Empty Gate Zen Center has taken some further baby steps into the new millennium, with both a
Facebook page and a
Twitter thingie. Along with the
Yahoo Group, we'll use Twitter to send out Center news and (daily?) Zen aphorisms.
Which reminds me of visits to my father's father (we called him
Zeyda, which is Yiddish for grandfather). This was 40-some years ago, and I was too young to be curious about the facinating life Zeyda had lived. Let alone to be grateful for his courage in crossing continents and oceans from Ukraine so that his lucky descendants could be born in America. I did notice how out of touch he seemed to be about the modern world, calling a refrigerator "the icebox" or a car "the machine."
My sage
brother would explain that just about everything in the world had changed since Zeyda's childhood. And (my brother would whisper to me) the world changes faster and faster, so the day would eventually arrive when I'd find
myself even
more clueless than Zeyda was then.
Twitter reminds me of that long-ago prediction. Not only do I fail to figure out Twitter technically... I can't even grasp the concept of
wanting the world to know what I'm doing minute to minute. But I got
my own Twitter account anyway. I don't expect to send out much; I still haven't worked out how to connect it to my BlackBerry.
Why did I bother to join Twitter? Because it's what all the kids are into; it appears to be the Biggest New Thing since
levitating ping-pong balls. So maybe my membership at Twitter will magically and mystically forestall that fateful day my brother whispered about. Besides, I do enjoy following some of the "Tweets" that others send out, like:
2012 is for people who were disappointed with Y2K (from
Guruphiliac) and
Looking for the meaning of life is like looking for the square root of purple (from
Duhism).