Published in On Our Selection News, November 3, 2016

I spent my first Saturday night in Sydney tweeting at Whoopi Goldberg.

To be fair, that first sentence made it sound like I was in a conversation with the shoe-loving presenter on The View who filled my childhood with song. I wasn’t. I tweeted at her while watching a back-to-back Sister Act special on television. It was glorious, obviously. The habits; the jazzy choir numbers; the wholesome fun dotted with a few spicy jokes. It’s all brilliant and I wanted Whoopi to know that. So I did what any attention-seeking homebody with access to the Internet would do: I tweeted at her.

And I like to think that if I were an already-established person of interest, we would have had a lovely online exchange that some smutty tabloid could have written about with a headline going something along the lines of “DMags [in my mind, the press would see me as a slightly bogan Jennifer Lawson/J-Law] shows us once again why she is the celeb we’d most like to have a sleepover with – and wins over Whoopi Goldberg in the process!”.

But let’s be honest here, there’s no way someone like Whoopi was ever going to respond to me. She was probably out doing cool stuff, and understandably ignored me like the lowly person that I am.

In fact, if you look through my last few tweets, you’d understand why the woman who had a brief cameo the 1994 family motion picture Little Rascals didn’t respond to me.

As a young media professional (yes, I’m calling myself a media professional because this column is nothing if not professional) I really need to work on building my online presence. You know, getting likes on my Instagram pictures and building an army of followers on Twitter. Twitter is that social media platform that lets you post your opinions in 140 letters or less. This can be anything from your disgust about the state of politics, or think your thoughts are important, when we all know they are worthless trash.

Twitter great because the only people who use it are celebrities, trolls and budding journos trying to build their profiles. And if you’re a budding journo trying to build your profile, you’re not famous enough to get attention from trolls and the fame-hungry twitter users like yourself tend to favourite your tweets to trick you into reciprocating. This means your real friends usually miss out on your cringe-worthy attempts for attention. But a sad consequence is that the celebrities you desperately try to contact rarely respond.

And maybe it’s a good thing the celebrities don’t look at my tweets, because they don’t make me look like the most fun or emotionally-stable person on the planet.

Here’s my bottom three tweets:

“You know you need a sleep in when you’re crying to 60 Minute Makeover.”

“Woke up hangover-free as my neighbourhood is too fancy to stock the only red wine cordial-y enough for me to drink.”

“Aaaaand I just teared up over a bread ad on TV.”

I guess I’m going to have to work on changing my image. Or go on a Tweet deleting rampage.