Polaroids in the Darkness

Based on a simple google search, I think it's safe to say I'm not the only person curious - "how long have I been on twitter?"
There are several services that will tell you just this, and so I went to whendidyoujointwitter.com and as it happens the virtual "twitter-me"is one year old today.
I have followed and been followed back in the the Twitterverse for a whole year now. A place that exists - like the Twilight Zone - just outside your reality.

And what has Twitter brought me in this past year? - and maybe more importantly what have I brought it?
What has my contribution to this hive mind amounted to in that time?
Now I'm going to do a quick recap of some of the highlight's of my "life" on twitter. And then parallel those with events from my life in last year. Because that's how you do this.
So how does it feel to be a year old on Twitter?
It's changed the way I use the internet, and given me a lot of great links to things - it's been an early warning system on all things news or media related. I remember too, the whole thing with the Iranian election and how for a time everyone was sporting the green avatars.
I've gotten a lot of laughs, and learned a lot about some pretty diverse things, and I think I've even made a couple of real friendships.
I've learned a lot about myself, too and I was surprised at just how quickly I sink to the level of a vicious 2nd grade hooligan.
Towards the end of the summer I seldom tweeted at all. Life just wasn't set up for it. I had no consistant wifi access and there was the whole debacle of the computers -thieved and smashed - and trying to keep one, in working order while living on the streets.
But I tried to keep my hand in, although the intermittent times I'd log in to my account I was piss drunk and my typing in those tweets was even worse than my normal unintelligible peckings on the keyboard. i flounderd and dashed off as much as I could manage while hopping from shelter to shelter.
Since joining twitter I've been to jail. That was not a good experience.
And oh there are so many stories in there if I could ever just get them all out
What have I given back this year?
I guess my main contribution (other than being a whiny know it all bitch who sits in the back eating all the hummous and correcting peoples grammar.) is the blog. This very one you, gentle reader, are now perusing.
Twitter and this blog kind of go hand in hand -they were both started at the same time - and just like my twitter acount has changed so has my blog
It started out as just a kind of a release - a journal of stuff that I needed to vent as I went into recovery. Since then it's almost as though there is a pretension to art here on the lame blog.
It's been a pretty wild ride of a year in spots.
Now it loks as though I'l be on here for another one, an my hope is that my life is decidedly less interesting and both my twitter timeline and this blog are far more so.