Twitter-Free for a Week

I’ve been more or less Twitter-free for the last seven days.

I’m a little compulsive about my computer environment. I can–and have–gone months without washing my car, but when someone touches my screen with a greasy, oily finger, my response is fairly predictable. I immediately threaten to cut off their hands if they ever do that again, and then I go looking for some microfiber to clean off the smudge. The fact that I keep getting an error message about an expired certificate on one of our BlackBoard pages grates on me worse than chalk squeaking on a board, even though it takes less than a second to click through it. Why doesn’t someone fix that; can’t they see that our site is BROKEN!

Twitter was contributing to my craziness far more than some moronic little application should be able to do. The endless errors about the server timing out, or the pagination not working, or whatever other technical problem was plaguing Twitterdom broke the flow that made the whole exercise worthwhile.

So I turned it off–with only one minor relapse–only to find that I really missed the sense of community, the stream of interesting quotes and comments, the tinyurls with interesting connections. So, I’m jumping back in. I’ve downloaded and installed the new version of Twhirl, and normalcy is being re-established. I now know that Andy and Jerry are in Princeton listening to Henry Jenkins, Jeff is changing his oil, and Garder, ‘Woke up this morning with “The Ballad of Mott the Hoople” in my head. “But if I had my time again / You all know just what I’d do.”‘

All’s right with the world.