I have a difficult relationship with social networks. The very idea of investing interest in the lives of other people that I secretly resent is both alluring and repellent. While I scroll through my Facebook newsfeed, I often alternate between grimacing at my drunk high school acquaintance oversharing Instagram pictures and popping popcorn to watch the disintegration of a couple's relationship. I'm intrigued and repulsed by how much of their lives people make available for others to snoop through.

As an incredibly private person, displaying any really personal part of my life on the Internet is sacrilegious. I will untag and unfollow posts and pictures to erase any trace of myself I don't want others to know.  

But all of that changed when I got a Twitter account. It's only been a couple of days, but I'm hooked. It started slowly. I tweet when I would first wake up in the morning, something witty that my 11 eager followers would enjoy. Retweet Slate around lunchtime and finish the day strong with a trending hashtag.

There are already signs the networking site is starting to permeate my lifestyle. It's probably not normal to hear something funny and immediately think to retweet it.
I'm putting more of my thoughts on display that I ever would on Facebook or Tumblr. My general mentality has been that I'm just me, so who really cares what I have to say? Do I even want anyone to know what I'm really thinking?

Maybe it's the audience on Twitter or that I've genuinely enjoyed reading Kanye West's infamously conceited tweets, but I have developed a greater respect for the tweeting community than those of Facebook and Tumblr. Or maybe it's because you can as easily tweet your friends as Anderson Cooper or Joseph Gordon Levitt. The degrees of separation that exist on other networking sites are stripped away-just simply hit reply.  

And now I'm on the verge of oversharing. The cat's out of the bag that I watch Grey's Anatomy and I have a super-secret crush on B.J. Novak. And it's only going to get worse from here. I might actually start to inform everyone who doesn't care about my decision-making processes. Should I buy the maroon cardigan because it goes with my skin tone or the dark gray cardigan because I don't have one in that color yet?

The real problem here is that I'm not necessarily concerned that I'm sharing more details about my life, as are the millions of the other tweeters on the site. If a future potential employer is offended by my interest in the meth business or references to Arrest Development, then those are not the kind of people I want to associate myself with. And to those that say I'll eventually lose interest and stop tweeting, they need to realize I'm not really taking this too seriously and neither should anyone else.
My stream of consciousness may not be as profound or literary as Jack Kerouac's, but the sentiment is the same. It's a collection of thoughts that allows me to connect with people in ways other social media networking sites haven't allowed me to. After all, what else am I going to use my English degree for? I think I'll tweet about that.