It's good to be in touch with pop culture

For years, I've failed at staying in touch with pop culture, and in fact, I had no real interest in it. I still don't have any genuine interest in pop culture, but it is a great way to oil the writing engine, and in turn, write more marketable pieces than just whatever pops in my head that has nothing to do with what's going on outside of my own world.

I say this now, in particular, because I wrote a piece recently that I published on my own in Intrepid Media's gallery, and ended up landing a feature spot for that piece.

I wrote the piece titled "The Awkward Ref," after watching the new NBC show "The Marriage Ref," and hating it.

The purpose of this post is to spread the word that I have been featured again, and also to talk about the significance of this particular featured piece, which will be smack dab on the homepage of IM through Monday, I believe.

You see, for perhaps the first time in my life as an independent writer I wrote about something so timely, that the piece I wrote was featured on IM on the day that something was set to happen. For me, this is a huge step toward producing things that publications want to publish, which will inevitably broaden my horizons-- that is, if I continue to stay in touch with what's happening in a timely fashion.

Although "The Marriage Ref" was something I came across on TV, I feel that the way I will keep at being up to date is with the help of Twitter.

I've had Twitter for a while, but I hardly ever used it or even signed into the service until I began following the Winter Olympics through NBC's iPhone app. The app included tweets from the Team USA athletes. Seeing as how I was especially interested in Apolo Ohno, I began to follow him on Twitter and quickly became obssessed with Twitter altogether. I tweet constantly now. I went from following just a handful of people, to 59, ranging from friends, to individual celebrities, to the TV show Dexter, to all kinds of news outlets, and the list just keeps on growing.

The way we get information has evolved, and after a long time spent resisting the switch from newspapers and perfume-scented magazines to mysterious tweets that are no more than 150 characters long, I have surrendered. To resist is to remain ignorant, and left behind in a fast-moving world.