All last week, I made something like 25 “microposts” from my cell phone. The content of those posts were rather limited, since the phone can send only out 135 characters at a time. I’ve left them as they are, unlabeled and untitled (Blogger uses the first few words of the post as a title if I don’t fill in one) with little snippets of thought from the trip.
Mark Twain once wrote a long letter to a friend and apologized, explaining that “I didn’t have time to write you a short letter,” and I know how he felt. I was limited to 135 characters at a time to describe the astonishing beauty of the Rocky Mountains, my joy at my friends’ beautiful wedding, the great pleasure of discovering the charming college town of Ft. Collins, the charm and coziness of my friends’ beach house in southwestern San Francisco and the great pleasures to be had in America’s most European city, trying to express gratitude for all the great people we’ve been able to be with the past week, the great foodie pleasures of the past several days, and most of all my great happiness at having The Wife with me for the entire trip.
I am reminded of the Emperor telling Mozart that there were “simply too many notes” in his opera, and suggesting that he “just cut a few.” It takes as many characters, words, and sentences as it takes to adequately express a thought.
Being able to write as many words as I wish now feels like a luxury. (Oddly, it seems that short posts are just as unpopular as long ones. So, I’ll continue writing posts to be exactly as long as I please. You get what you get for free.)
Since the internet was down at home for no apparent reason, and it took more than an hour to get it up and running again I’ll have to catch up on other things later. I’ll need to reset the air conditioning and make sure The Wife knows that the minor moments of irritation over the past week were not directed at her.
