Bell Jar
I have always been tangentially aware of such experimental Twitters, but I hadn't gotten to a point where I thought of them as literature. Now it is exciting to view them as legitimate works by real scholars! The one that generated every word in the English language over the course of several years was particularly satisfying to see. I wonder if the creator (or anyone else who discovered it) ever just watched it crawl its way through the C's, then the D's, then maybe they left it for awhile and came back and took in the I's. Imagine the excitement they felt when it got towards the end of the Z's, seven years of patience about to come to fruition. Fascinating stuff, I would love to make some sort of social media account with a nifty concept behind it.
Today, at my monotonous clerical job, I began to inevitably pore over the disappointments of this last week and was quite pleased when I only turned up a handful. However, the ones I could think of all had something in common: they revolved around some sort of canceled plan. Of course, everyone is busy and has loads of legitimate reasons for skipping out on a coffee and/or movie and/or late lunch and/or early dinner and/or donut and/or "well this has been awful, wanna call it quits before we really hate each other?" In my particular case, I got bailed on in my attempts to schedule friendly week one meetups, which is hardly a surprise. I too found myself making several 11th hour cancellations as my latest Netflix obsession picked up steam. As the autoplay counted down to the Xth episode of the night, I suddenly paused and remembered I had work the next day. After a moment of distress I looked up and realized I had missed the pause button anyway. Oh well, what would one more episode hurt?
As my shift began to wind down and as my mood picked up with the realization of how manageable and unremarkable my shortcomings of the last week were, I had an idea for a project. What if I took these cancellation texts and made some kind of interactive experience with them?
"Solid idea, just needs to be fleshed out more," says my friend over dinner after rescheduling from last week.
I nod, check my Twitter, then go back to fretting about the work I haven't done this quarter.
