot club you're kickin' it at later, and let's not forget that perfect 0.5" x 0.5" pic of you in your Twitter avatar.... seems like everyone out there has their shit all together and life is just fabulous.

According to what I read in the blogosphere and the Twittosphere, you all are super healthy, spiritually balanced, perfect figured (wo)man magnets who are all educated and wildly successful.  And ya know, that makes me feel pretty shitty sometimes.  I'm divorced, under-employed, am officially "overweight" by BMI standards (although I would say I'm more in the zaftig category), I don't go to church,  I drink too much wine Diet Pepsi, I'm grossly in debt, often moody, and spend way too much time on Twitter.

Let me repeat that again...... "spend way too much time on Twitter."

The realization that keeps me from flinging myself off my apartment balcony into the retention pond below to end my comparatively worthless existence is the myth of the Twitter Superstar.  You know these people.  Folks with 10,000 followers hanging from their short and curlies, the person whose tweets fill up every other entry in your timeline, the person who always has abundant wisdom and wit for the Twittosphere, telling you about all the wonderful things they're doing and how you should be living your life so you can be as happy and popular as they are.  And for every tweet of theirs you actually see, there are 10 other @ replies to their friends that you don't see.  If there's a break in their tweeting for more than an 30 minutes, you assume they have died.

Seriously..... how much can you really be doing when your updates come from the web like a rapid-fire automatic machine gun?  And even for those with mobile Twitter apps, how much can you really be doing with your head down and thumbs twiddling away over your Blackberry or iPhone, firing off a tweet every 10 seconds to appease your Twitter Groupies??  As a self professed Twitter abuser I can tell you the answer: not much.

The unfortunate beauty of Twitter is that you only know what people tell you in 140 characters or less.  And they can tell you ANYTHING.  And I have on good authority that some of you wildly popular Twitter celebs have the personality of a tofu brick in real life.  One thing I've noticed over the years that even in real life, there's a general rule that the more a person talks about how smart (or attractive, or well off) they are, the less likely that assertion is actually true.  And I would be willing to wager that this rule applies to other sorts of boasting, because if you're really about something, you don't have to constantly beat people over the head with it by constantly informing everyone about it.  And this is ESPECIALLY true in the Twittosphere where there's no way to cross check the veracity of your statements (at least on Facebook all of your status updates, wall posts, and pics have to jibe). Honestly, to everyone besides the Twitter Groupies, it makes you sound kind of douchey.  Mildly amusing maybe, but you can save that seat on your jock for someone else.

As long as there is social networking, there will be those people who abuse the system to re-create the lives they wish they had, not the ones they actually have.  But there's a fine line between selective sharing and the megalomania of Twitter Superstars.  I just hope you have your next gig lined up..... cuz it won't last forever.

"If you are what you say you are.... a Superstar...... then have no fear........" ~ Lupe Fiasco, Superstar