Finding Myself in Cyberspace

Last weekend I got an invite to join twitter. It had to happen. I've heard so much about twitter, and the more I heard the more confused I have become. It seems you can send a tweet from your cellphone (if you can send text messages). Why you would do this I can't understand--just letting everybody online know that you're riding a bus and looking at a kid with green hair or you're shopping for fish at Fresh Market. Now, if something momentous happens on the bus or at the fish counter, then you might be a hero for putting it online, but in my life such things don't seem to happen to me.

Having been roped into Facebook in a similar fashion a few months before, I decided to go to twitter and see what the difference might be. On twitter you're only allowed 140 characters, and they start counting for you as soon as you start typing in the message box. But as soon as I registered, twitter revealed a mailbox of my friends who are also registered, some I haven't heard from in years. I tweeted a couple, but it didn't work because they have to have included me on their tweetlist.

This is gonna take some time. I've gotten so I nonchalantly post over on my "wall" at Facebook, and write on other people's walls. But to make twitter work, you have to post those tweets, 140 characters and no more, all day long. Who's gonna read? I have no idea.

I'm good with blogs. I have three of them. The only one I update on a regular basis, say, three or four times a week, is this one. I consider it my Open Letter To the World and I'm comfortable spilling my guts here whenever I feel so moved. This usually takes the form of a little essay on what I'm doing, where I've been, or where I'm going--and it usually relates to life for a newcomer in Hoboken.

But it always relates to finding myself. That's the theme here, if you haven't picked that up. Some early posts collected historical anecdotes about growing up in Hoboken, and through them I picked up a following of sometime visitors and sometime commenters. Sometimes I write about a local restaurant or review a local theatrical performance or a movie I've rented.

I'm pretty sure I can use both Facebook and twitter to direct people here to read my meanderings and comment. Maybe I can get famous. Maybe I can sell ads. Maybe I'll find my true calling in cyberspace. Maybe I'll get a newspaper column out of this.

But whether or not I do, I'll probably blog til the end of my days.

Oh, and by the way, that wasn't the last installment of the Real Housewives of New Jersey. There'll be a follow-up tonight and another on Thursday, with the women discussing their emotional damage from the series. This I've got to see.