There are three types of people. One type is the tweet professional, with links to his or her LinkedIn account in his or her bio. Another is the casual tweeter, dropping hashtags about bad drivers and sharing Thought Catalog articles.
The third category belongs to the undefinable: Weird Twitter.
“Are you over age 24? Lou Bega had already recorded and released Mambo #5 by that age. what have you done with your life you loser,” tweeted Jon Hendren (@fart) on Dec. 10, 2012.
The Weird masses, made up of anonymous Twitter prodigies like @fart and @dril, also include comedian Rob Delaney (@robdelaney) and poet Patricia Lockwood (@TriciaLockwood), who balance tweet promotions of their newest pieces, shows and books, and the off-kilter tweets that set them apart from the average celebrity tweeter.
Since being discovered, Weird Twitter has been poked, prodded, analyzed and made merciless fun of. I say we just enjoy tweets that aren’t obeying a formula to get the most reads or put off just the right happy-go-lucky, yet professional attitude.
From watching their antics firsthand, rather than taking the word of Buzzfeed or a pretentious blogger who thinks he stumbled upon something outrageous, Weird Twitter isn’t just weird. It is also Profound Twitter, Poetic Twitter and Hilarious Twitter.
As a writer and occasional tweeter, I look at how they play with form, turning those 140 characters into a poem or a miniature screenplay or a nonsensical soundbyte. It’s incredible what you can find, even if it is disconcerting and laughable at face value.
On Nov. 6, 2013, Kimmy (@aRealLiveGhost) tweeted: “keep your hot panini and your chipotle mayo. I only eat sandwiches that taste like they’re asleep.”
As a seeker of meaning in the endless flood of images and flack that is the Internet, I find more accurate and original social commentary in this subset than in the rest of the social network. Their popular references are on-point. Their stereotype usage and their sense of the absurd leaves me feeling better about the state of things than ever before.
And college students could learn a thing or two from the most well-known of Weird Tweeters, those who go by their real names, like the aforementioned Delaney and Lockwood.
Delaney, as a comedian, can get away with more than other celebrities, but Lockwood’s account balances regular self-promotion and the kind of fun every professional on the site is too scared to have. Her mocking sext tweets, beginning right after then-Congressman Anthony Weiner’s sex scandal, should be taught in high schools to teach them not to take their love lives so seriously.
I look to these accounts whenever find myself taking social media too seriously, and my state of mind is better for it.
Samantha Bares is a 20-year-old English junior from Erath, La.