Tweet Tweet

Recently my boyfriend’s mother came for a work related visit. When we had dinner, we inevitably started talking about twitter seeing as how that is what I spend a large portion of my day doing. Typical of parent aged people, she understood the basic concept of it being this new way of connecting with people but questioned why we need it and what exactly it was (I think she heard about it at her book club…). I gave examples of incredible meetings that could be held by the 100k members of the California Medical Association that would be near impossible in person. I also told her how I liked that I had the ability to follow intelligent people with whom I shared interests and that they would post articles that I would like to read, and rather than hearing about the previous evenings drunken shenanigans form my college friends on facebook I could learn about colony collapse, or palm oil, or how to knit a pocket sized fish.

As the conversation turned away from things I am interested and back to political jokes and high scoring scrabble words, I began to think more about why I have suddenly become practically obsessed with twitter. Like most people I spend my entire day in a cubicle. The walls aren’t very high or sound proof, so I also spend a lot of time ignoring what is going on around me. I love sending emails and getting electronic signatures because it is fast and efficient, but I don’t interact with anybody all day. I forget that there is a world outside of my little desk area. Twitter is a little reminder that there are other people in the world doing things that are not filling out forms at grants.gov.

Blah blah blah everybody says this, but while pondering the meaning of life – perdon – the meaning of twitter, I also realized that it kind of keeps me in check mentally. This morning I got a ride to work and on the way I pointed out the window and said ‘see, that is where my community garden is going to be.’ I didn’t realize that I had never bounced this far fetched idea off of anybody. With no human contact for 9 hours a day 5 days a week my mind wanders out of control. Before I know it I am designing entire farms, bridesmaid dresses, Obama interviews. I am planning how to decorate the walls in my Argentina apartment and what veggies I will grow outside my house on the Parisian countryside. I have traded out all of the hospital scrubs for the Uniform Project girls black dress, and think about how I would far prefer a flying carpet to a broomstick even if they do break the law about bewitching muggle artifacts. I am not saying that any of these things are bad. I think that imagination is fabulous; the problem is I have such thorough conversations with myself in my head while im sitting alone in my cubicle, that 2 things happen. 1) I continue the conversation aloud when I get home to the utter confusion of the listening party, or 2) I think that I have had feedback and that my ideas have been checked and validated. For me, Twitter provides little blurbs of reason. It gives me somebody to kind of talk to and bounce ideas off of.