For me, what is Twitter for?

I do understand the appeal of watching, and being woven into, a fabric of many people's daily minutiae. There's comfort there, above and beyond the various usefulnesses of connecting with other people. There's a feeling of fitting into place, being significant yet insignificant (another puppy in the pile), making sense even to near-strangers. But for me, I think, twitter's benefits will come from making myself get very specific.

For example, a while ago I did a month-long experiment with a subject-specific twitter account, and I found the primary benefit for me was the increased feeling of accountability. If you're reporting what you're doing in a way that's sustained and 'public' to any degree at all, you do feel moved to have things to report. I know I engaged more with that account's subject matter than I would've otherwise, which was beneficial all around. This suggests it might be useful, in a life that's still so full of administrivia and the business of supporting myself, to have a composing twitter where I only report on the moments when I've made time for actually composing. "Working on Gather These Mirrors." "Working on Shahida." Entries like that wouldn't have any broad appeal, but number of followers isn't important -- just publicness-to-any-extent. Could I make myself make at least one entry like that every day?

In the same vein, my new experiment is a twitter account just for "what's wonderful" -- another area where I'm interested in accountability, in making myself both focus on and articulate/preserve something specific. There's so much random beauty and so many small joyful thoughts in any given day, but these things get displaced by logistics and responsibilities and unpleasant surprises and all the enervating mechanics of living in an expensive, competitive, overcrowded city.

So this new account is strictly for recording some of the random joys that flash into my head -- just taking a minute to fix each of them in a form that says, "This is important too." This gorgeous pattern the sun's making on the wall; this mind-opening image I just saw in somebody's blog; this rush of happiness at the IM thread; this out-loud laugh at the terrible pun. "Delight is important too." Not frivolous, not a waste -- not distraction but core.