The affirmation that I was addicted to Twitter came on a cold Friday afternoon. My husband and I both work from home on Fridays and typically we say few words to each other as I type away writing my columns, and he types away writing code for his latest IT project.
But on this particular day, our thoughts turned to love, or should I say lust.
I don't want to give anyone the wrong impression. We've been married for more than 10 years, and most intimate encounters happen the traditional way, at night when the kids are fast asleep. Sometimes, however, the fog of age and familiarity fall away and you see each other as you did during those first months after you met, when there were few cares and lust obsessed your every waking moment.
"S-E-X." That was the instant message from my husband, who sits two feet from me, that sent us both scrambling for the bedroom, pulling off our clothing and jumping into each other's arms.
We lay back with broad smiles on our faces afterwards, and the aching feeling that we'd have to leave our warm bed and head back to the real world. The sun shined harshly through our windows like an angry supervisor telling us to get back to our cold computer assembly line.
Surely John Donne would have tweeted this tryst if he were alive.
Busy old fool, unruly Sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run?
(This particular stanza from Donne's poem, "The Sun Rising," is less than 140 characters.)
I sidled up to my husband, who was picking our crumpled clothing off the floor, and said: "I have a question for you. Would you mind if I tweeted our afternoon encounter?"
I should have known better than to ask this question. For months he's been complaining about my obsession with Twitter, that I was on it too often, that I talked about it too much, that it was silly and needed to be eradicated from my already busy schedule. "Are you tweeting?" he'd often ask when he was waiting for me to get to the dinner table or join him for a morning walk.
I often find myself defending Twitter. And lately, it's gotten easier to defend, having gotten some props for being more than just another social networking site.
Alas, there's been so much hype about how Twitter's reach is now shaping world events, that what's gotten lost in the shuffle is its impact on our regular, mundane lives.
It's not tweets about protests in the streets of Tehran, but ones about bowel movements, recipes for the perfect Greek salad, and unabashed self-promotion that have rocketed Twitter into the stratosphere. Almost everyone on Twitter is trying to promote themselves whether they admit it or not, and the more followers you have the cooler you are, and the greater impact your tweets will have. I'm known as CareerDiva and I have over 3,400 followers.
Tweeting about my career blog and my MSNBC.com column have been at the top of my Twitter to do list because it's a great way to drive more traffic. I can also share the workplace issues that are near and dear to my heart, or just bitch about any type of news from around the globe.
I also write all my tweets in verse, and dubbed myself the Calvin Trillin of Twitter. People have asked me why I always rhyme. I guess I like the challenge of coming up with something witty that also rhymes, whether it's about hostessing or joblessness.
just tell me if you're going to show up for my gig/i know RSVPs are passé but without them i'll be short of the fatted pig
news of 2.6 million jobs lost in 2008 is making me blue, the highest number of jobs lost in a year since WWII.
Lately, I find myself inadvertently sharing more. It was almost like a cathartic cyber pen that emerged as I began tweeting about my marriage, my children and my own mortality.
looking thru our wedding album and see three guests now dead and gone/just part of the growing old con?
ex-boyfriend wants to friend me on facebook/my hubby's ok with this/should i regard this as a diss?
"All About Eve" wasn't making my hubby happy and, while he never tried to really derail my Twitter obsession, he made it clear many a times that he thought Twitter was twisted, and that I was getting more and more tangled.
And now I dared ask him if I could share our most intimate moment with twitterheads around the globe. "No," he said with a bit of shocked disgust in his voice.
"No?" I asked meekly. "No," he responded quietly.
We both knew the discussion was over, and we headed back to our desks. I sat there like an alcoholic who was just told she drinks too much; ready to reach for another drink as I called up Twitter.
Of course I wouldn't tweet about our brief, beautiful moments together, but it took me a while before I could grasp how my request pointed to something I would have to someday face -- I was bordering on being a Twitter-a-holic.
"So what if I was?" was my first thought. It doesn't hurt anyone, doesn't cause wars, doesn't destroy love.
I love many things, as my Twitter friends know all to well.
nothing better than rummaging thru a bag of pistachios and finding one that's shell-less/i'm a salt-a-holic, i must confess
Salt-a-holic, Twitter-a-holic. We're all so focused on our "a-holics."
Maybe it's not Twitter obsession. Maybe I, along with so many others, just want to spread love across the ether.
I can't help but think, though, that what's happening on so many of these social networking sites will someday become fodder for digital poetry books we've yet to download. Someday my tweets of love and passion could end up Kindled. My book on CEOs has already made it, why not a book of my tweets.
While I promised my husband I would not divulge the euphoria of our afternoon on Twitter, I said nothing about offering a tweet elsewhere about the spectacular event.
was it like stealing?/off to bed to embrace our feeling/during the daily-grind such a thing wasn't right/but we seized our afternoon delight