So much fun I forgot to post

I was feeling a little bit ambivalent about our plan to head to the beach last Sunday. I knew the drive would be long and the traffic heavy, and there were items on my To Do list that would go undone for yet another week if we were out all day.

But as my two children reminded me, it’s a tradition. Every summer, we spend one afternoon with friends on the beach. And even though these particular friends live only three miles away from us the rest of the year and we generally see them several times a month, the annual meet-up during their Maine vacation is a tradition now ten years old. So no one wanted to miss out.

It turned out to be a perfect beach day, and none of the inconvenience mattered compared to a gorgeous afternoon of bright sunshine, dry air, tossing waves, and happy children on Boogie boards.

Not until we were driving home did I realize what was missing. How had I managed to overlook something so critical? I double-checked, and then triple-checked, but no: the proof was right there, painfully obvious in its absence.

It wasn’t my wallet or my phone or my purse, or either of my children, that I’d neglected to bring home from the beach with me. Instead, it was any technological record of the fact that we’d been there. Caught up in the fun of visiting with friends, watching the kids jump in the waves, and taking a long walk along the water’s edge, I’d forgotten to take a single photo. Or jot a Facebook post about what we were doing. Or tweet a witty 160-character description of the beach crowd. Or press a button on a virtual map to show just where we were.

My presence at the beach had disappeared as quickly as my footprints in the sand, all because in the spirit of the moment, I’d completely forgotten to press any buttons on any screens connected to any social media platforms or other digital networks.

If a tree falls in the forest….. I muttered to myself as I scrolled pointlessly through my phone just to be sure there weren’t any photos I’d somehow overlooked. If I didn’t snap it or post it or tag it or collocate it, how do I know it happened?

And for that matter, if friends can’t immediately show their appreciation for all the fun I’m having, am I really having the same amount of fun?

I knew it was a ridiculous concern. I’d been having fun for nearly four decades before Facebook even existed. And yet, I realized as I drove home from the beach, in the course of just a few years, my perspective had been somehow intractably altered. Posting on Facebook is like having an automatic cheering section behind you; suddenly everything you do seems worthy of enthusiastic acknowledgment, as if we are all toddlers learning to walk again. Photo of my kids on the last day of school. Hooray! Bon mot about the complicated but rewarding life of a freelance writer. Love it! Tongue-in-cheek and yet inexplicably poignant line about how happy I am to be celebrating 22 years of marriage. Go, you two, go!

If I can’t “share” it, how can I share it?, I wondered, even though I knew that not so long ago, this question wouldn’t have even borne semantic sense to me.

“How was the beach?” my husband asked as the kids and I arrived home.

“It was wonderful,” I said. “Everyone was sorry not to see you, though.”

“I learned how to use a boogie board,” my daughter reported.

“We ate lobster rolls,” my son added.

Oh, right, I remembered. This is how you share when you can’t “share.” This is how you communicate what happened when you don’t have photos, hashtags or links to help tell the story. You put it into words. I remember this.

When I woke up the next morning, there were no red flags on my computer screen telling me that a few dozen more people had “liked” my afternoon at the beach. In fact, it seemed as if no one except for me was even thinking about my afternoon at the beach.

So I wrote a note to our friends thanking them for a great day. And I reminded the kids of the boogie boarding and lobster rolls, and assured them we’d go back again next summer.

It’s a tradition, after all. And sometimes you really don’t need to crowdsource your experience to know you’ve had a good time.

Facebook days: Real life in concentrated form

“Because I don’t care what people had for lunch,” said an acquaintance recently in telling me why he hadn’t joined Facebook.

I had not asked. The people I know who avoid Facebook have my full admiration. I myself once said I wouldn’t join it until I was managing the feat of keeping up with the New York Times seven days a week, but I caved long before reaching that goal. Most days, Facebook is like my virtual water cooler. My work life consists of hours sitting by myself in an empty house writing; Facebook provides the same kind of escapist chit-chat that I used to find from my co-workers when I worked in a regular office full-time.

But sometimes Facebook is weighty, and then too it can be like a day at the office. People do bring their milestone events and news to work, after all, and now the same is true of Facebook. Yesterday, my Facebook news feed covered the gamut in terms of what my friends had to share. One had just bought her first house, a pictureseque little bungalow in Burlington, Vermont. Another had been invited to speak at a prestigious writers’ conference where she once studied as an aspiring novelist; now, with two successful books to her name, she’s invited back to share her expertise. Another was watching her 8-year-old daughter play the first softball game of the season. And another friend posted a photo of her late husband. Yesterday would have been his 44^th birthday, and the photo showed him a few years ago with a birthday cake in front of him and both daughters in his lap. I’d seen this same snapshot of a joyful dad with his two adorable children once before: it was part of a slide show montage shown at his wake.

It was one of those days when Facebook felt like real life being run in fast-motion. Ordinary things were going on but with overwhelming speed: accomplishments, losses, celebrations, anxieties. It was upsetting. And yet it was also authentic. By dinnertime, sixty-eight people had clicked “Like” on the photo of my friend’s late husband. Some of them were close enough to her that they would have known it was his birthday even without Facebook, but most of us would not have, including me. This was our chance to acknowledge her loss once again, and I hoped that felt reassuring to her and not invasive.

By the end of the day I felt a little bit overwhelmed by so many people’s different kinds of news, so much more information than I would have been privy to on an ordinary day in the pre-Facebook era. But for those of us who have opted in to this particular virtual universe, this is part of life now. We all share in each other’s news in a kind of super-accelerated realtime. And yes, occasionally there are posts about who’s eating what for lunch. But given the invitation to share people’s news, both good and bad, I’ll accept. We’re all here for each other. We always have been, but this makes it all the more evident, at those very times in life when it’s most important to realize it.

Other people having fun

I’ve been looking at pictures all week. Pictures of New York City, pictures of Vermont and Vancouver, pictures of Boston’s Freedom Trail, pictures of a Caribbean cruise (not the one that lost power and had no working bathrooms!), pictures of the Arizona desert.

It’s public school vacation week here, and our friends are madly posting their vacation snapshots on Facebook. Not only do I know where they all went; I know what they did while they were there, how crowded it was or wasn’t, what the snow or surf conditions were like, and even what they wore throughout their vacation.

And I have to say I’m thoroughly enjoying it. So I was surprised to hear a segment on NPR’s Morning Edition earlier this week about how therapists are reporting increased business from unhappy patients who are overwhelmed with feelings of envy and insecurity because of what they see their friends doing on Facebook: the clothes, the vacations, the parties, the fun.

We didn’t go far this vacation week – we went to Portland last weekend, which was great, but other than that the big excursions have been to a nearby museum and a frozen yogurt parlor – but I don’t feel envious or insecure; I feel happily entertained by my friends’ photos. Here’s one of Holly’s friends posing next to a horse in Central Park, and here are our former neighbors at a Diamondbacks spring training game. Jody and her daughter got caught in a blizzard but ultimately reached their destination; Diane waited in the airport for a long time after her flight was cancelled, but now she’s with her new grandchild. I think it’s great fun to see where people are and what they’re doing, and I’m happy for them that they can take interesting trips.

I have a recurrent memory from childhood of sitting in long backups at the toll gates on the Maine Turnpike on a summer weekend, waiting seemingly forever for our turn to get through and continue making our way home. All around us were other cars with other sunburned, tired vacationers like us. “Isn’t it nice to see that so many people have been vacationing and having fun?” my parents used to say as the car inched forward fractionally.

No, I would think to myself. What would be nice would be to hit some open highway and get home. I wish none of these other people was here vacationing and having fun. They are all in our way and I want to get home.

But now I understand what my parents meant, and I’m glad their words have stayed in my mind. Maybe I’m just older than the people referred to on Morning Edition who feel envious and insecure about their friends’ photos; maybe I’ve just lived long enough to feel grateful any time anyone anywhere is having fun, and if it’s someone I know, all the better. I don’t feel bad that we didn’t go far this week, but I think it’s wonderful so many of them did. 

I don’t think this suggests that I’m a particularly selfless person, just that it’s so clear to me that plenty can go wrong in life at any time, and seeing pictures of people enjoying themselves, even if it’s very far away from where I am right now, is a pleasurable experience for me. I wish them safe travels and a wonderful time. And yes, to be truthful, I look forward to posting some enviable vacation photos of my own next time a vacation week rolls around.

When gratitude hurts (other people)

“The reason I don’t like looking at Facebook is that everyone is just bragging about how happy they are!”

The sentiment came from an acquaintance during an informal group discussion about social media recently. Although I don’t know the woman who said it well, I do know that she has faced some very difficult obstacles in her life recently. But it surprised me nonetheless. I had never thought about expressing happiness as a form of bragging. I just think of it as, well, honesty. And an outward display of gratitude. And almost everyone agrees that gratitude is a good thing, don’t they? In Thornton Wilder's words, “We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.”

And yet I’m sympathetic to this acquaintance, who has endured with courage particular problems that are very alien to me. I don’t even think she and I are connected on Facebook, but her words gave me pause and made me think about whether there are times when it is insensitive to express gratitude.

Yesterday I thought of her as I sat down at my computer to dash off a quick update. Yesterday was the kind of day that was wonderful for its very ordinariness. I barely left home, except to teach Sunday school in the morning. Sunday school is far, far from being one of my favorite things to do, but it’s a little like the Vaudeville joke about why the man is hitting himself with a pipe: it feels so good when I stop, and after a successful class – which I define as one in which all the kids stayed attentive and contributed to the discussion – I feel great about the time I put into preparing for it. Better still, I had fit in a run before church, so I didn’t have to go through the morning with the thought of fitting in a run hanging over my head. After church I bought some fresh fruit, went home and made everyone lunch, and read the paper for a while. Then I put together a pot of vegetarian chili and let it simmer while two friends and I went walking in the woods for an hour, and after that I made chocolate chip cookies and spent the evening with my family.

But is it bragging for me to admit that? Or is it expressing gratitude? Of course, the fact that one person said she doesn’t like hearing about how happy other people are doesn’t make it uniformly wrong, but her opinion means something to me. I’m well aware of how many people face challenges that I don’t, or for whatever reason have not found themselves in the same fortunate circumstances I have. Is my being happy anathema to their sense of well-being?

I don’t know the answer. As I said at the outset, I was surprised that she said she didn’t like to read about other people’s happiness. I don’t think any the worse of my friend for her honesty. And even knowing that one person might be made to feel worse than necessary for my posts initially made me hold back from writing about yesterday’s pleasures.

But actually, I don’t think my expressions of gratitude are necessarily what she was talking about anyway. I wasn’t bragging about my children’s successes or my vacation plans. I was just taking pleasure in an ordinary day. And my guess is that she would understand that – the gratitude itself, and the good intent behind it.

Turning 13

On the afternoon of Tim’s third birthday, I had to work, but my mother was happy to take Tim on a special birthday expedition. The two of them went raspberry-picking at a local farm. The preceding day, he’d received a cardboard crown at preschool, and he insisted on wearing it throughout that birthday, including to the farm. My mother regaled me with an account of how the only other berry-pickers that afternoon were a consortium of chefs from upscale Boston restaurants who were on some kind of group tour promoting local agriculture. As my mother told it, they made a big fuss over Tim at every turn throughout the raspberry patch, exclaiming, “Tim, you’re the birthday king!”

I thought of this story yesterday, exactly ten years later, as I waited for Tim to bike home from the bus stop. Buses, middle school, riding a bike, being outside by himself – all of these would have been unimaginable to me the day Tim went raspberry-picking as a 3-year-old, but all are commonplace matters in the life of a 13-year-old.

Contemporary American society doesn’t hold a lot of age-specific rites of passage for kids. In Carlisle, kids can leave campus on their own after dismissal as of fifth grade, and that tends to be a big deal to them; it means they can walk to the general store or the library by themselves or with friends. But after that, for a lot of kids there’s nothing specifically great about turning any particular age until they reach 16 and start learning to drive.

Happily, social media has changed that. By turning 13, Tim was officially old enough to open his own Facebook account, and he’s been looking forward to that for months.

Not every family upholds the 13-year-old rule for Facebook, since it’s essentially done on an honor system, and some parents don’t even know about the rule, as I discovered over the summer when I expressed surprise that a friend let her 12-year-old have a Facebook presence. But I felt pretty strongly about compliance. Partly it was that I believe it sets a good standard to assume rules exist for a reason, but I also liked the fact that here was an age-specific milestone at a time when those can be hard to come by. I was happy for the built-in opportunity to make something special about turning 13 for Tim.

Rick and I went over the ground rules during dinner: he had to friend both of us, so that we could keep an eye on what he was saying on line; and he couldn’t friend anyone who used inappropriate language. After dinner, Tim got to work setting up his account.

As promised, I was the first person he friended; then he found both his grandmothers and some cousins. Since he’s among the oldest of his friends, he didn’t find too many peers on Facebook, but in time he will. For now, he’s enjoying something special and new, granted to him because he reached teenagehood. It’s pleasing to find rites of passage where few exist. So far, Tim is taking it in stride – and joining Facebook was definitely less thrilling to him than other aspects of his birthday this year including his party last weekend in Maine and the apple crisp I made for his birthday dessert – but he’s having fun with it. And I’m happy in the knowledge that turning 13 does indeed come with some special privileges.

Computer karma

There was a time long ago when, in identical circumstances, I probably never would have learned that a distant acquaintance from high school who is also a writer but lives in New York caused irreversible computer damage yesterday morning by spilling coffee -- with milk -- on her keyboard.

But that long-ago time was before Facebook. And I didn't spend long on Facebook yesterday morning, honest. I spent three hours drafting a story about a food writer who just published a book about lobsters. A quick glimpse at Facebook before breaking for lunch was supposed to be my reward for my diligence.

I read the post with, frankly, little interest. "A little coffee on the keyboard? How bad can that be?" I shrugged to myself. "If keyboards couldn't withstand the occasional coffee spill, you wouldn't see them on every single table in Starbucks, right? I'm sure it will fix itself in no time."

Well, anyone who agrees with my that the goddess Fate has a sharp sense of irony can guess what happened next. I reached over to close my laptop and knocked over my water bottle. Right onto my keyboard.

But I grabbed it and righted it in no time. Two, maybe three tablespoons of water at the most had actually landed on the computer. "No problem," I reassured myself. "It's just lucky I drink nice clean water rather than milky sugary coffee, and it's lucky I have reasonably fast reflexes."

Wrong, of course. When I returned to my desk after lunch, my keyboard was utterly unresponsive. No vowels. No consonants. No space bar. No hard return. No numbers or symbols or shortcut keys. Nothing.

I put out the cry for help every way I knew: on Facebook, on Twitter, via email (to a friend who is an IT expert), by phone (to my husband, who I already knew probably wouldn't have time to help me with a computer fix until approximately halfway through Labor Day weekend).

Responses and advice poured in. I followed it all. I wiped the computer thoroughly with a chamois cloth. Then I borrowed a hair dryer from my mother-in-law and ran the hair dryer over the keyboard for about twenty minutes. Then I put the computer next to a pedestal fan and ran cool air over it for another ten minutes. Then I submerged my computer in a pan full of uncooked rice. (Apparently this is a great trick to deploy if your cell phone gets submerged in water. The dried rice absorbs the moisture. I've repeated the adjective "dried" preceding "rice" here in hopes of lowering the inevitable odds that someone will think I said to do this with cooked rice.)

Then I did another hair dryer treatment. After that, the whole body of the computer seemed overheated to me, so I wrapped it in a cool damp towel. It really would have made more sense to just send my laptop to a day spa and ask for "The Works," with hot stone massage and apricot facial most definitely included.

Now I'm letting my computer rest. We'll reevaluate later today. I have a different computer to work on in the meantime, and if I may indulge in a brief moment of self-righteousness, there is nothing on my regular laptop that I had neglected to back up -- yes, I learned that lesson the hard way and won't make that mistake again -- so I'm not worried about any particular files. I just want to be able to use the computer itself again sometime soon.

So in the end, lots of lessons learned. Don't snicker at your friends -- or your distant acquaintances -- when bad luck befalls them even in the form of a knocked-over coffee cup: you'll probably be next. Keep files backed up. Have plenty of uncooked (did I mention it has to be uncooked?) rice on hand. If you care about your computer, be prepared to indulge it with a full spa treatment at any time.

And, of course, no more full water bottles near the keyboard. The goddess of Fate might just catch me being dismissive of other people's computer problems once again, and this time the repair could be a lot more complicated than A Day at the Spa.

A sheepish convert defends Facebook

Even as I said it, I could hear the defensive tone of my voice. “I am a Facebook user,” I told the six students in the essay-writing class I’m currently teaching for our local adult education program.

I can’t help it, though. I do feel a little defensive admitting it, in part because I was such a late convert that my own skepticism about Facebook espoused over the couple of years preceding the start of my membership last July still rings in my ears. Isn’t Facebook for kids? I used to think when middle-aged people like me mentioned it. Teens, college students, maybe twenty-somethings, okay. But middle-aged suburban moms?

Now, though, I’ll defend my use of Facebook with the best of them, even if I do so a touch sheepishly because it’s just so darn cliché to become a convert. I liked myself a little bit better when I showed some moral fiber, insisting that my only problem with the idea of Facebook was the time-suck aspect, and that I would join only after I’d managed to find time to read the entire New York Times every day.

Well, in all fairness to myself and to the spirit of compromise, ever since buying a Kindle, I’ve developed the good habit of reading the Sunday New York Times every week, if not the daily one every day. It’s a start, right?

My justification for Facebook, on which I spend probably five to eight minutes per visit, five or six times throughout the day, is that I’m a self-employed writer who sits at my kitchen table writing all day. The time I spend on Facebook feels uncannily similar to the time I used to spend in friends’ cubicles back when we all worked together in the same corporate environment. Back then, I had no trouble at all justifying the little sociability breaks with which we regularly interrupted our work day. I genuinely believed, and still do, that it perked us up and increased our mental energy to spend a few minutes every couple of hours discussing TV shows, current events, our horoscopes or office gossip in the midst of an otherwise long and somewhat tedious work day.

Now that I work alone, I do the same thing, only electronically. And in some ways it causes me to work more diligently, not less. Finish drafting the article about the new orchestra and then you can dash off a quick Facebook post, I tell myself, and the incentive works. Make those revisions to the medical website and then you can spend five minutes looking at the vacation photo album Jody just posted, I tell myself, and sure enough, that gets me back to work on the medical copy.

Moreover, in ways I never expected, Facebook has actually enhanced some of my existing relationships. Before I was a member – when I stood on the sidelines feeling a little bit scornful of Facebook users – I bought into the stereotype that it was just a way for people to banter with their high school sweethearts. But in fact, I find it much more valuable in helping me to keep track of and better get to know the local friends I run into all the time. Even in this small town where some of us cross paths two or three times a day – at the library, at afterschool pick-up, at a committee meeting -- sometimes it’s hard to get past the daily small talk in these regular encounters. I’ve known Karen well enough for casual “What do you think of the second grade project” chatting for years, but were it not for Facebook, I wouldn’t have known that she lost her mother when she was still a teenager. I see Tom almost every week at church, but the subject of his recent trip to Barbados never came up there. Reading on Facebook about the people I see regularly anyway helps me to get to know them better.

And sometimes it’s more serious than that. Last year was the first year following my friend Emily’s father’s death, and she wasn’t shy about posting her feelings when she was having a particularly difficult day. That made it easy for her friends to be supportive, whether by a return Facebook post or an actual visit. But it would have been hard both emotionally and logistically for Emily to communicate to so many individual friends that it was one of those times when she was feeling particularly low.

So I admit, my earlier contempt was misplaced. Yes, I’m on Facebook. Not for more than a few minutes, several times a day, but I’m there. Checking in on my friends, touching base with long-time acquaintances, keeping track of my nieces in Germany. For a work-at-home writer, it’s both office water cooler and village well: something that brings us all together. I’m glad I’m there.

Should a middle schooler email a teacher?

Following a recent eye exam, the pediatric ophthalmologist told us Tim did not need glasses but should ask his teachers to be seated in the front half of the classroom if possible. I emailed this request to the sixth grade team leader, who responded with assurances that this could be easily accommodated. A few days later, Tim was frustrated over his social studies homework. His teacher had told the kids to answer some questions about current events in Egypt as listed on a website associated with her class assignments, but Tim couldn’t find the link she had referred to. “Mom, can you email Ms. Rooney and ask her where it is?” he asked. I dashed off a quick query to Ms. Rooney, and she wrote back almost immediately verifying that she had in fact given the kids the wrong link. She gave me the corrected version and Tim went on to do his homework.

Both of these experiences gave me pause. Normally I consider the relationship between student and teacher to be sacred. Except for the few assignments that the elementary schoolers take home which are labeled “family homework,” I believe the kids should be responsible for communicating with their teachers about anything related to school absent the benefit of parental intervention.

At the same time, I wasn’t comfortable telling Tim to email his teachers. Every teacher at our school has a published email address and encourages parents to use this as a form of communication, but it seemed inappropriate for me to tell Tim to email his teacher. Not off-the-charts inappropriate, just mildly inappropriate. It just seems strange to me for a kid to email a teacher, as strange as it would have been when I was a student for a student to call a teacher on the phone. Yet I don’t necessarily know that the teachers feel this way; nor would I perhaps feel this way if my son was in high school rather than middle school.

Most likely, education is just another of the many arenas in which our (or at least my) general grasp of common etiquette has yet to catch up to social media, particularly regarding the sometimes awkward triumvariate of student, parent and teacher. Last summer, after I joined Facebook, one of the names that appeared on the “People you may know” listing was that of someone who’s been a friend for the past several years, ever since he was Tim’s third grade teacher. I clicked on “Send friend request” and only after he’d accepted it did I remember he was also Holly’s teacher for the upcoming year, and it might seem awkward to have her teacher reading my Facebook posts (though he would be the first to assure you he doesn’t read all my posts; who could possibly be expected to keep up with my verbosity?).

After the school year was under way, I would often forget he was a Facebook friend and realize only midway through a posted exchange in which other parents and I kvetched about an annoying and time-consuming third grade assignment that it was all visible to him.

I’ve read a raft of articles in recent years about college deans who are astounded by how over-involved the parents of incoming freshmen are in their children’s lives. They rail at the inappropriateness of parents calling their offices to complain about a rooming situation or a course load rather than having the students fight their own battles. I doubt I’ll ever be like this; I tend to lean the opposite way when it comes to expecting my kids to do their own dirty work, and from that perspective it seems reasonable for a kid to send an email to a teacher. At the same time, recent media coverage of schools that prohibit teachers from friending students on Facebook (or vice versa, by definition). But in some ways, we’re still testing the waters when it comes to social media, and I’m just not sure where a sixth grader emailing his social studies teacher falls on the spectrum of acceptability.

Social media and me, Part II: What I've learned so far about Twitter

Earlier this month, I wrote about why I was feeling so positive about my first brushes with Twitter. It was new to me, and I was just beginning to learn the ropes. At around the same time I wrote that, my 7-year-old learned to ride a two-wheeler, and I feel a little bit like she looked that day she finally stopped wobbling and soared down the lane. I have that “Okay, I get this now, I understand how to do it and I’m soaring!” feeling.

I joined Twitter a little uncertainly, not so sure I’d be welcome at the social media party. After all, I’m one of the last Facebook holdouts in my generation. In my mind, prior to late summer, Twitter was in the same category. I joined it because my agent suggested that I do so, but at first I didn’t feel like I was gaining much traction. I found lots of people whom I wanted to follow; I just wasn’t finding many followers of my own. “My friends aren’t really using Twitter,” I said, making excuses for my low numbers. “It’s not a soccer-mom trend yet.” But as my agent, who served as my Twitter guru in those early days, pointed out, it wasn’t my friends I wanted as followers; it was people I didn’t already know.

And gradually, with her help, I caught on as to how to find them. When people I was already following mentioned names in their Tweets, I looked up those names and usually clicked on “Follow.” Those names led to more names, and so on. Then I figured out how to search profiles for keywords. I thought about the topics that most interested me: parenting, writing, running. But that’s going to bring up like a million people, if I search on those three terms, I worried. I came up with an idea: search on writer plus runner plus the name of one state at a time. Find a writer/runner in Massachusetts, in Maine, in South Carolina, in Kansas, in Montana. I tried that, and it worked really well. In most cases, only a single page of names of people who identified themselves as both writers and runners came up for each state. And by not including “parent” in my search terms, even though that’s one of the topics I like to read about, I found a wider scope of people: an Episcopal minister in Massachusetts, a sorority girl in South Carolina, a grandmother out west, a middle-aged male CEO in the mid-Atlantic region.

Soon I was reading a lot about writing and a lot about running, which continue to be two topics of great interest to me. But I like knowing that these are only two of the hundreds or thousands of topical subgroups available to me. One day I searched on Unitarianism, my religion. Another day I searched on “mindful living,” a life practice important to me. But I could also choose words not connected to me, like “surfing” or “beekeeping,” and read about people I don’t necessarily have much in common with at all, and it would probably be just as interesting. I like finding out what other people are doing, just as the cornerstone Twitter question asks, but also what they are cooking for dinner, where they go running, what they are reading, how the weather is wherever they are. No one can be boring in just 140 characters.

And it’s not just chitchat; Twitterers use posts to point out valuable information, how-to articles, interesting blogs. Some of it is like small talk around the water cooler, but the links make all the difference. A co-worker from another part of the building might tell you about the soup she made for dinner, but seldom does she hand you a just-published article about the craft of fiction, say, or how to train for a half-marathon.

Moreover, this week I used Twitter to find an old friend I hadn’t spoken with in 15 years. She has her own website; I could have just as easily found her through Google earlier. But somehow the rapid-fire nature of Tweets made it easier to reach out. I didn’t have to cover the last 15 years; no one would expect that in 140 characters. I just had to say “Hi, how are you, glad I found you here, let’s get back in touch!” Ultimately, I do want to know more about what’s happened to her over the past decade and a half than she’ll be able to fit into 140-character bursts, but it helped me break the ice, knowing there was no pressure to write a long explanatory letter. Through Twitter, just a quick hello is all the eloquence you need.

So it’s really good to be here, and to keep learning. I’m glad my agent encouraged me, and I’m grateful to everyone I’ve connected with so far. It’s not like riding a bike in most ways. It’s not good exercise, for example. But as with my daughter learning to ride her bike earlier this month, it’s a skill that I’m excited to have mastered, and am eager to work on further. I’m soaring.