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“Please shoot me,” I said, like an arrogant snot, “if I ever get a Twitter account.”

I have a friend – who shall remain nameless to protect their dignity – who regularly sneers at television. Simply doesn’t believe that there can be anything of value, artistic merit or non-trashy on the small screen. We all know that this snobbery is a cover for the fact that if you put said person in a room with a television that’s on, they will never, ever leave, completely mesmerized by the flickering in the corner.

I suspect my arrogance was rooted in something similar. Given my tendency towards immersing myself rather fully (which sounds so much better than the word obsessive), Twitter has the potential for taking over my life. And then there’s the fact that I doubted I could express myself in 140 characters (me? Verbose? Well, now that you mention it…).

And then I got injured. Well, not the one I’m “enjoying” at the moment, but the one a couple of weeks ago and there wasn’t any writing and I was resenting it and felt completely gagged and… signed up for Twitter. I’d probably have done it eventually anyway. I recently spent an afternoon listening to Antonia Zerbisias of the Toronto Star – who is brilliant and for an example of her brilliance, she posts things like this on her blog Broadsides – talking about social media and how to use it politically. And then there was Roger Ebert’s article about a similar conversion that I’ve just experienced in which he gave examples of wonderful tweets from people he’s following. And it was this one, from natashabadhwar that tipped me over the edge and got me to sign up immediately:

There’s a drizzle in the breeze today. Small droplets, smaller than the tingle in my skin when I see you.

I may not be able to write such beauty, but I most definitely want to read it.

And then there’s the thing about being too injured to be able to write something with paragraphs and finding out that it is indeed quite possible to communicate in 140 characters. And somewhere inside me, there is a pondering on the human will to communicate and how when it is blocked in one way, it, like a river, inevitably finds a way around into new territory.

It turns out that Twitter is an endless source of entertainment, one around which I have to place certain restrictions to combat the aforementioned immersive tendencies. Not only is it a fun way to keep in touch with friends and read transcendently beautiful poetry, but it is also a source of the greatest links. Seriously. Roger Ebert alone can keep me entertained for hours, pointing me in the direction of an article about orangutan language, an incredibly well made, yet apoplexy-inducing video from some arse named Rick Barber, another video about the Tetris god that made me howl, a graphic that sums up the earth and blew my mind. And then there’s this tweet, found by The Boy, allegedly from the Queen after England blew the World Cup.

Consider me hooked. Should you want to check out my decidedly newbie antics, I am a Twit here.