Allow me to correct Descartes: I Facebook therefore I am. I’m sure that’s what he meant to say, or what he would say today. In these days of Internet excess, if you don’t have a Facebook account, a blog or aren’t tweeting at least a couple times a day, well, you wonder whether you actually exist. That’s what it’s beginning to feel like anyway.

I’m proud to say that I now have more than 250 Facebook friends and judging from the number of pokes and superpokes I’ve received, I’m pretty swell. I Digg every news article that catches my eye. If it’s on The New York Times, I send it out to my network via Times People, the latest in social networking sites exclusively for Times readers.

But I haven’t always had such a cozy relationship with technology; I started my career as a newspaper reporter and during that time developed a deep mistrust of technology, especially recalcitrant computers that balked at deadlines. But a funny thing happened the past couple years – I became a new media convert, learning as many software applications as I could and joining about every new social networking service that came along – Twhirl, Digg, Reddit, Facebook, MySpace … And with my iPod Touch, I can connect from just about anywhere.

Most recently, I’ve adopted Twitter, a micro-blogging service that allows users to post (via PC, PDA or cell) 140-character updates, known as tweets, to their account in response to the question, “What are you doing?”

Some people answer the question literally:

In doctors office looking at a poster for Travellers Diarrhea [sic].

Some muse about random oddities:

Whats with foaming hand soap… are people so retarded they cant adequately distribute liquid soap? [sic]

Others wax philosophical:

Is it wrong that I secretly wish I could text in the tanning bed? Twelve minutes of doing nothing can sometimes be so difficult.

This social networking service has caught on among the tech savvy, growing exponentially over the past year. It’s so popular that an awards program, The Twitties, has emerged to recognize the best Tweets, which is sort of like choosing the best dot in a Monet landscape.

I was initially skeptical of Twitter. It seemed like little more than a forum for the self-absorbed. I’m brushing my teeth. Now I’m flossing. Now I’m counting sheep. Now I’m snoring ...

Then a writer friend of mine tipped me off to one of Twitter’s secret uses. You can use it to take notes.

Aha!

Like my friend, I used to be that writer who would carry a notebook with him everywhere. I lived by the words of the late John Gregory Dunne who was known to extol the virtue of note taking and carried a stack of pocket-sized index cards with him everywhere. So fervent was Dunne’s belief in note taking that he admonished his wife, Joan Didion, on those occasions when she forgot her notebook. “[T]he ability to make a note when something came to mind was the difference between being able to write and not being able to write …” Didion, in her book The Year of Magical Thinking, recalls her husband saying.

As a writer, this is the maxim by which I’ve lived. Rare was the day I wasn’t carrying a notebook and pen. The thought of allowing flashes of inspiration to evanesce was too cruel. Whenever inspiration struck I would sit down and feverishly scribble away. Thoughts, ideas, revelations, story buds. Notebooks mounded in the corner of my bedroom filled with observations, ruminations and ideas, at turns raw, thoughtful, humorous and inspired:

A woman gets on the bus this morning. Sits down. Then, spying a baby across the aisle, slides over. She begins an involved conversation with the child going so far as to tell him about the lives of her own children. The woman carries on this conversation with the baby as if he understands. All this and yet she has not even engaged the mother with a simple “hello.” The craziness caused by babies.

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The specificity of my friend’s vernacular makes me posit that he was born with a mortarboard on his pate. Need I elucidate further?

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When did the PC movement co-opt the class assignments on trains and airlines? No longer is it First Class, it’s Business Class. If you’ve got a first class, then of course you need a second class and we don’t want to imply that any passengers are second-class. I mean that would be like calling it low class, peon class, barely-better-than-dirt class.

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M. is an emotional vampire. She sucks all the positivity and emotional verve out of me. When I’m around her I go cold, harden myself. To expose the soft underbelly of my emotions would be dangerous.

When I read through old notebooks, I felt like a collector, a hoarder of ideas. These were the germs of stories. Not only that, they were a catharsis, spilling emotions, feelings and anguish onto the page.

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