It’s been a weird week. Sunday, I saw what was, perhaps, the best show of my entire life: The National (playing, as it were, at the Richmond venue called The National). That show deserves its own post (delayed though it may be), but what I want to convey here, as efficiently as possible, is what happened afterward.
Namely, I kind of fell apart, for a laundry list of reasons I won’t elaborate on here, except to say that for me, extraordinarily awesome moments are often followed by the sense of getting bitch-slapped by the Universe (sorry, I mean Universe). Also, I become excruciatingly aware that certain of my (mostly verbal) excesses can attract strangers, while alienating friends.
That’s always going to be a hard thing for me to wrap my head around, but on Monday, after deciding to go on a week-long hiatus from Twitter (where most of my excess verbiage gets spilled), I started keeping a running list of things I wasn’t “tweeting” (in the peculiar parlance of the medium).
Perhaps not surprisingly, the list of things I wasn’t posting there became far more unmanageable than if I’d been posting them as I went along. In a way it was good, because while I have certainly erred on the side of non-self-censorship on Twitter, there were some things that were really freaking me out (some of them devastatingly sad, others just as devastatingly – and inappropriately – hilarious) which even I wouldn’t have been comfortable with posting publicly. That stuff had to go somewhere, or I was gonna lose it.
I made it all of two days into my intended week-long “hiatus” before realizing it had been rather ridiculous of me to even try. So, after a few friends had seen the crude list (crude in the sense of raw, but, yeah, there was certainly the other crude, too), I came back, I’m pretty sure, for good. I hope that in doing so I don’t alienate or overwhelm the people I care about most (on and off Twitter), but if that does happen, I’ll be a big girl about it and just deal.
And now, thanks to my pal Mogrify (@mogrify on Twitter, main website here), I have discovered Wordle, a tool via which I can share with you (at least a visualization of) the 74 things I didn’t post to Twitter. Without, you know, actually saying what all those things were, and causing all sorts of undeserved discomfort for the people I love.
Here, then, are some of the relevant words that arose (from which y’all had best not infer any particular thing or things)*:
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