Nice to tweet you. Now please join my cult.

Yeah, I'm on Twitter (see sidebar). As you may have guessed, wordy me is having a hard time fitting complete thoughts into 140 characters. I am also completely stressed out by the pressure of coming up with multiple things in my boring daily life to tweet about. This doesn't seem to bother the majority of the twittersphere as much as it does me. Regardless, here I am, blogging about Twitter. And after this post is up, I will tweet about this blog. I'm pretty excited about that part--a tweet that writes itself. It's like a free tweet or a "freet" or a "#freet" or even a "#freetTM" as I like to call it. I'm planning to just continually cycle through blogging about tweeting and tweeting about blogging until I have woven an entire area rug of cross-promotion and self-aggrandizement. In fact, if anyone ever asks me for a "business plan," whatever that is ("uh... make money?"), the aforementioned area rug is exactly what I will offer up, only I will insert the phrases "grass-roots," "new media," "guerrilla marketing" and "the untapped potential of social networking" at key points for dramatic effect.

Another thing that really irks me about Twitter is the use of the term "followers." I like the "friends" I have on Facebook and also MySpace if I used MySpace (I don't). I'll give it to Twitter that "followers" is more accurate than "friends" in the sense that any term would be more accurate than "friends" for the hoards of celebrities, common folk and corporate entities that we twitterbugs are constantly soliciting. "Friends" conjures up images of school-sponsored clubs and whatnot. There are many appropriate situations for having "friends." On the other hand, if you have "followers," you are most likely leading your own cult.

Let's face it--is that not what Twitter really is, a collection of cults of personality? And Ashton (@aplusk) is Islam and Britney (@britneyspears) is Catholicism and Oprah (@Oprah) is Hinduism and nobody knows how CNN (@cnnbrk) got so high on the list other than saying "Ashton" every five seconds because it is not a legitimate celebrity worthy of cult adoration in and of itself.

And then there is me. As far as Twitter cults go, I'm like the leader of a rag-tag band of people drawn together from the fringes of society, peddling a combination of extraterrestrial life and the healing power of radio waves and the need to stockpile geese. The entire cult resides in my living room and we have a chore chart and we eat a lot of Minute Rice and, as the leader, my only chores are to eat Minute Rice and make sure everyone else is doing their chores, particularly those related to the geese. Years from now, the children raised in my living room will all go on to be indie actors, as everyone knows that acting is the only profession for which a cult-raised kid is qualified. Eventually, they will open their own Twitter accounts and gain more followers than me and I will constantly tweet about how I knew them back when.

So yeah, if you reach the end of this post and find yourself pining to read a tweet about it as well, please check me out at @rileynoehren. And follow me if you will, cause I definitely need followers.

I also could use a few friends.