[I gave up Twitter during Lent earlier this year and wrote my "return to" when Lent was done and never posted it. Why? I have no effing idea why this was not posted, other than clearly I was hitting the crack pipe. - Lisa 11/20/09]

Going 40 days without Twitter was an interesting experience as I’m terrible at moderation — it’s either feast or famine with me. This is one of the reasons why quitting smoking has always been so hard for me: I WANTED just one cigarette and then I would smoke 12, which meant I would have to buy a pack or bum from someone and the whole smoking process would start all over again. The only way I kicked it this time was not hang out with smokers, which is easy to do since I don’t know any smokers on the east side of the state.

However with Twitter, the problem was that just as I was weaning myself off of Twitter, everyone and their second cousin was joiningTwitter. Since this was definitely not a geographic issue (like attempting to quit smoking)¹ but rather a interest issue, what was a girl to do?

I decided to to go off of Twitter for 40 days not because I am religious and needed something to give up for Lent² but rather I was spending an inordinate amount of time on Twitter and not allocating that time for other, often necessary, projects. Twitter is not just about reading my public_timeline and tweeting but rather for me it is also about looking at what others are tweeting, following links, researching interests, people and things. If someone posted a blog entry, I’d end up spending several hours on that blog and then some. I want to to know who I am interacting with, so thus, Twitter became this full-time job of me searching out and expanding my network. I’m a curious cat who needs to know how things are done!

I wanted to use the time off from Twitter to do a variety of things though, things that I swore I was NOT doing because all of my time was being sucked in by Twitter. Things such as: updating lib schooled. more often, personal research, knitting, exercise (WiiFit), homework, writing, cleaning my apartment. I suck at time management and Twitter was fast becoming another obsession that was sucking down my time and like smoking, I couldn’t find myself an easy way to quit. More succinctly, I couldn’t find myself moderating my Twitter activity to do something else. Feast or famine.

In the Twitterverse (or really, any active online social life), 40 days is almost an entire cycle or IS an entire cycle of birth to death. Fads can come and go in 40 days or less, and with Twitter it went from bubbling under the surface of explosion to totally exploding all over the media. Every single form of media outlet was becoming Twitterized and add insult to injury, bands, authors, celebs, friends and everyone else in between were suddenly joining the Twitter bandwagon! And I couldn’t add them or read them! The one and only time I logged into Twitter during this period was when a co-worker asked me a question that required me to do so. But I didn’t look at my public_timeline, I swear. But other than that single instance, I refrained from reading my public_timeline, I did not log into Twitter, I did not follow Twitter links, I did not log into Twhirl or any other application, did not respond to DMs: not a damn thing.

The only thing I did was check how many minions were following me because the number kept growing and it was insane! In the 40 days I was gone, the number of my followers almost doubled! Thanks to auto-tweeting on this blog, I tweeted maybe half a dozen times in the last 40 days but not the continual dozen times a day (or more!) that I was doing before. According to TwitterCounter, the projection that I was to hit 500 minions before Easter was completely feasible — something that Chris and I had a gentlemen’s agreement on (that I would indeed hit 500 before Easter, while he did not believe it to be so). The final tally was 520 before i

And this became the puzzlement for me: I was not tweeting with any regular basis and I was gaining new minions. Why? I came up with the following reasons:
1. People I knew who created Twitter accounts after my hiatus.
2. People who were recommended to follow me (via #followfriday or another method).
3. Key word/geographic search: I gained a lot of new minions because of “librarian” and “punk rock” (@pnkrcklibrarian) in my name. I also gained new minions because of where I live, as it’s listed in my bio.
4. Hashtag (#) via my own self-created hasltags or via key wording my bio.
5. Spam bots, auto/serial adders.
6. MLM market peeps.

Was there a lesson learned in any of this? Probably in the end I was able to do a bit better this semester than projected because I was able to keep away from the time sucking whore that Twitter had become in my life. But other than that? I came back fast and furious to the Twitter world, as the SomeECard that Chris created for me.

P.S. As of November 2009, I’ve hit nearly 1200 minions. Yeah, I don’t get it either.

1. Yes, I’ve been smoke-free for 10 weeks now. I’ve got the 10-15lbs to prove it too!
2. While I was raised Catholic, I’ve given up all preludes of Catholicism years ago (despite the fact that I went to a Catholic college). Interestingly enough, my mother who is Christian and only practices some tenements of Catholicism (when it suites her) continually gives up men for Lent every year. You can see where my sense of humor comes from, then.

By definition, I’m an extremist. I can’t eat one cupcake, I have to eat the whole batch. I can’t watch just one episode of $Television_Show, I must watch the entire series. I can’t do things in halves or partials, I must have the whole entire wondrous, beautiful thing. Thus, anytime I need to quit or par down on something, it’s hard for me to get into the mindset that majority of the population already does this on a daily basis and that it’s totally okay to have $X in small amounts or not at all.

Temptation and gluttony be thy middle name. And usually, I’m totally okay with that until it starts running my life — like Twitter.

Let me spin it this way: When TheEX and I “broke up” for a second time in August ’08, I swore that I was not going to read his blog anymore. This sounds silly, yes, but after nearly two years of being together and the joining of our digital and physical lives, I did not want to know what he was doing or how he was doing in grad school. I went from checking his blog several times a day, during the entirety of our relationship, to not checking his blog at all. NO MATTER HOW TEMPTING IT WAS TO GO THERE! I especially did not want to find out about his love life. I’m egotistical enough to state that once you go Lisa, you never go back and I know myself well enough to know that my little heart could not bear to find out that in “3 weeks, 3 months or 3 years” he’d be dating someone else. Also finding that information would lead me to want to track the newGF down and talk sense in her before he started smacking her around (literally). But I’m horribly digressing.

The point being is that I had to rationalize my way through of not going to his blog: What was I going to learn? How was this information going to help me? Did I or do I need know what or how he is doing? How is this going to help me in the healing process? I deleted cached information so that there would be no auto-complete when I went to the browser bar, I cleared out the cache so that it would not show up in my history. I did not want any easy way for me to stumble upon his blog, even innocuously.

Melodramatic? Yes. Necessary? Absolutely.

Like reading TheEx’s blog, like smoking (25 days smoke-free! woot!), like most anything that has a shred of addictiveness to it – Twitter has become one of those indispensable things in my life that one wouldn’t think would make such an impression or be declared a necessity but because it has, I have to nip it in the bud before it takes over my life — which it has started to do.

I discovered Twitter in the August of 2007 via somewhere, created my account and tweeted my first tweet about procrastinating on a now-abandoned thesis. I lost interest in the technology — I knew no one really other than a handful of people on Twitter and since at the time the interaction with those people was sporadic, I too was sporadic with my tweeting. My tweeting picked up in December/January of ’08 and from June onwards, I became a tweeting fiend.

I’m not sure what changed — perhaps finding out I could tweet from my cellphone via SMS was probably a huge factor, tweeting non-sequitor stuff I was thinking about while grocery shopping or what have you seemed like the bestest thing since sliced bread. Or that my own readership was growing as well as those who were following me. Discovering that not only people but robots, news services, and whole corporate entities were on or getting on Twitter also helped further along the obsession.

But what really hooked me was the immediacy of Twitter — there is no thought process or need for editing (other than “Can this fit in under 140 characters or less?”). Getting out a thought, no matter how minute or ridiculous or profound fanned the flames. According to TweetStats, I averaged 20 tweets per day for January 2009. My overall average is 10 tweets per day, which via another statistical tool (of which I can not find now, obvs.), was higher than the average tweeter who does something like 5-7 tweets per day. Some popular tweeters get along on much less.

But it isn’t about the time of writing the tweets that becomes a problem, really, it’s the auxiliary work that becomes the issue. I use auxiliary as a term for things such as reading my public tweet line (which can take time especially when reading pages upon pages after period of non-reading. Like reading what was going on in the Twitterverse while I was in bed.), finding new tweeters, researching said tweeters (yeah, like you don’t Google everyone you digitally meet), reading those tweeters back log and making decisions on whether to follow them or not. In short, tweeting is not just about the immediacy of getting out your special snowflake thought but it is also about researching and developing relationships with those in your network, which of course takes a lot of time.

So much so that everything else I am working on (such as working in a library, homework, studying, personal projects) went to the way side and I hadn’t realized to the extent of how bad this addiction of mine was getting until it dawned on me that the first thing I do when I’m at work everyday is log into Twitter — before I do anything else. My own writing for my various blogs, journals and personal use also took a huge nose dive – libschooled. alone hasn’t been properly updated in ages. Couple this with I was beginning to write professional emails in Twit-speak, the problem had to be curtailed and soon.

Several Twitterpeeps were discussing what they were giving up for Lent and while I no longer practice Catholicism, I do like a challenge. Could I go 40 days without participating in the Twitterverse? No tweets, no adding friends, no reading the public tweet lines? If I could give up smoking, which was on the one crutch that I have been trying for years to give up, surely Twitter could be no worse.

So, I resolved for the next 40 days (starting today, Ash Wednesday, of course) of no personal tweeting and no reading of public time lines. Twhirl has not been removed from my computers but it has been removed from my desktop. I’m even debating on removing the Twitter SMS number from my phone. In my little world, Twitter will not exist, at least for 40 days. But of course there are exceptions, such as libschooled. has third party software that tweets when it is updated, so that is okay. And I also believe some other software stuff I have installed on various forms also tweets when that is updated, so that is also the exception. As long as I am not personally involved in the tweeting, then I have not broken this vow of Twitter-chasity.

What I’m going to be interested in is how much the Twitterverse will have changed in 40 days — how many people have stopped following me, how many people will begin to follow me. What new, cool and useful toys will make its appearance while I’m gone and how social networking within my own Twitter group will also change and also social networking as a whole in the Twitterverse.

You can get in touch with via the usual routes and I’m always on gTalk. See you in 40 days. More or less.

I’ve been writing online since the mid ’90s. Sometime in 2001, when LiveJournal was still accessible only by invite codes, I snagged a code from someone (unintentionally stealing it from the person it was meant for — not my fault that the originator posted it PUBLICLY!) and started using LiveJournal. For a long time, up until 2004 or 2005, I would cross reference entries between my own domain over to LiveJournal. The writing on my own domain slowly petered out and I started using LiveJournal for all of my “blogging” needs.

But I’m a voracious blogger, as it were, known for indepth analysis of the human condition (that sounded totally Pretentious Fucktwattedness, henceforth known as PFT, but I’m okay with that) and short non-sequitors that were mostly one or two lines of text. Stream of consciousness thinking, as it were, are my calling cards. I could start out a post about the joys of doing laundry only to end up discussing the rituals 006 and I used to share. There was never any “thought” process to my writing, it is what it is.

I’ve owned my own domain since the mid-’90s when one could buy them ONLY from Network Solutions (then Internic) and pay exorbitant amount of cold hard cash for the said privileged. I knew friends who ran their own servers, never paid for my own web hosting up until recently and for the most part, maintained (in the blogosphere) at least some sense of anonymity.

For the last couple of years, I’ve felt disjointed on how to combine my “internets” life with my public and personal ones. I’ve had exes who attempted to sue me for libel and slander, ex-employers who found my website and kept tabs on me after I left the company (even after I’ve left on my own accord and I was not dooced) and a local (state) family farm who claimed that my using their family name in the title of a piece was ruining their business. I’m everywhere and nowhere and the projects that I started, always seem to fall to pieces while modgirl.net languishes in disarray from terrible lack of upkeep. So thus began the great “re-organizational plan.”

• Finish the archives for modgirl.net and never touch that website again.
• Start updating She’s Got Plans and cross-reference to LiveJournal.
• Keep small non-sequitor stuff to Twitter.
• I’ve been asked about the Podcasting plugin that is showcasing on the bottom of this page, here is the scoop: I have over 700 CDs and close to 70 gigs of music, most of which I’ll probably never listen to. I thought it would be great to create a podcast, called AutoMusicBiographically. Each episode, starting with the beginning of the alphabet, I’ll showcase a particular band and discuss how they are relevant to me and to music in general while showcasing a few of their hits. I’m pretty excited about this new project, just need to get other stuff done before I get going on that one. I do, however, have a friend who does audio production work so this should
  far easier to get accomplished.

And so, what can you expect on She’s Got Plans?

• Music, book, television, and general pop culture reviews.
• Library school (and grad school) bru-haha.
• General commentary on the absurdity of the human populace.
• Project updates, including but not limited to: Knitting, cooking (because I’m relatively new to this whole “cooking” thing), writing (I’m working on flash fiction pieces to be compiled for an anthology), exercise and diet shit (gluten intolerance, like everyone else on the planet). The usual project and entertainment crap.
• Team Sassy updates. Steph and I are walking 50 miles in October to help combat MS. Cross-referencing both websites with updates.
• AutoMusicBiographically. I’m so excited for this project to begin!
• Photos. There will be lots of photos.
• And whatever else I can think of.

I’ll be tweaking the front end for a bit while I discover new plugins and widgets and of course, start driving users to the website, etc.

That’s it for me, for now. I need to get to bed.
Good night internets, sleep well and don’t hog the bed.