What I like about twitter: aka, John Mayer brightens my day

I’ve added yet another button to my website:

 I never did it before because, frankly – twitter, facebook, the blog – it can all get very repetitive. And I figure if you’ve read me here, you’ve read me enough. But some people might be more into one than the other, so I thought I should at least put it up there. Besides, with twitter you only get one-hundred-forty characters of a person at a time. Which might be preferable. You never know. 

Twitter is like facebook with status updates ONLY. You just go to it whenever you want, and answer the question “What are you doing?” Although, really, people would rather hear something along the lines of, “What are you thinking about?”, “What cool thing have you seen lately?”, or “Make me laugh.”

As a writer, I really like the challenge of saying something in 140 characters or less. I also like the discipline of trying to say things of actual interest. You can say, “I’m eating lunch.” But really? I mean, at least tell us that a pickle just fell in your lap.

To give you an idea, I wanted to present some of my favorite tweets (that’s what they’re called). First up: My sis. Felicity joined fairly recently, and she quickly noticed that certain members of the fam kept tweeting their progress in a certain exercise program, P90X. The tweet would start with what day they were on and proceed with how much they sweat and how much they hurt. So Felic had these two tweets that made my day:

Day 0 of P90X – it was awesome. I feel great. Ate ice cream for lunch.

Day -2 of P90X. Again, this is really going well. I accidentally walked the dog last night but I got back on track with pizza for breakfast.

Dr. Frank Maurio‘s bio says he is New York’s Psychologist to the Celebrities. He must have started following me when I tweeted about wanting to be the new castmember in Ocean’s 14 or something. His posts are little words of affirmation, which you’d think would be annoying. No sir. I ADORE them. He doesn’t tweet every minute of the day, which is nice. But just once every day or two, he zings you with something like this:

There is a responsibility that is uniquely yours in terms of allowing yourself to be your very best. Take a chance and go for the prize. 

And I gotta say, even though I got all swept up in the Ashton Kutcher race to beat CNN to one million followers (power to the people and all that), my favorite celebrity on twitter is a musician: John Mayer. You can count on him for laughs like this one, which he tweeted shortly after the donations for mosquito nets (to prevent malaria) had reached 300,000:

Is now not a good time to announce that I’ve bought 300,000 tiny scissors for mosquitoes? 

But besides the (admittedly irreverent) humor, you get little gems about songwriting like this:

Rare, but when you write a song and record it within 6 hours, you sort of listen to it as a gift. Like getting to know a different you. 

And I really liked the time that he said something about Thursdays giving him a false sense of Fridays, and later I saw this in response to the person who said, “You’re John Mayer, EVERY DAY is Friday:

I am a member of society like anyone else. I take my cues from the vibe at large.

And you know what? I believed him. Because that’s what twitter does – it connects you. It decreases every degree of separation to one. It makes you realize that what you have to say in 140 characters at any given moment of the day is every bit as noteworthy as what anyone else has to say. We’re all just trying to be the best version of ourselves. And we all need Fridays.