Hello, my friends!

Well, it's happening again. Twitter has once again become such a toxic environment that I am once again forcing myself to take a 24 hour break from social media, just to see if I can get caught up on my writing. Every year, I try to review every movie that I see and every book that I read and right now, I am running far behind in accomplishing my goal! It is 4:30 pm on June 19th (a Tuesday) as I sit here typing this. At 5:00, I will be singing out of twitter and I will not return for 24 hours.

That may not sound like a big deal and I guess it's not. However, checking Twitter has become a habit with me. It's usually one of the first things that I do when I wake up and one of the last things that I do before I go to bed. I check throughout the day to see if any of my friends have a funny story to tell and, even if you're only intending to spend a minute or two checking, Twitter sucks you in. That used to be good thing, back when Twitter was relatively fun environment where people talked about movies and shared pictures and occasionally even managed to respectfully disagree with each other. Those of us who joined Twitter back in 2009 (and earlier) can remember those days. Many of the new members, especially the ones who joined during the last Presidential election, can not and, even if they could, they have shown that they have no desire to accomplish anything with Twitter, beyond pissing off whoever they happen to blame for the state of the world.

And, unfortunately, after you spend a few minutes reading through all of it, that negativity is not easy to shake off. Once you've been exposed to all the anger and anxiety and drama that makes up modern Twitter, it's hard to let it go. You spend so much time obsessing on that negativity that you no longer appreciate the simple joys of just being alive. I love to write but, far too often, the negativity of the online world leaves me so annoyed that I can't relax enough to get anything done.

So, I am doing the smart thing. Just as I did earlier this year, I am logging off of Twitter for 24 hours. Me being gone won't change or fix Twitter, of course. People are still going to accuse strangers of terrible things. The jerks and creeps will continue to demand that everyone drop everything and listen to them pontificate about the state of the world. I've been told recently that, because I don't tweet about politics, I'm somehow failing my responsibility as someone who has a lot of followers.

Well, you know what? Screw that.

I mean, it's twitter, okay? It's not the dungeon where Socrates continued to teach while waiting for the hemlock to silence his voice. Instead, it's a social media web site. Eventually, it'll go the way of MySpace and we'll all feel pretty foolish when we remember how addicted and dramatic we once were.

I'm taking 24 hours for me. I'll let you know how it goes!

And seriously, people -- TRY TO BE NICE TO EACH OTHER!

It's not that hard.