Analogies a Specialty of the House

This is my 1,707th post. It has taken me six years to write 1,707 posts.

I have tweeted (on twitter) 1,712 times. It has taken me less than a year to write that many tweets. 1,712 times 120 characters (140 characters allowed per tweet, but I am averaging) is 205,440 words.

205,440 words! About nothing! I am running in a hamster wheel of Seinfeld episodes!

I joined twitter when I signed up to be a Canada Moms Blog Blogger. I had a bunch of instant friends; the CMB team, the other writers who belonged to the greater network of the Silicon Valley Moms Blog. I followed them all. They all followed me. After a few months maintaining two blogs, a facebook page and a twitter feed, I realized there was too much of me out there. Too many places where I was smiling, standing at the chip bowl, making pleasantries. I was in all different corners of the room during the party and that is not my style.

There is nothing wrong with that person. I am just not her.

The Internet has grown around me like a very aggressive garden. Lately I feel like I’m constantly weeding, trimming back over-zealous vines, bush-whacking with a sharp knife that I might see the good again, the small wild flowers trying to find the light, the ivy softening cold stone walls.

Twitter is a constant battery of starlings in this garden. Protecting their nests, dive bombing when I walk by, and chattering, the constant chattering. I have no use for it.

Ah, that’s not even it, which is too bad because I like the starling imagery a lot. It’s not that twitter (or those who use it) bothers me. Some judicious following / unfollowing and you, too, can see only what you want to see on twitter (or anywhere else on the ‘net.) It’s how I use twitter that bothers me. It’s that I throw these one-offs, these 140 character pieces out into the ether and never see them again. I never dig out the story and I love the story. The story is the thing.

Of course, I could do that. It’s not twitter’s fault that I don’t. I guess it comes from being a different kind of processor. An internal processor.

Let’s put this in the language of reality TV. At the beginning of the day I have 5 bags of chips to give out. One goes to the kids. One goes to SA. One goes to me. One goes to the house / to writing / to slack-jawed drooling in front of the TV. And one goes to the Internet. Will it be twitter who gets the bag of chips? This blog? Someone else’s blog comments?

Blogging replaced real writing for me because it provided instant gratification. I hate to admit it, but it is obvious. I could work for months on a short story, send it to magazines for months more, hear nothing, start over, spend years. People do. Better people than me. Maybe if I had kept doing that for the past six years instead of blogging I would be published by now.

Sobering thought.

As if blogging wasn’t instant gratification enough, tweeting comes along, with gratification even more instant and for far less effort.

In a perfect world, if I were better organized and disciplined then yes, I could have it all. I could use twitter to my advantage. But right now, twitter is using me. It takes my bag of chips and then I have no bag of chips left for any other part of the Internet. The Internet is hungry!

First step. Losing twitter, at least for a while. Maybe someday, if I have twelve bags of chips a day, I can take it back.