yearbook?

Bad Twitter Parody Account Interviewed by Award-Winning Established School Yearbook

The pronoun "I" here refers to me, Rejected tjTODAY's creator.

1. How did Rejected tjTODAY start? What did you hope to accomplish?

Rejected tjTODAY began as another one of my stupid ideas. The very first headline, the one about the $24 million dollar research wing and the $24 thousand dollar humanities wing, popped into my head, and then I figured it sounded like a headline. That lunchtime, I typed it out into a Word document, and then more and more ideas started coming once the premise of Rejected tjTODAY headlines was established.

I created the Twitter account as a joke; I expected it to run until the headlines I wrote that day ran out, and then leave it there, untouched, as another relic of my internet activity. So did I hope to accomplish anything? No. But then came a day when someone retweeted one tweet and suddenly the account gained upwards of a hundred followers. From then, I took it as a personal challenge to come up with new headlines to keep the one-a-day streak going.

2. How do you come up with tweets? If there is more than 1 of you, how do you delegate the work?

It's mainly me. I have a few friends who are on board; they contribute ideas and we bounce headlines off each other to filter out the bad ones - we're a really good team. And I also have some friends who are guinea pigs, who gauge whether something's funny before it gets published. But I come up with the bulk of the headlines, and if we run out of them, I'm the one who takes the most responsibility for replenishing the stash.

Topical headlines about current events are always nice, but there are also weeks when nothing eventful is happening. In those scenarios, I have the usual topics I can fall back on, like resume padding, IBET projects, lazy geosystems seniors, the intensity of physics, TJ prep, college admissions... the lack of support for athletics, the arts, or the humanities...

Other than that, coming up with funny is just a matter of time. It's harder now because so many topics have already had headlines written about them. More than once I've spent an entire lunch period racking my brain until I came up with something I could quickly post and get it over with. Desperation fuels creativity.

3. What sort of feedback have you gotten about the Twitter and Facebook from students, teachers, etc.?

Occasionally someone will send us a nice message and that's always a treat. But other than that, not much.

Do teachers know about this? If they do, it's news to me...