My blog and I have agreed to an open relationship.

It's no secret. I've been working long hours lately. I've been schlepping home late, smelling of bluebirds. It's true. I've fallen rhapsodically, deliriously in love with Twitter. Sadly, however, my fervent and frequent 140-character fixes of expression have led me to neglect longer writerly endeavors-- namely, blog posts. Now, I'm sure, once this first flush of limerence fades into the comfortable secondary time-suck it was always meant to be, I'll be able to turn my attention back to my first love, my lifelong partner, my bunny-lovin' spewings. But in the meantime, oh, how I do adore my eight-or-more-times-a-day Twitterly trystings. I do. I so do.

For years, I've resisted Facebook. Frankly, I have minimal interest in hooking up with all those once-plaid-skirted girls with whom I went to high school. Distant family members would doubtlessly become shifty and uncomfortable were they to read of my fantasies of molesting strange men on the metro or of my taste for sweaty naked girl art. One day, I'm sure I'll cave and join up and then I'll have old Republican acquaintances giving me hell in comments, just like all my other Facebooking blogger friends do. But for now, I've got just about all the online presence I can handle.

Twitter, however, entered my life rather serendipitously one night when my friend Jen, in her infinite, intuitive wisdom, sent me an invitation. Quickly, I realized Twitter was the exact blogging companion of my dreams. Daily, the internet washes little scabs and flotsam onto my shores. So many beautiful and disturbing images. So many weird and worrisome articles. So fucking much constantly refreshed novelty. Though it's true what Sappho said, -- "If you are squeamish, do not prod the beach rubble."-- I do so love the bounty of the internet. So, prod it, I do. Thank gods for my strong stomach. But not every sexy photo, not every weird blurb, certainly not every silly YouTube video merits a full-on bloggerly essay. And yet, I'm driven to share my happenstance findings.

Enter Twitter.

I started tweeting because I thought it would make a healthy sidebar to my blog. I could link to my heart's content and not feel obligated to offer more than 115 characters worth of analysis. But quickly, it became more. So very much more. Tweeting is like launching headfirst into the best, most far-ranging conversation you ever had, only you never get too tired or too talked out to keep going. And even if you do, everything everyone else says while you sleep is waiting for you in the morning. Since joining, I've had hilarious, enlightening, and even touching exchanges with some folks with internet presences far more impressive than my own, whose writing I've long admired, who render me downright star-struck. Last week, Susan Orlean (yes, that Susan Orlean) re-tweeted something I said and, voila!, I suddenly had 15 new followers. If I can get Joseph Gordon-Levitt to follow me, I believe I will have achieved the Twitter dream. But moreover, the exchanges are immediate and pithy. And, like, authentic. It is an online community of my own design. How could I not succumb to such voluptuous overtures?

Beyond my own adventures in tweeting with the stars, however, I really do feel like I'm watching the dawn of a new medium. A few weeks ago, I wrote about the #Amazonfail phenomenon, in which twitterers, en masse, shouted down a weird, dubious, new policy of censorship Amazon attempted to unleash. And over the last couple of days, if you want up-to-the-minute news and videos coming out of Tehran, where the bandwidth is so low news networks can scarcely communicate within themselves, you turn to Twitter. Twitter is where the photos and videos of the violence-- the ones CNN will never show you-- have found an audience. Sexy illustrator Molly Crabapple, called it the "engine of a revolution" earlier tonight. There is real power here. It's galvanic. You can see it.

Now, I know, plenty of high school kids tweet to tell you about how drunk they got last night. Plenty of celebrities use it for not much more than specious self-promotion. But to say that's all it's good for? To say that's the only use any of us have found for it? Well, to say such a thing is to sorely underestimate the potential of the tweeting community. And the medium itself. Twitter is the living global democracy of exchange, parceled out in links and the essentialists' terse texts. In the end, it can't be denied: it takes a specific discipline and linguistic nimbleness to say what you mean in such tight confines. See for yourself. The best tweeters really know how to work it.

There are a lot of us. If you aren't following, you just might be missing, well, everything. All I'm saying is the bluebird is not a force with whom one trifles. Got it?

Oh, and if you want to follow me, check out the linky fun over there on the right.