et maintenant, je gazouille

Belatedly inspired by my buddy Mike, I am now a resident of Twitter. God help me. I kept protesting that it would never happen, that Facebook and Twitter both sucked... that I didn't need to spend my days writing one-liner after one-liner... but then I discovered that the writing you do on Twitter doesn't bear the same sorts of security risks associated with Facebook membership, and that microblogging presents a sexy challenge to those of a writerly mindset: the challenge of making one's thoughts as concise yet information-saturated as possible in the face of tight constraints... and that was all she wrote. I can now say from experience: Twitter reduces your life to solipsistic, narcissistic haiku, and you'll love it. I don't even have any followers, and I still love it.

So now-- or perhaps I should say for now-- I tweet. I hoot, screech, chirp, squawk, and caw. I can't guarantee that I'll do it routinely, but right now I'm still in that gleeful, kid-in-a-candy-store, get-it-out-of-my-system phase, so if you head over to my Twitter page, you'll see plenty of examples of me trying out the one-liners-- serious, naughty, philosophical, political, whatever. Those familiar with this blog will also see plenty of recycled material.

The addictive power of microblogging is analogous to the fattening power of mini-Reese's peanut butter cups: you keep eating and eating them, thinking that you're not eating too many, and by the time you realize that you've eaten the equivalent of twelve regular-size peanut butter cups, it's too late: the sugar has already been coursing through your system for ten minutes, and there's nothing you can do about it. So you keep eating. Twitter encourages just that sort of addiction, one based on minute quanta, substituting prose for chocolate and peanut butter. Praise be unto Allah that I no longer have a cell phone. Were I to tweet from that, I'd never be off Twitter.

It's possible that I may quickly become bored with Twitter. Possible, but not likely anytime soon.

Good God, I'm a whore.


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