What happened??

Had to dust off the old blog for this one because WHOA nelly, what an interesting 24 hours I've had.

So yesterday, I was making muffins, and when my hands are occupied and my mind isn't, stuff pops in. It usually pops out on Facebook or Twitter. So after I finished grating and juicing four oranges, I tweeted this: "So Palin & crew are feeling unjustly blamed for the actions of an extremist. Maybe they can ask Muslims for advice on how to deal with that."

Just something snarky. My usual fare. After I finished mixing the muffins, I checked Twitter again and had a few positive replies from my usual followers and noticed I'd been retweeted (reposted). Yay! People liked it. On with the muffins.

Muffins are in the oven. I checked Twitter from my computer to see how many times I'd been retweeted - 20! That was a record. I'd also gotten 6 new followers, which was exciting. I went to take a shower.

Shower's done, hair's dry, muffins are out of the oven. I hear my phone blowing up. I've gotten 30 followers since I last checked my e-mail. I check Twitter and my replies column is spinning - messages of support and people paraphrasing to retweet. (Tech moment. A proper retweet won't show up to the author, it just gets logged on Twitter. Some people will retweet so it will show up to the author, and it shows up as a regular reply.)

I texted a couple of my friends to let them know that I was kind of a big deal on Twitter right now, and as I'm having conversations with them, my phone keeps beeping with new e-mails. 10 more followers. 10 more followers. 10 more followers. I checked my Twitter again, and my replies column is out of control.

People are starting to yell at me. I got called a whore, a racist (??), and was told to shut the **** up. Someone told me they can't wait for the end of the world in 2012 so people like me would shut up forever. I freaked out a liiiiiiittle bit and locked my account down to private. Had Drew do the same thing.

Still, people are retweeting. And following. A LOT. These were follower requests - people couldn't see my tweets unless I allowed them to. And I wasn't allowing them to.

I got a notification that I was trending in Portland. "Trending" means I was a trending topic, which means I was one of the 10 most popular things being talked about in Portland at that time. Then I got a notification that I was trending in Seattle. Then I got a notification that I was trending in CANADA. THE WHOLE COUNTRY was talking about me. Yowza.

THEN. I was featured on twitter.com/toptweets, which features the most popular tweets on Twitter. They have 800K+ followers. WOW.

There was much pit sweat during this time, folks. I've always liked writing and thought that mayyyybeeee some day I'd do some actual published writing and I figured people might like it, but I had a moment in the kitchen yesterday when I realized that roughly a million people had read what I'd written. People were suggesting me to Keith Olbermann for his Tweet of the Day segment. Lots of people watch his show. YIIIKES.

Went to my Bible study last night to regroup. Told everyone what had happened and at one point opened my Twitter to show them and I had gotten a bunch of notifications that people were using my tweet and not crediting me. Really popular people. That doesn't bother me so much, because I had put it out on a popular, public domain, but hey, I'd been plagiarized! COOL.

When I woke up this morning and checked my e-mail, I had 149 new follower requests, bringing my total to 229. I absolutely could not believe I had somehow gotten that popular. I checked Twitter and several people were telling me that I was being featured on the front page of Reddit.com, which is a website where you can submit links which people will then vote on, and the more votes a link gets, the higher it's featured on the website. My tweet was number one. Reddit is a VERY popular website. There's the pit sweat again.

So, I took my baby to school, stopped for some coffee, came home, and decided to face the music. I un-protected my tweets, accepted all my new followers, and started responding to my replies. For most of the day today, with obviously long breaks to take care of and play with my kid, I've been responding to people. 99% of the replies are messages of support. The 1% that disagree with me aren't so bad. I understand their point of view. Most of them disagree with the analogy I made, but in arguing their point, they're reinforcing mine.

So that's what's happened. I've gone from 420-ish followers to, at press time, 892. It's rumored that my tweet has been retweeted an estimated 25,000 times. I've been called "f***ing brilliant." Me.

I'm just feeling sorry for my new followers, because I'm about 6% profound political observations and 94% fart jokes.

We'll see where this goes.