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So the truth is out. After days of sketchy answers, Representative Anthony D. Weiner (D - NY) has finally confessed that the picture of a semi-erect penis that appeared on his Twitter stream over a week ago, in fact, his.
According to Weiner, he'd intended to send it as a direct message to a Seattle college student with whom he was indulging a cyber-affair, but accidentally sent it out to his public Twitter stream. Whoopsie!
I have a confession to make. While everyone else was discussing what this incident and its coverage said about modern American politics and journalism and hypothesizing about politicians' inability to keep themselves out of sexual scandals, I was counting the times technology had inadvertently cast me into deeply mortifying situations.
While I was married, I began conversing with a man on a regular basis, at first using Twitter's direct messaging, and then on chat. At first, the conversation was very general but, as time passed, it began to get more and more intimate. Aware of the slippery slope, I started discussing my attraction with the man, as well as my difficulty with what it meant in terms of fidelity.
The discussion, with its innate arc from conversations between two platonic married people to two people who are attracted to one another, touching on loyalty, infidelity. its reasons, and how to get away with it, though theoretical, was so riddled in erotic obstruction, it makes Weiner's naughty messages look like the boring, mundane come-ons of teenagers.
Being a writer, I knew even then that the material was interesting, so I started collecting bits and pieces of our interaction into an anonymous blog. This is how it happens, I realized at the time, looking over the conversations. You start talking to someone and before you know it, you're in over your head.
Desire is a terrifying thing when it doesn't belong to the person you're with. My therapy was research. I devoured books and movies, taking down the conversations in these that fit the theme of sliding into infidelity and adding them to the blog. It became a catch-basin of desire -- and the only way that I could express it.
For some reason, texting back and forth with my friend Simone, I decided to show her my blog.
I had fallen into the habit to texting my tweets to my public stream and the motions to do so had become almost second nature to me, so I didn't realize that I had tweeted my secret blog to my public stream instead of texting it to Simone for almost three hours.
This was in the early days of Twitter. I only had a couple thousand followers and no one in my daily life looked at my stream. I think most people who followed me assumed I was working on a story about affairs. The inclusion of conversations among fictional characters in books and movies served to camouflage what was actually unfolding between posts.
This was also in the days before Google, readers and various Twitter apps began to cache the information in people's public streams, so when the tweet was deleted, it was gone for good.
I learned my lesson and immediately made all the conversations that pertained to me private on the blog, leaving only the fictional exchanges.
And even though the years have made all of us a little wiser -- teaching us that Twitpics are public even if we send them over direct message, that it's wise to look at the reply field of an e-mail before hitting send, that sometimes Update Status bars look deceptively like Search fields (ever updated someone's name on Facebook when you were trying to stalk them? Embarrassing!), we're human and come equipped with a terrible margin of error that only widens the more excited or aroused we get.
Most recently, while shopping at well-known boutique, I tweeted to my entire stream that I was waiting to be fucked seven ways from Sunday in the changing room. I'd meant to send it only to my lover at the time, but somehow managed to fail again. I'd given my exact location to some 7,000 people and told them I wanted to have sex.
I'm grateful only my lover showed up. That one could have ended quite unpleasantly, to say the least.
Have you ever had an epic technology fail?
AV Flox
