Twitter Dependency: Addicts in Painful Blather Withdrawal

The signature image on Twitter of "artdetective," my enabler

I'm an ambivalent tweeter. I started because several people said that if you blog, you gotta tweet. The young(er) Bloomberg reporter who successfully convinced me to try it (during our chat at the Met's "Afghanistan" preview) wrote back approvingly that I'd soon become addicted.

Mercifully, that hasn't happened. The last thing I need is another computer-based addiction. (Blogging's quite enough, thank you.)

Yesterday's Twitter outage, which I experienced with the rest of the chirpers, proved how insidious "social media" can be: Some of the 140-character characters were beside themselves; others discovered the joys of real-life pleasures that they'd been missing.

You can get some flavor of this on the whentwitterwasdown thread in Twitterdom. As for me, I'm powering down now and heading to Manhattan to do some planning for my son's (and future daughter-in-law's) wedding rehearsal dinner. The only art I'm going to think about is the art of flower arranging.

And I obviously do need a blogging break: The BlogBack that I posted yesterday from Alan Wallach was so nice that I posted it twice.

But before I go, I must exultantly report to you that ASIA CAME THROUGH, meeting the latest CultureGrrl Geographic Challenge! Many warm thanks to CultureGrrl Donors 64 and 65 from Tokyo (YES!!!) and, from my home state, Newark, NJ.

Let's continue panhandling in Asia over the weekend, shall we? I know I've had readers this morning from Singapore and Jakarta, for example. Go ahead: Click my "Donate" button. Make my day.

Perhaps you'd like to endow a $65 floral centerpiece? (Just kidding. I'll be delighted if you endow a rose petal!)