RT Romance is dead.

I’ve made 51 tweets since joining the land of Tweeters a few weeks ago, and I have to admit it’s left me feeling somewhat empty. I think it’s quite possible that we’ve become a generation so wrapped up in our own selves, that in many ways we’ve forgotten to experience what we’re seeing as it happens and feel all there is to be felt.

The more I see of Twitter and our push toward putting all of our lives on the internet, I wonder if fun moments at bars with friends really matter if they’re not captured on a digital camera and then immediately posted as a Twitpic. Can we really taste how great that pork sandwich is from Ko if we’re so worried about typing in to the hundreds of strangers following us, just how much the line was worth the wait?

It all goes back to the tree falling in the woods riddle. Does it make a sound? Does it (or anything) matter if no one is around to hear?

I can’t help but think that we’re no longer capable of feeling in real-time. Rather, we are so caught up in our own self-importance that we don’t even know how to function without hiding behind our screens. Case in point: what can you really say when you meet someone at a bar who doesn’t take the opportunity to talk to you beyond a casual hello, but then later, (some way, somehow without a name or number), tracks you down on Match.com based on your picture alone and sends the message – “Was that you at the bar on Sunday night? Want to go out sometime?”

Seriously? (*Note this wasn’t me).

What are we doing running so scared from what is right in front of us? Maybe we’re too wrapped up in having a good time, thinking that anything new is ultimately better without stopping to recognize just how much it’s changing our lives - new ways to watch our favorite shows or listen to music or read our books or interact with friends or even, come to it, how we love.

I’m not sure where I fit in, in this forest of ever-growing technology forever distancing us from anything real. But I have to think that the uneasy feeling that comes along with how much everything is changing only proves that none of us can see the forest for the trees, as it were. Whatever that means.

All I want, I guess, is for people to open their eyes and recognize that no matter where we’re standing it’s not the absence of sound that should be considered, but rather the absence of awareness of the sound that makes all the difference.