tweet.

on may thirty-first, i joined twitter.

there were a few reasons for this. and i am not ashamed to list them on my blog.

1. my best friend jacob has a twitter, and he constantly tells me that it's better than facebook.

2. i could shamelessly follow matthew gray gubler. (don't judge. this is what twitter is for... right?)

3. my cousin spent an entire evening tweeting and it drove me insane. (enough to get one...)

4. i have an absolute and debilitating OCD with my facebook statuses.

on the evening of may thirty-first, probably around ten, i was frequenting matthewgraygubler.com (don't visit it if you're afraid of tim burton movies. trust me.) and there was a nice little button that said @gublernation. so i clicked on it was and was instantly transported to the twitter universe. once i was on there, i had access to every tweet that matthew gray gubler had ever posted and quickly realized that if i had one of these, i could keep up with him, and post anything that i wanted to.

from there, i spent ten minutes fretting at the 'sign up for twitter' page before finally doing it. i made an e. e. cummings based email address just for twitter because i knew that it would email me shamelessly, and i can't have that kind of inbox number. i'm one of those people who lets their inbox fill up to over  a thousand emails and then spends hours deleting them and being a grump about it when i know it's my fault for being lazy. so...

i finally nodded, bit my lip, stopped chewing my nails, and made a twitter. @emilyyxh, if you're into tweeting and think that my life is cool enough for you to follow. you are reading this, so that's saying something.

i began to follow matthew gray gubler and jacob, and then i slowly began to find more people that i knew. and then i realized that twitter was incredibly freeing.

in middle school, i ate a fairly decent bowl of OCD cereal. back then, it was bad enough that i would line up food by color and variety, count them, and eat them one at a time. this made fruit snacks less enjoyable and lunch extra long. i've gotten most of it under control, but when it comes to facebook statuses, well...

i absolutely have to have my name, emily hollenberg, be the beginning part of the sentence. it must fit grammatically with the sentence, so if i refer to myself, i'm not i or me, i'm her or she. the sentence has to be grammatically correct in all ways, shapes, and forms, and only rarely does it actually describe what i'm doing.

my status always has to be at the top of my profile. if i post a status and someone writes on my wall within the next hour, i'll delete the status and repost it to put it at the top. if enough posts are posted to my wall during the day, i'll permit myself to post another status, but i generally stick to one a day.

i absolutely cannot have two statuses right next to each other. i will wait as long as i can to post one so something else can cover my latest status. i'll do a variety of things on facebook that will show up on my wall so it will have 'recent activities' at the top to get pushed between my old status and the new one.

i'm also very particular about what i post. my college job monitors my facebook and i cannot disgrace the college in any way, shape, or form, and that goes for what other people put on my wall as well. i try not to post things that i'm doing about my day because generally nobody cares. and honestly, if at least one person doesn't like it or comment on it, i feel like a little bit of a failure.

so yes, i have some facebook status stipulations. i am not ashamed to admit them in front of you, my valued reader. believe me, i have way worse idiosyncrasies than facebook status craziness.

suddenly, with twitter, i could post whatever i wanted, whenever i wanted (almost, but soon!) and not care who read it, saw it, or cared about it. if you care about me enough to follow me, then you get to read my tweet. my tweets didn't have to fit with my name. they didn't have to be a perfect sentence. it didn't have to be weird obscure song lyrics to try to describe how i was feeling. i could tweet whatever and feel good about it.

and that's when the addiction set in.

twitter makes me forget that i have email and makes me forget that i have a facebook. i tweet entirely too much (at least eight times a day) and when i tweet something, it makes me never want to post a facebook status. for about a day, i had these two nice little folders in my brain: a tweet folder, and a facebook status folder. now all i have is a gigantic tweet folder, and i sit on facebook, thinking of a status, and realizing that all i want to do is tweet.

i've gotten a lot of strange feedback on announcing that i have a twitter. my parents think i'm crazy. my best friend thinks i'm awesome and seeing the light (i do enjoy twitter more than facebook). a lot of people simply ask me why i joined twitter, and i mostly say that i got one to follow matthew gray gubler because that's just one hundred percent true. a lot of people say, "OMG I HAVE ONE TOO FOLLOW ME."

considering the fact that i'm addicted to twitter, i tweet too much, and i talk about twitter like it's my newborn child, i'm still a little cynical. i do feel like a major creep every time matthew gray gubler posts something that he's doing and i get excited. when i tweet things like, "lunch time!" and "i love my job, now it's time to eat some cheerios" i worry that this is the most pointless thing i could be doing with my time.

and i'm pretty sure it is.

i'm proud to say that i'm one of the few people who don't have twitter mobile. twitter is driven from phones, and i don't have mobile internet access. every time i tweet, i actually have to go to twitter.com and type up a tweet. this does allow me to post these blogs to twitter easily enough, and i do enjoy doing that.

so now i'm all savvy in the online world. i've got my four year old facebook with my charming 600 friends. i've got my twitter with my beautiful thirteen followers (thank you for liking me enough to at least read that i'm eating a bagel) and i have my blog. look at me, taking the internet by storm.

my tweet if blogspot were twitter: getting ready for work! :)



post script: if tim burton DOESN'T freak you out and you like matthew gray gubler or dr. spencer reid or that one nerdy guy in 500 days of summer, click right here for gublerland. the drawings are all his. and i warned you.