I did this project because I feel that in this world of oversharing and constant content creation, we tend to forget what we actually said amid all the turnover of attention we pay to the digital tools that consume our lives.

To compile this list, I left out any @replies or tweets that were meant to share news or links. This list comprises a snapshot of moments of semi-original thought and observations of the world around me throughout the year.

I hesitate to say any of this is profound or relevant, but at points it might be witty or insightful at best — at worst, this list is quite self indulgent. Regardless, the exercise gave me a chance to look at how I used Twitter and remember some ideas I’d forgotten.

With that said, here’s my best tweets:

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Bit of advice. The computer’s great, but meeting people in person is 10x better as far as networking goes. Beer over bits.

I hope the bits that I tweet (and read) end up in conversations over beer with my friends.

Advice: When something in the mail says ****FINAL NOTICE**** you should probably read it.

Facebook has gone mainstream. My friend’s aunt friended him. Weird! Twitter will go mainstream when it’s referenced in a major film.

My friend on people posting minutiae all the time on social networks: “Giving some people Facebook is like giving a baby a gun.”

Obama’s on Twitter, has a BlackBerry, a Tumblr, plus will be President tomorrow. It’s like a frienemy showing up to your favorite dive bar.

Ideal bar: plays non-mainstream hiphop, serves microbrews, classy atmosphere, wifi, TVs play indie films. Am I on to something? I think so.

Can we be honest & admit that a free breakfast at Denny’s isn’t worth it?

I’m coining a new term: metalocal. Definition: a news ecosystem that revolves around me. (Only being 50% sarcastic.)

The hash (#) sign is the new slashy (/)

I’m not interested in the State of the Union, just the state of my checking account.

The more incredible technology becomes the more bored we get.

Don’t be on Twitter to appear relevant. Tweet relevant things.

Everyone complains when you spoil the night’s TV shows, but no one ever complains you spoiled the evening newscast.

No matter how good something is, you could’ve done better. Right?

Instead of going to a #teaparty protest today, just tweet your whines instead. It’s equally effective.

The Pulitzer Prize: the best of “tl;dr” for the American public.

We create a lot of crap & bullshit. And the majority of us, frankly, are completely content with this practice from ourselves & others.

Packing for a move is like playing Tetris in real life.

You never see a skinny pigeon in Chicago.

When will the Twitter equivalent of PostSecret happen? And how soon after that will the book deal happen?

Honest question: Is it possible to lose complete interest in the Internet?

When you say “don’t,” I say “too late.”

Intellectualism isn’t found in a bottle, but emotions are.

Cleaning out boxes. Found old undergrad transcript. 2 Fs, 3 Ds, GPA: 2.59. Still got into grad school. Life was good then!

Irony: a bar in Wrigleyville whose bathroom door reads “Gentlemen.”

What Twitter really needs is a function that tells you in 140characters what you did last nite while drunk.

Is the Perez Hilton vs. will.i.am feud the end of snark blogging & the beginning of online celebrity feuding blogging?

Forget the lawyers & guns, just send money.

I want to rock ‘n’ roll until a reasonable hour and party once every other weekend.

“If you’re gonna start a war, then you better end it. Twice.”

If Hell is other people, then what does that make Facebook?

Thought: Being a part of the Millennial Generation really sucks.

“Did you put that in your iGoogle?” – My mom to my dad.

It’s 2009. There’s gotta be a better way to find a dentist than manually cross referencing a provider list with Yelp.

Thought of the day: direct democracy doesn’t scale very well.

“INTERVIEW HAS BEEN CONDENSED AND EDITED.” In the age of the Internet & infinite space, it makes me sad when the NYTMag prints this phrase.

Forget “watchdog” journalism, we’re in the age of “watchpuppy” journalism.

“Wave envy”: When your friend gets a Google Wave invite before you do.

It’s kind of amazing that my dad has uploaded more videos to YouTube than I have.

I look forward to the day when someone legitimately asks for my dishonest opinion about something.

I wish my immune system was more like 50 Cent instead of Biggie Smalls.

The concept of “backspace” & “delete” is as powerful as the rest of the keyboard combined, yet highly under utilized.

“You’re a liar!” “No, I’m just projecting mythology.”

I can’t stomach the idea of eating what I kill. Seriously! I’m too full.

“Drill baby, drill!” Words you don’t want to hear at your dentist.

Some say sleeping in for 12 hrs is a waste. I say it’s an invaluable “reset” button for your life.

In the iPod era, no one gives a shit about radio “talent.”

Dear Internet: That full-page advertisement you make me look at instead of your content isn’t a “welcome screen.” It’s not welcome at all.

meta-napping — def. When one dreams of taking a nap while napping. See also: “Yo dawg nap.”

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And, yes, you can follow me on Twitter here: @kiyoshimartinez

Still, the whole process wasn’t all that bad. Granted, getting a shot of anesthetic into your gums isn’t something I loved, but the aftereffects were amazing. The entire right side of my face became paralyzed within a few minutes and I couldn’t feel very much of anything. I remarked to my dentist that I felt like Two Face in Batman.

Sitting in the dentist chair made my mind wander, trying to imagine what “going to the dentist” even meant decades ago compared to now. Or what the earliest dental care was like. Nowdays we’ve got ultrasonic scalers that do some amazing work for your oral hygiene, but you have to wonder what people did without such treatments?

As the pain in my right-side jaw slowly subsides tonight, I’m left wondering how people dealt with pain not caused by treatment, but rather caused by the lack of available care. This led to me wondering how people dealt without modern medicine and survived.

Of course, this naturally led me to think about the national health care debate. As I sit here in my bed, teasing my molars with my tongue, I’m pretty sure I know where I fall in the debate.

People should be able to get health care. It should be reasonably priced, transparent, reformed, non-bureaucratic and available to all. It’s not a privilege, it’s a necessity to survive. Despite this economy, we’re a nation of abundance and wealth. Public health is a public good. It is something that we need to survive as a nation, to be a stronger, healthier workforce to compete in the world.

Should anyone be punished with a lifetime of pain because they get cancer, are born with a disorder, have an accident at work, were a victim of a crime, exposed to a virus or had a “pre-existing condition”? I don’t think so.

We have amazing advancements in medical care to help people who, for whatever reason, were dealt a bad hand in life. It shocks me at the lack of compassion and will to help create a system to address the physical ills of society.

But right now, so many are acting out of fear, driven to radicalism by lies and deliberate misinformation campaigns by pundits tapping into a political counter-zeitgeist for the sake of a few ratings points on the Nielsen.

Eventually, this pain in my teeth will fade away. But for others, they’ll continue to live with it the rest of their lives.

With that said, I randomly thought about this verse tonight. I can’t say why, exactly, I thought of that phrase. I don’t attend church (haven’t since college, despite being raised Seventh Day Adventist). I don’t have a Bible in my apartment. And I don’t regularly think about religion or discuss it with anyone — unless it’s in the context of politics, which is a whole keg of dynamite I’d rather not get into here.

So, I have no idea why this two-word phrase entered my head. Perhaps it’s because it’s the easiest memory verse for kids to learn in the entire Bible, which I remember being taught back in the day as a child.

Looking back at “Sabbath School” (this is what we called it rather than “Sunday School,” since the SDA denomination gathers on Saturday instead of Sunday), one thing that struck me was the regurgitation of such “memory verses” as a form of homework of sorts each week. Usually, they were kind of of phrases that you’d probably find placed into greeting cards or inserted onto whatever religious literature that required a touching blockquote of text.

What strikes me now is that these verses were never given a deep study, placed into context and opened for interpretation. This isn’t to say Sabbath School was void of religious discussion, or even debate (God knows that I probably drove some of my instructors on edge with my contrarian questioning), but these verses in particular were presented in a vacuum, which I think is kind of a waste of an intellectual exercise.

And here’s why. Whatever the reason of why the phrase “Jesus wept” entered my mind tonight, I googled it, stumbled upon the WikiPedia page I’ve linked above and learned something and it reframed my understanding of the verse.

I’m not saying that my initial perceptions of the verse was “wrong,” but rather narrow and uninformed of other possible meanings. Simply put, I had a certain amount of ignorance since I lacked the context and introduction to other possibilities of the phrase’s significance.

For reference, check the “interpretation” section of the WikiPedia entry. This list fascinates me, especially this particular one:

The views above interpret his weeping to mean that Jesus was sorrowful for the fact that Lazarus had died (which was the interpretation of the bystanders in verse 36). However, an alternate explanation considers this to be unreasonable, given his full knowledge that he was about to resurrect Lazarus. This view instead argues that every single person whom Jesus talked to was blinded by their misconceptions of Jesus and by their failure to recognize that he himself was “the resurrection and the life.” Thus, “he groaned in the spirit and was troubled.” This view holds that he wept because even those who were closest to him were still blinded by their concepts to the fact that he really was “the resurrection and the life” in spite of all his plain words to them. A striking point in this view is that the only person in the chapter who had no misconceptions was the dead man Lazarus, who promptly obeyed and received life when commanded to come forth. Finally, this view holds that the bystanders, just like most readers today, were blinded by their own misconceptions and so did not understand that Jesus was actually weeping for them, not for Lazarus.

If you’re familiar with the story and had originally thought that “Jesus wept” because a friend had died, then this is a mind-blowing concept! It shows the extremely different thinking behind Christ and what actually drove him to feel such a deep emotional sadness as the Son of God. Plus, it makes Jesus actually seem a whole lot more complex than crying over the death of Lazarus.

Reading this makes me realize another reason why I think I left my religion behind. Originally, I believed what caused a rift between the SDA religion and me came from the overbearing amount of rules that imposed limitations of what one could and couldn’t do and my dislike of those who saw fit to judge you for alleged “sins.” Naturally, I think it’s nearly instinctual for many young teenagers to rebel against authority (to varying degrees, personally I wasn’t off the deep end doing this, I just left the church), but there’s a greater reason why I just didn’t stick with religion — or at the very least never returned to it.

Fundamentally, I don’t have problems with authority or submitting myself to following rules — indeed, lots of the Ten Commandments are GREAT ideas (not killing and all that). But religious worship to me feels very instructional, as opposed to academic and philosophical.

Obviously, religious beliefs can be intellectual pursuits and a great deal of academic study does go into doctrine, etc., but that’s more-or-less on the end of those who wish to act as leaders within the church. On the congregational end, it’s mainly about accepting interpretations and falling into line. This fundamentally turned me off.

As with all things, religion is what you choose to make of it. A part of me does occasionally think about attending a service now and then, but then I shrug it off realizing that I’ve done it before and didn’t find it fulfills what I need from such a significant time commitment.

Part of me thinks this might be part of the explanation behind the Pew U.S. Religious Landscape Survey results from 2008:

The survey finds that the number of people who say they are unaffiliated with any particular faith today (16.1%) is more than double the number who say they were not affiliated with any particular religion as children. Among Americans ages 18-29, one-in-four say they are not currently affiliated with any particular religion.

I wonder if as a generation we’ve come to demand a more intellectually curious and unstructured approach to religion, and when these faith-based institutions, which are stuck in their conservative and unchanging ways, don’t adapt, then we simply leave.

It makes you wonder if Jesus weeps over this.

The latter half of the essay then moves into a theory about how this generation would make great Twitter-length copywriters that find a blend of fiction and fact matching the attention spans of our generation and our nature of crafting an online persona. It’s a compelling idea, but I want to get back to the first question of why this l33terati never developed (or has yet to).

It’d be tempting to blame it on the shortened attention span of our generation or the death of print (especially the consumption of literature that isn’t Harry Potter or Twilight), but I think that’s too easy of a target and would largely scrape the surface without finding the foundation.

It’s obvious to say a generalizing statement like, “kids don’t read anymore,” but I think you have to think about why that is — because of the attention economy.

But before the Internet, books consumed my life. I loved to read and it remained one of my core joys and hobbies in life until the Internet occupied my attention. In my school’s reading program, I excelled in a reading competition called Accelerated Reader (hopefully I’m not the only one that remembers this?) and you couldn’t pull me away from my books. Not being very skilled at athletics, I got a sense of adventure and fun elsewhere in the realm of fictional characters and their stories. This went on for a while, until I had access to the computer lab at my mom’s school library for hours after school.

Growing up, I had the unique experience of my generation to watch as the Internet exploded from something only a few computers in a building could access to nearly every home and every computer in the house. I remember the transition from dial-up to broadband. And in college I lived the glutton life of peer-to-peer consumption of all things digital.

All throughout middle school and high school I didn’t read anywhere near the volume of books I did in elementary school. I just wasn’t interested. And while my college years had a few moments of diving into post-modern minimalism (ie: Chuck Palahniuk), I read maybe a dozen books at most. Even now, I don’t read more than half a dozen books a year (and I haven’t been that big on fiction lately).

I don’t think it’s fair to say the introduction of the Internet provided me with one more generational distraction. That’s a huge understatement. The Internet provided my generation with an infinitely expanding distraction that probably gutted one’s path of jumping onto a literary movement.

Consuming the Internet is one thing. It’s another thing to be able to participate in its creation. And then use it to supplement your communication with friends. And share media. And play networked games.

At the end of the day, your life becomes consumed by a culture that’s managed to meld everything together into a seamless experience that places you in front of a screen and machine that incorporates all other media EXCEPT literature.

Long blocks of text never really went over well online. Yes, we read a lot of things online, but there’s something psychologically impossible about reading a whole novel on even the most beautiful of screens, let alone CRTs. And to read a book would mean unplugging one’s focus on the magic box that gave him everything else. Giving up literature seemed like a no-brainer decision that came with minimal sacrifice.

Maybe the reason “l33terati” never happened is all the geek writers value tl, dr above everything else.

Indeed, “too long, didn’t read” exists, but the reason why that attitude came to be roots itself in the simple reason of one’s limited amount of attention. If one’s attention is finite, then it made sense to shift that attention to a place where multiple things happened at once, rather than literature which is quite singular.

Before our generation, the growth of media and distractions could almost be linear. We had print. Then radio. Then TV. But the Internet isn’t linear. While you could only read one thing, listen to one thing, watch one thing, the Internet’s nature of what it could offer wasn’t singular — it is many and exponential.

Something had to get squeezed, and indeed many things did. The lack of a literary movement might very well be one of them.

But, I don’t think that it’s a foregone conclusion or will never happen. It still could, but it’s going to take a unique group of individuals to make extraordinary counter-culture decisions with their lives to refocus on crafting literature.

This means unplugging. It means the end of pointless clicking. It means shutting out distractions and not chasing more followers or web traffic. It will mean filtering what gets in and resisting one’s output to just literature exercises.

I think this l33terati, should it exist, has a grasp of the unique world we’ve witnessed and doesn’t need to play with the rest of the kids anymore. It’s time to make intelligent observations about it and discuss what happened to all of us as a generation.

If I had absurd amounts of money, probably one of the first completely unnecessary purchases I would make would be a set of authentic samurai armor dating as far back as possible and with the most ornate detail. I’d want it all. The chestplate, the facemask, the headdress, the gauntlets, the sword and spears and flags. All of it.

Around my sophomore year in college I went through a “samurai” phase where I rented nearly every Akira Kurosawa samurai movie at the local video store and bought a few others. I’ve seen two versions of the 47 ronin story. I actually read up on Macbeth and King Lear to understand Kurosawa’s “Throne of Blood” and “Ran” better. I grin when people talk about how great Westerns were, when Kurosawa’s “Yojimbo” influenced Sergio Leone’s “A Fistful of Dollars” and his “Seven Samurai” influenced John Ford’s “Magnificent Seven.” And watching George Lucas’ roots for “Star Wars” from “The Hidden Fortress” is a complete joy that makes you appreciate the science-fiction story at a new level.

It’s fair to say I have a romantic view of the samurai tradition, heavily influenced by Kurosawa’s films. While lots of people like ninjas for their Hollywood kitsch value, I think there’s something to be admired about the nobility and prestige of the samurai class.

While traditionally viewed as a warrior class, the samurai also embraced the arts. Many were painters, writers, poets and philosophers. There’s a sense of intellectualism in the samurais alongside a steadfast loyalty that went to death.

Perhaps my favorite samurai that I can name is Miyamoto Musashi. Besides being a complete badass when it came to duels, the guy wrote a book and did some phenomenally beautiful sumi-e ink paintings.

Perhaps Musashi’s best-known work is “Koboku meikakuzu” or “Kingfisher Perched on a Withered Branch” that features a bird waiting patiently balanced on a small branch, above a body of water among the shoreline of reeds. At first glance, it appears to be merely a bird on a stick, but closer observation shows you why the bird has landed there. In fact, the bird’s been there quite a long time. It’s been there, waiting, as a small caterpillar crawls up the branch where the kingfisher waits for an easy meal.

The point of the painting, I believe, is to show resourcefulness. While the bird could easily fly off the branch and go for the kill, it chooses to let the meal come to him. The bird is confident in its position of power and knowledge of the fate to come. It feels no sense to rush and has a sense of serene patience as it glances to take in the surroundings. The painting has a sense of peace, but really is a precursor to violence in nature.

Musashi’s “Book of Five Rings” or “Go Rin No Sho” identifies the ideas that I believe he portrays in this painting. While I think the “Water Book” emphasizes a lot of elements of the kingfisher and the samurai way, Musashi mentions this earlier in the book:

There is timing in everything. Timing in strategy cannot be mastered without a great deal of practice.

Indeed, the kingfisher is a master of timing and knows enough to wait. Knowing this, we can see this is an older bird, one that’s wise enough to have the experience of how to best catch his prey, no matter how small.

One other element to look at in the painting is the distinct shape of the branch. It appears to be done in one stroke, or made to look like the shape of a samurai’s sword. Both creatures here are along the edge of the branch, meaning they are along the edge of the weapon. While the caterpillar crawls along the edge, obviously closer to death, the kingfisher also sits on the blade. Why does the bird also find itself on the edge of death?

I believe it sits there because its own life depends on the death of the caterpillar and it killing its prey. If it doesn’t succeed, then it could die also. In a way, this shows the reality of combat. Even if one is in a position of power, he holds the possibility of death in his own hands despite all the advantages. A worthwhile lesson.

Musashi’s tale would end up as a trilogy of films, starring legendary actor Toshiro Mifune as the samurai, the first of which won an Academy Award. I’d obviously recommend viewing them if you have a chance, as they’re often called the “Gone of the Wind” of Japanese cinema.

So, yes, my obsession of the samurai does run rather deep. I admire this particular part of my culture greatly, despite not being well-educated on the rich history of it. Still, a part of me holds an extreme reverence toward this part of my ancestry and influences me to a degree.

It’s hard to say what, exactly, drew me to pick up one rock over another, but I’m pretty sure the only thought that crossed my mind consisted of, “Wow, this is cool!” It’s this principle that guided (and largely still guides) my collecting as I moved on from rocks to other things: stamps, baseball cards, pogs (remember those?!), action figures, comic books and most recently art prints.

One of the earliest memories I remember having about collecting came when I heavily invested myself in baseball cards. At the beginning, I merely enjoyed opening a new pack of cards and couldn’t wait to see who I got. My brother and I would trade cards, trying to get our favorite players and we’d store them in these huge binders, flipping through pages organized by team.

But then my neurotic nature took hold and I began to want to complete team sets. After all, wouldn’t it be cool to have all the players from your favorite team from your favorite card company? So, I went to baseball card shops and I became indoctrinated in the concept of “greed collecting.”

Greed collecting, as I define it, is when a collector simply amasses a collection of objects for the sake of a perceived, relative and theoretical monetary value. To this collector, his collection is an investment of sorts. It’s not about completing a set or this is really cool — it’s about money, pure and simple. To them, the hobby isn’t a hobby anymore, it’s business. Buy low, sell high. It’s a farce of an economy created by a false sense of scarcity driven by greed. In summary, greed collecting is for bastards and they ruin everything fun about collecting.

For a while, I will admit, I found myself looking up the value of my cards, totaling this phantom number of how much my card collection was worth. Being a math nerd, this exercise was a great way to flex my multiplication skills, but I’d soon come to learn the realities of the phrase, “It’s only worth what someone’s willing to pay for it.” How true!

Going to these baseball card shops, the first thing I realized that it would be impossible to complete my sets at a fair price. Typically, the cards they sold were twice the price of any pricing guide (Beckett’s was the favored price guide back then of determining a card’s “value” — based on what methods I have zero clue), and if you wished to sell them a card, they’d only give you half its value or less! As I said, complete bastards.

Later I’d realize that these “collectors” basically bought in bulk and essentially held a monopoly on the market. If you wanted a shortcut to getting what you want, then you’d have to pay a ridiculous premium to get it. I found this absurd. Why shouldn’t everyone be able to get what they want?

Naive, I know, but this epiphany changed my perspective on collecting. My mindset shifted back to, “Wow, that’s cool” instead of “Wow, that’s valuable.”

After a while, my interest in baseball waned (the MLB strike of 1994-95 really turned me off to professional sports for a long time) and my baseball card collecting days ended. Soon though, a new obsession would take over my life: Star Wars.

Yes, the famed George Lucas trilogy couldn’t have entered my life at a more appropriate age. The “special editions” made their way to the theaters and I really couldn’t get enough. Lucas knows how to merchandise the living hell out of his franchise, and the re-issue of Hasbro’s “Power of the Force” line of action figures were beyond anything a complete nerd such as myself could resist.

Once again, greed collectors descended into the Star Wars action figure market. As the years went by, it became nearly impossible to find certain figures because these bastards would treat this hobby like a job. They’d hit every retail store that carried the figures each day and buy out any “valuable” inventory, multiples of the same figure if possible. As a kid who just really wanted to find a Boba Fett or a Snowtrooper, this was a huge frustration. After all, what if you were an honest-to-goodness kid who wanted to take these figures out of the package and play with them? Who were these adults buying shelves of toys and leaving the undesirable figures — like Malakili the Rancor Keeper and Prince Xizor — to hang idly on the pegs of Walmart and Toys ‘R’ Us?

Another perfect example of greed collecting came during the 1990s, when comic books suddenly received a surge in popularity. When people started realizing that old comic books (and I mean golden and silver era, stretching generally from the 1930s to 1970) were actually worth something, a goldrush began on the modern era books.

What no one really thought about though was why these old gold and silver era comics were worth so much. Kids back then usually treated their comics much like you probably would treat a newspaper or magazine today. Folding it over, creasing pages, tearing them, eating them with fingers sticky with soda and candy. No one boarded and bagged them back then. And parents often threw them out. No one assigned them any value. In a legal sense, comics were considered periodicals and even to this day comic books in Illinois are immune to the state sales tax for this reason.

So, essentially, when you fast forward to the modern era, not many copies of these comics were around, let alone in any sort of decent condition. You can legitimately consider these comics antiques and rare — hence, they’re worth something. But that’s hardly the case with modern comics.

Still, greed collectors consumed the industry, speculating that modern comics would one day — in their lifetime, no less! — be worth as much as Action Comics #1 or Amazing Fantasy #15. Eventually, the publishers caught on to the fad and started pumping out tons of comics, filled with gimmicks. Variant covers. Multiple editions. Holograms! Foil!

And it probably all peaked with the Death of Superman, which came in a poly-wrapped bag, thus forcing you to buy one issue to keep unopened and another to open and read. Absurd. I remember hearing about this issue on the local news and stores being completely sold out. Copies went for around $200 (maybe even more) back in the 1990s. A few years back, I remember going to a small comic book convention and seeing several poly-bagged copies in decent condition in the dollar box. I laughed.

Today, I noticed yet another example of greed collecting and it recalled all my other previous collecting adventures. The art print community definitely has a very vocal presence online, filled with those who really can be ruthless when it comes to “collecting” limited-edition prints.

As I mentioned previously, Tim Doyle’s “Change into a Truck” now has a second edition. For most people, like you and me, the mere existence of a second run comes as a nice surprise. While I threw down quite a bit of cash to obtain one of the original, first-edition prints, others might not be so inclined to spend that kind of cash, however, a second edition for $25 is a great deal, looks cool and maybe would make a neat gift for that Transformers and/or Obama fan you know.

But for the greed collectors, this second edition drove them absolutely nuts. In fact, they’re livid. Just look at this comment thread on OMG Posters! to see what I mean. To them, it’s the end of the world. It “devalues” the original print. It hurts their “investment.” The artist who chose to do a second run is “greedy” and “has no soul.”

I really wish they could realize the hypocrisy of their statements: It’s OK for you to make money off of the artist’s work, but it’s wrong for the artist to make more money themselves? Are you kidding me? What a bunch of bastards.

To Doyle’s credit, he admits that, yes, it is about money. He’s got a family and this is the way he puts food on the table, pays a mortgage and bills and makes the point that flippers don’t care about the artists at all, only themselves.

But more importantly, Doyle highlights why he does screen printing in the first place:

I love screen printing because it makes art accessible, and not at inflated gallery prices. And doing prints that sell like this enable me as a business to take risks and push lesser known artists on my site I other wise would not be able to.

It’s about enjoyment of the art form. It’s about accessibility. It’s about fun. It’s about discovery and people being able to say, “Wow, that’s cool” and then buy it, put a frame around it and put it up in their apartment for others to see and enjoy.

To me, this is the essence of collecting for the sake of cool. It’s not about “how much it’s worth” to someone else in cold, hard cash. Collecting is about enjoying an idea so much that part of you wants to own it and share it with others.

I think about all these people who accumulate a huge collection of toys, comics, art prints or whatever and store them away in the perfect temperature, sealed as if they were lost artifacts in a time capsule to be opened and sold “in the future.” The absurdity of it all defies any logical sense of why these objects really exist to do. I wonder how many of these people are parents and warn their children, “Don’t touch!” or “Don’t take these out of the bag!” It’s a sad thought.

Toys are meant to be played with. Comics are meant to be read. Art is meant to be seen. None of these are meant to be hoarded and resold. If you’re stockpiling away these things, then you’ll only find yourself among the miserable company that shares the same bunker mentality you do.

I firmly believe that people create things for the sake of them to be used and enjoyed. And if you’re not collecting with that in mind, well, then you’re a bastard.

There is the presumption that suburbanites are living these lives of quiet desperation and isolation, and they really hate being there. You see trotted out ideas about community being missing. And to have community, you’ve got to be in Manhattan. There are a lot of ex-Manhattanites that would challenge that theory very seriously.

The article is interesting from a contrarian point of view, but I’m not sure that I agree with the conclusion that everyone wants to go live in the suburbs. Like all things, it’s an extremely personal decision that factors in all elements of your life (family, social, work, etc.).

I grew up in the suburbs, left for college, moved back to the suburbs after graduation for about a year and a half, and now live in Chicago. There’s a lot of upside to living in the suburbs, but in the end it ultimately came down to my commute time. Working downtown with the only viable option being taking the Metra meant a total of 3 hours a day commuting. This left me with less sleep in the morning, less free time in the afternoon/evening and being a lot more tired as a result.

On the upside, I liked being able to drive everywhere and not worry about parking. I know it’s bad for the environment, but whatever. I like the convenience of knowing I don’t have to rely on mass transit. I also — at times — enjoyed the space provided by suburban sprawl. It’s nice to have a driveway, yard and generally more living room to put your stuff at a cheaper price.

The downside though is the complete lack of culture, or rather the complete uniformity of suburban life. Everything is geared toward family lifestyles. When you’re single (as in “not married”), you really find life in the suburbs quite boring. The restaurants are boring. The movie theater will never show an indie film. And good luck trying to find ethnic produce at Jewel or Dominick’s. And that’s just the tip of it.

Are there things I dislike about Chicago? Sure. Outside of traffic, which I will eternally curse, I do regret the lack of abundant green spaces (and, what’s that smell?) and then there’s the high cost of living only made worse by the highest tax rate in the nation. You don’t have to try hard to find things to gripe about here.

But getting back to Gordon’s point about community. I think the idea of community isn’t just dead in the suburbs, but it’s also (maybe?) dead in the cities as well.

Perhaps it’s just me, but I’ve always felt that a sense of community completely depends upon your willingness to seek out and find people like yourself and engage with those people. If you’re not doing that, or your life is perhaps too involved with other things, then you won’t get that community feeling.

The reason why I feel like community might be dying in the city is because when I look at my current generation, I don’t see us becoming more socially involved in traditional community settings. We’ve retreated to the Internet. Even on public transportation we’ve narrowed our vision and hearing to iPhones/iPods. I often wonder what riding the CTA was like 30 years ago, before we had mobile devices that created this media bubble we immerse ourselves in routinely.

For a while, I had a theory that the Internet would become the new townhall or front porch of sorts. I’ve since discarded that theory. When you look at where people are congregating to form communities online, it’s often based on interest, not geography. If anything’s killing the traditional idea of community and people being more active in the place they live, I’d say the Internet is the leading factor.

But I don’t know that’s a bad thing! In fact, it just goes to show how outdated our models for government are and maybe we’ll one day acknowledge the fact that the Internet has been a disruptive force not just for media, but also government. Perhaps it’s time we started to ask the question if our ideas of representation and democracy need to change as we’re becoming untethered emotionally from our physical location.

Twitter makes it easy to follow more people than you would friend on Facebook, simply because it’s not a two-way relationship. You can follow. They can follow. But you don’t have to both follow each other. So, you can quickly accumulate more people than you ever would on Facebook, because one doesn’t require another permission to see tweets.

It’s this relative ease of following that leads to users introducing a lot of noise into their use of the service. That’s what I found to be the case when I followed more than 400 accounts. Many of these I followed because they followed me first. I was doing it to be nice, not because I really knew who they were. Many were journalists that found me via a blog post from 10,000 Words, who recommended me as one of 10 journalists to follow on Twitter.

At first, it was very exciting. My Twitter feed was constantly refreshed and there was always something new. No more waiting around for my friends to start updating their own feeds — look at what these other people are saying! But then came the PR, marketing, SEO guru types, who I fell into a trap adding.

From there, the noise continued to increase. And then it reached a tipping point where I found I was missing the tweets of those I really wanted to hear from. Personal friends and people I actually knew in real life. This is what led to me going through the list of people I followed and started unfollowing to find the signal.

I know some people actually have thousands following them and follow thousands themselves, but I think that’s just absurd. If Twitter is supposed to be about what you and your friends are doing, then how can you have that conversation if there are so many others burying the more important, more real voices in your feed?

A year ago, I asked whether Twitter was useful or useless. At the end, I concluded that it’s not a “must-use” service. Using and observing Twitter for the past year has changed my mind on that. I still wouldn’t say it’s a “must use” service, but a “helpful service.” However, it’s only as useful and helpful as you make it. It’s very easy to abuse it and let yourself be abused by it.

I also wrote this in my blog post, which I proceeded to ignore as I added more people to the list of those I followed:

I will admit that Twitter can become a bit spam-ish (or is that bacn-ish?) if you follow too many people. While some people have chosen to follow me, I’ve made the decision to not follow all of them back. Frankly, I’m just not interested in what they have to say. And I don’t feel bad if people aren’t interested in following my Twitter feed either. Social tools shouldn’t mean social obligations, it should be about providing utility.

I emphasized that last line because I think it’s important to remember and generally can make anything more enjoyable.

On Facebook, I opted to completely deactivate my account. Several of my friends have tried this before and failed, so who really knows how long this will last for me. As one of my friends said, “There have been more determined people than you who tried and failed.”

I won’t deny that Facebook can offer you value in several ways. It’s a great one-stop site that has all your friends in one place. It’s easy to see their photos (as it’s the largest photo-sharing Web site in the world), organize events, get phone numbers, share links, etc.

But Facebook has social consequences, too. I won’t go into elaborate detail on this, as plenty more people have detailed this before, but there reaches a point where your social circles overlap then collapse upon each other on Facebook. You have people you would really consider your “true friends” that you want to share everything with. Then there are coworkers and former coworkers. Then there’s acquaintances, friends of friends, Internet “friends,” former schoolmates from gradeschool and classmates from college. And then there’s family.

To get something of value out of Facebook, you have to share. But the nature of human relationships dictates that we don’t want to share equally with everyone, and vice versa. This forces you to do one of several things: overshare to everyone, share nothing universally or micromanage your sharing by grouping your “friends” into Facebook friend lists.

It’d be easy to say that Facebook is a vortex for wasting time, but I think there’s also some mental stress associated with it, too. You’re forced to spend a certain percentage of your time doing mind exercises about what goes where to share with whom.

Certainly, some people receive entertainment (or other) value from Facebook that makes using it worth it for them. But for others who do the cost-benefit analysis of Facebook, it can fall short.

I found that I only really appreciated the shared items (now renamed “Links”) from one person. But these shared links can be imported to an RSS reader and once I did that, I found no reason to keep using Facebook.

For me, the overwhelming reason to use social networks is to share and discover new things or ideas. Facebook is built upon the idea that the main content being shared and discovered revolves around personal media, which I’m going to coin as the term “metalocal.”

But when you consider how much value this actually has and whether it’s something worth spending your time sifting through the noise to find better signal, I think there reaches a point where you can say, “I’m not missing anything if I’m not here.”

How long will this last? Again, I’m not sure. But I like the idea of deactivation and seeing where I shift my time and attention to.

1.) I had a blast spending time with the WIU faculty. They were all really nice and it was great to be around educators who understood the need for students to get themselves motivated and working to develop the skills they’d need to be competitive. Also, I was pleasantly surprised to find that several of them read comic books, too!

2.) Meeting with the student newspaper staff of the Western Courier highlighted a problem that I recognized while working at the Daily Illini: recruiting students from the journalism school to work at the student paper. It continues to shock me how many journalism students completely ignore one of the easiest ways to get experience on campus and never pursue this opportunity.

3.) Not enough students realize how difficult the job market is, or why it’s so competitive right now. A few students did mention that what I had to say was an eye-opener to get motivated to learn new skills as a leg up.

4.) I need to improve my public speaking skills and get more confident with my delivery. I don’t think I did a poor job, but I definitely didn’t hit it out of the park either. It’s really tough to gauge an audience’s reaction, especially when your presentation tends to bring up facts that are pessimistic about industry the students intend to enter and that they’ll have to work hard to be successful. I worried that I’d sound too much like their parents, but hoped to provide a level of honesty they might not hear elsewhere.

5.) There are still students who want to do journalism as a career. The passion is still there, but it’s unfortunate the industry they’re about to enter isn’t as welcoming. Every round of layoffs and buyouts isn’t inspiring confidence. Newspapers need to prove to students that a future does exist by finding ways to stay in business that doesn’t involve cutting staff.

6.) When I asked for suggestions and advice journalists would give to students to include in my speech, a lot of it surrounded the topic of wages. I put an emphasis on this during my presentation, breaking down how far a $30,000 salary goes each month after you subtract expenses. This seemed to surprise the audience the most and I think is something that needs to be more openly discussed. Going into debt in college to only go into debt further when you start a job doesn’t make sense. I don’t believe enough students have thought about this seriously.

7.) Macomb’s downtown layout was really cool. It was a courthouse surrounded by stores in a square. The sense of a small-town community was there and I really wish the suburbs copied this model. I think a lot of suburbs lack personality in this way.

8.) I need to get personal business cards printed with my personal e-mail and Web site on them.

9.) Smartphones won’t kill the newspaper. While traveling on the Amtrak train, it went through several deadzones. Until every inch of this country has broadband mobile technology, newspapers will be around. Mobile technology infrastructure still has a long way to go (and so does rural broadband for that matter).

10.) I was told later after my presentation that one of the students who asked a question had previously asked his instructor why he should come to listen to what I had to say. I’m glad he attended and hope that he took away something valuable, but this got me thinking: In everything we do, we should provide value either for ourselves personally or for others. Personal time management is important, but we also have to respect the time we expect others to pay attention to us — especially if it’s something we expect to profit on.