I first caught a glimmer of Twitter a couple months ago whilst stumbling about online, drawn to the adorable little blue bird logo. I read up on it briefly, but quickly decided that this seemed a time-consumming, juvenile, overall fruitless endeavor. I mean, I am a religious IM'er and have accounts with iChat, Yahoo!, AIM, MSN and Skype. I blog. Fairly routinely. Why do I need to post play-by-play reports of my day in 140 characters or less? WHO am I sharing this with? Do THEY care? And if they do, WHY do they care, and do I even care if and why they care? I promplty hit my stumble button again, leaving this new fangled social-networking thingamabob to the communication-crazed 13 year olds.

Just recently, however, ana/g called me up and said, "Hey - join Twitter." A little bell rang. I recalled the little blue bird. I replied simply, "OK" - a bit reluctantly, albeit. But I dutifully navigated to twitter.com and created a user ID. I completely and blindly caved despite all previous reservations - but I figured she had done sufficient research enough for the both of us to warrant the decisive "Hey - join Twitter" command. Besides, I didn't HAVE to use it if I really wasn't digging it, right? I could stop anytime I wanted to, right?

Once I got my ID, I made note of my password, checked the Remember Me box, and bookmarked the page in a matter of 60 seconds. So. Now. What to write? (It's like the first page of a Moleskine. So much pressure!) This first Tweet would be the Tweet to open the door and pave the way for all the other Tweets. I mean, how does everyone on this thing know what to write, anyway? Who outlined it for them? Are there suggestions somewhere? What could possibly be so alluring about a (maximum) 140 character message? I nervously leaned forward, contemplating the impatient blinking cursor underneath the LOOMING question:

what are you doing?

What am I doing??? Seriously? Like right now? This feels potentially invasive... I'm very private, after all. How much detail do you want exactly? Oh, right, no more than 140 characters... Hmm.. Ok. So. It's not like this was a test or something. Nobody's actually grading me on this or anything, so I told myself to just relax, and go with the gut.

> "now what? are we having fun yet?"

I am such a pessimist. I know. But I had to be true to me. Phew, at least it was done.

And that was all I could possibly think to Tweet in my first 24 hours.

At day 2, though, I was loosening up a bit: