Thirsty

This weekend 2 friends of mine in the People of Praise got married. Marcus is originally from Togo, Africa, and Bekah is from around here. Marcus has been here for less than a year, after having lived in NYC for awhile. He is in my men's group, and I have enjoyed getting to know him since he's been here. For posterity, here is what I shared with him at his bachelor party. I always have to write stuff like this down, because I cannot think when I'm in front of people. Someday I'll be able to. But for now, I have this stuff written down which makes it easy to save too. It's kinda ironic because you'll only get to see this stuff until I get good enough at it that I don't need to write it. Marcus, if your family were here with us tonight, what would they say? Would they allow you to stay here, or would they try to bring you back home? Would they understand what sort of life you have chosen to live here? What stories would they tell us about you? I wa...

Why do I? There is the useful reason: I enjoy knowing what my friends are up to, what's on their minds, and twitter lowers the technological barrier to that. The converse is true, and so I quickly hammer out a snapshot of my state of being, putting no thought into it. Then there is the vain reason: I am interested in eliciting some specific perception from my friends. I have even a broader scope: I can elicit a perception from the readers of my blog, and from my 400+ facebook contacts. In other words, I use it as a sort of platform, but when I try to stick to the "What are you doing?" question, it is a platform thats all about me. Then there is the lazy reason: This manifests itself rather as a form of loneliness. My thoughts swirl about me, and I recognize my need for friendship. I want to reach out and open myself to other people; in fact I need to. Everything I say on twitter is something that really belongs in my everyday conversation, and the frequency and ...

As glorious as Twitter may be, it is still dreadfully insufficient. Some thoughts I want to convey that are more than 140 characters, and I squelch them because they don't command the audience that Twitter can. We need a conversation-ready tool similar to Twitter but which can handle full posts. Maybe I will go against my no-linking in Twitter rule and add my blog post links to Twitter every time I post. All this really is, though, is me procrastinating tonight while I sit at the office on our first night of 60-hour work weeks hitting up some good ol' extreme programming. Believe it or not, I enjoy it. Just wish I could get other stuff done during that time too.