Twitterexia

When you are traveling for 30+ hours you have a lot of time to think.  Now I've done this long-distance, moisture sucking, patience deteriorating kind of trip before but I've never noticed a very unique thing that occurred to me this time around.

I came down with a bout of twitterexia.  I found myself observing my surroundings and feeling distraught by the fact that from 30,000 miles high, I couldn't micro-blog about it.  It made me realise that twitter has filled a gap in my life that I didn't even realise I had - it makes me feel like I'm being heard.

What I mean by this is that of the modest 100 or so people following me, while they may or may not consistently read my tweets and therein pay varying levels of attention to them, I do feel like I have a voice.  And moreover, a voice that can say whatever it wants with the buffer of 'real life' distance staying in tact.

For instance, on the KL to Amsterdam leg of my trip Cannes, I was sat next to a women whom I now hold anything but fond memories of.  She invaded my space for some 12 hours, huffed & puffed everytime I needed to scoot past her and did not let me use the shared armrest once!  Small grievances I admit but on a 12 hour flight, grievances that became increasingly irritating.

So there I was thinking about all the things one may implement to make their long haul trip more enjoyable (assuming they're like me and the business class option is out of reach).  The problem with arriving at such genius mid flight was that I couldn't easily share my ideas.  I kept whispering into my boyfriend's ear but with real fear that initial said woman would hear what I was saying and sock me one.   It was also annoying for my boyfriend because as my tired brain spewed out more words of wisdom, I kept interrupting what he was doing.

The beauty of twitter is that you can expel your thoughts in real-time and receive instant gratification for 'getting them off your chest' but people can choose to digest them in their time.

I don't remember the first time I felt naked without my mobile phone but this new feeling of nakedness sans-twitter will be memorable (if only for the fact that I'm blogging about it) and it opens up a whole new list of questions about the application - what is correct twitter ettiquette?  Should I log all of my missed tweets at once or will this needlessly clog up my followers' feeds... but then what about the fact that they've missed out on my tweets for the last 24hrs?  So much confusion and so few rules to guide me along the way.