I think if anything, the last day or so has proven that I have no natural inclination to take part in social media like I once thought I did. My free time has been again whisked away by the real world woes of keeping a roof over our heads and the bills paid, which has been my excuse about blogging lately (and it looks like will continue to be until April). But tweeting? 140 characters of what’s going on right now?
In the last 24 hours we’ve had (as it turns out) an electrical fire in our water heater, the subsequent dumping of many gallons of hot water on our laundry floor, and the joys of homeownership – the bill for replacing said water heater. A hard-core tweeter (and I know, because I follow some of them) would have documented every step of the process for the world to read. I made two tweets iirc. Or on my trip to the doctor’s this morning for the pain I’ve had in my foot for a week – I made one tweet of questionable nature about how young the nurse was (funny aside – that tweet got retweeted by Neal Asher, which I thought was awesome not the least because I got the retweet notice while reading Line of Polity by Mr. Asher 🙂 )
I am not a tweeter is the conclusion I come to, and I feel somewhat bad about it. Over the last year, I’ve met some really great people on twitter, people I’d like to have a chance to meet in real life some day. I also got involved in a few weekly chats that for the past month or so, I just haven’t had the time or will to take part in. Those folks, I’m sure, have all written me off as a fly by night kind of guy, and maybe they’re right. While I could do it for a time, I really don’t have the resources to spend on being social.
This isn’t to say I won’t post on twitter (which is how my Facebook feed gets updated, btw). My blog posts will continue to post on twitter, mostly because they also pass on to Facebook, and because I treat them like a poor man’s RSS a la carte. But as the momentous birthday approaches in a week, I think I want to start spending the precious minutes I have free in a day elsewhere.
My shout out last week about a writing group netted nil. I’m not surprised or disappointed, though I would have been thrilled if something more of it had come. Only you can make you a writer, in the end, and only by the act of writing. If you see me online, say hi, but don’t be surprised if it’s a few weeks between musings. Those few minutes I might be saving by not catching up on twitter or posting inane things to the world? I think I’ll spend them somewhere else where the words dwell. I understand the sulfuric auroras of Io can be quite pleasing this time of the year.
