My love affair with Twitter

I love words.  I love to write.  I love to read.


I am also a bit of a stickler for spelling and punctuation.  I have recently began to appreciate the Oxford Comma.  Until I saw this cartoon, I had always thought it to be unnecessary.  But not anymore.

However, I digress.

Despite my preference for correct English, I must admit that I love Twitter.  I love to tweet, and I would check my Twitter timeline a few times most days.  It used to drive me a bit crazy when I would come up with an unusually clever tweet, and once it was completed I would have -2 characters.  So somehow I would have to make my clever tweet 2 characters shorter.  What do I do?  Commit a grammatical error?  Or a spelling one?  Do I change my tweet to make it slightly less clever?

Ahh, the woes of a modern day writer.  I know. Cry me a river.

I have, however, had to just get the hell over it.  So what?  A spelling error.  A missing full stop - nevermind.

I realised what I love about Twitter is the freedom.  Yeah, sure, you have the 140 character limit per tweet.  But I can say whatever I want.  I long ago made a rule that I do not allow people I know from real life to follow me.  That way, I can tweet about my family and friends.  I can moan.  I can vent about situations I want to keep secret.  I can get advice.

The strangest thing about Twitter for me is that I have actually made and developed friendships with people. Unlike facebook, where I would never accept a stranger as a friend, with Twitter all of my followers are strangers.  I might send out a tweet, I may get a reply, a conversation can develop.  I would say that I have made four real actual friends on twitter (none of which I have actually met though), and three of those people are now facebook friends.

I also think that as I don't have to worry about offending anyone on Twitter, as they are all strangers and they can unfollow me with the click of a button if they don't like what I have to say, then I can just say whatever I am thinking and feeling.  I often feel like the 'Twitter-me' is the real me.  I feel like I can truly be myself.  Geez, is that sad? I don't know.  Maybe I am just lucky that I have found such an outlet.  I wouldn't say that I pretend in front of my real-life family and friends, I guess they just get the version of me that I think they would like.  Where I omit to tell them certain things.  Or bullshit them a bit.  With Twitter I don't need to do that.