I Don't Get It

                                                           Gordon Studer

Twitter mystifies me. Who reads it, who writes it and what's it for are just a few of my questions. Today the company, currently valued at $14.4 billion, will begin offering shares to the public for $26 each. This is apparently one dollar higher than was previously announced. I guess they're feeling pretty confident, what with 232 million monthly users, and I must say that if I wanted a share at $25 bucks, I would not flinch at $26. Still, I just don't get it.

Stuffed-crust pizza seems like the Department of Redundancy Department. You've got the crust, the tomato sauce, the various toppings and the cheese on top, so who needs more cheese inside the crust? Why not just increase the amount of cheese on top if cheesiness is your thing, and leave the crust alone? After all, they don't add more crust on the top, or stuff the whole shebang inside a big tomato. Perhaps that's next.

Facelifts, tummy tucks, brow lifts, eye jobs, and all the rest seem pretty silly, considering your insides don't get any younger in the process. If there were some procedure where I could make my heart, lungs, kidneys, liver, stomach and brain ten or fifteen years younger I'd risk the possible infection, medical error and death and have the surgery. But if the only result is that people who look at me have a better time while I feel the same inside, I'm not getting any. It's sort of like who cares what color your car is on the outside.

Visiting Disney World once or twice, or maybe even three or four times if you have lots of children, seems, while not all the way to reasonable, at least understandable. But then you hear about--or even know personally-- seemingly sane people who go back every year for 35 years, or visit the park six times a year, and you gotta wonder what's up with them. Have they not heard about Europe, the Far East, Alaska, Hawaii, the islands or Yellowstone?

Reality TV shows about losers enduring horrible lives in squalid conditions are quite popular. Not with me; I have a hard enough time navigating my own messy closets, basement and garage. I certainly have no desire to watch a program like "Hoarders" and witness the insanity of some pathetic psycho's freaky existence. There's even a show called "My Strange Obsession." Hey, that's their problem, leave me out of it.

All that is just the tip of the iceberg. There's so much more I find unfathomable, like mean people who go to church every Sunday and feel good about themselves, and women with fake boobs that look like tennis balls sewn under their skin wearing low-cut dresses like they have something to show off, and wasting your one and only life being morbidly obese and unable to tie your own shoes, and motorcyclists who ride without helmets, and boiling lobsters alive and the fact that there is no bus or subway from Portland to Freeport. Like, what if you don't own a car?