Dad, you're doing social media wrong

Original joke: 30 Rock. Meme image: Meming Wiki.

Although I’ve registered social media accounts in an attempt to increase my, as the publishing guides put it, platform, I’m also a mid-forties dude with the absolute conviction that I don’t know what I’m doing on any of those sites.

To stretch the old adage: I’m somehow falling between three stools: not young and online enough to be authentically aware of the trends and conventions, far enough along in fatherhood to worry about the impact of social media on my children, but also not far enough along in fatherhood that my own children can be useful Virgils to guide me through the online netherworld. Maybe the Bermuda Triangle is a better metaphor.

I know that this is a silly way to feel—it’s evident there’s no one way to do social media correctly, if only because of the sheer variety of people out there succeeding at it.

So for the moment I’m going to continue blogging (the word itself creaks with age) things that feel to me like they might be better suited to social posts.

Ahem:

1) To “shoo away” a spider sounds like the euphemism for killing it with a shoe.

2 Five definitions with homophones for “peer” pressure, in increasing order of silliness:

• Peer pressure - suggestions from friends or colleagues

• Peer pressure - nobility browbeating commoners

• Peer pressure - when a parent looks over at a child to prompt a change in behavior

• Pier pressure - how you drive piles into riverbed mud

• Pyrrh pressure - when your commanding officer wants you to go for a victory that’s not worth it

3) And three for the dog owners out there:

• Pretreat is when you give your dog the treat before they’ve done anything good.

• Retreat is when you give another treat because they just ate the first one without doing what you asked.

• Recursive argument is the dog’s argument for treats.* For example:

Hooman: “Here’s a treat.”
Dog: “I eat the treat.”
Dog: “I deserve a treat for how well I ate that treat.”

* I’m not sure if cur, the old term for dog, is current enough for this pun to land. Oh well. Such are the hazards of age.