Free time is humorously dangerous

Free time can be dangerous—humorously so. The reason I say that is that this coming week is my spring break from my classes and editor’s duties at the paper. This leaves me with time to do somewhat important things I haven’t had much time to do since the semester began and an added bonus of actual free time, albeit it’s little.

As the week before spring break wound down at school, I began easing my mind into break mode with reading. I began with a book, which I will talk about shortly, but I also had time to sit down and catch up on my Time magazine reading. I have about four issues I haven’t had a chance to look at because of how busy I've been and I’m just now catching up.

Here’s the funny part. For the longest time, I’ve been hearing about Twitter and not having the foggiest idea or clue what the heck this new internet phenomenon was, until a week ago, when I read a column by Lev Grossman in Time magazine talking about just the thing I was clueless about. It explained Twitter in terms I could understand: “It is the status updates on Facebook, without the Facebook.”

It didn’t help that Grossman was talking about his attempt to quit Twitter and describing (in not so many words) what sounds like a socially acceptable way to basically stalk someone. I have an addictive, obsessive personality already— Twitter sounded like it would just intensify this thing I work hard to not let get out of hand. Besides, I thought, who would be interested in nothing but my status updates? What am I gonna write for an update? More importantly, what constitutes an update?

All these questions were building, but I left them unanswered, because I had no intention of joining Twitter.

Then...

I was reading the paper this morning when there was, yet, another article about Twitter. This article listed some celebs who use the service, gave a sample of their updates (which are no more interesting, in my opinion, than my updates would be) and added that Barack Obama himself used the service during his campaign.

That excited me.

Today, I decided I wanted to know what this service could do for me if I joined it. So, I am now a Twitter user. The only celebs I’ve managed to be interested enough in to “follow,” are Barack Obama and Gerard Butler. I’ve found a couple of friends on there too.

I’m looking forward to… I don’t know what it is one can look forward to with such a strange thing that if I really think about, really hard, find a little creepy. I guess I just feel a bit more with the times now that I’m on Twitter and hope I don’t end up like Lev Grossman: writing a column about my realization that indeed, a life worth living does exist outside of the world of Twitter.