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Let me preface this by saying that it’s been a tough week. I’m in the midst of many personal decisions in my life and after returning from vacation last week (that didn’t turn out to be as relaxing as I would have liked), I returned to a massive workload that kept me up until 4am two nights in a row.

With everything running through my mind at the moment, I’ve been struggling to find out what it is that inspires me. What is that one thing that will take me away from everything happening in my world and just let me be alone with myself for a solitary second.

It’s incredibly important to find that one thing in your life that you look forward to. The activity that inspires you to finish whatever you’re doing in order to start doing that one thing that brings you peace.

What I’ve always felt is that most people already know what their hobby is. They’ve been doing it for years. How hard can it be to have a hobby, right?

For some people it’s sitting down with a good book and drinking wine. I don’t have the attention span for that.

For some people it’s knitting. I don’t have the coordination for it. Really, I’ve tried.

For other people it could be exercising (no), pottery (tried it, no), or watching Law & Order with the family every night.

Well none of those things excite me for longer than the time they take to do them. Something that’s a true hobby should be something that you look forward to during the day, and something that makes everything else  less in focus until you’ve had your time to do that one thing.

For the past couple of years, my hobby has been to try new things. That’s a terrible hobby and I’ll tell you why.

I used to think that there was nothing more fun than making the most out of your day. I still do, but it’s not the most relaxing activity. There’s driving, spending money, meeting new people and deciding whether or not the activity was enjoyable to you. It’s fun, but it’s not relaxing. Sometimes I need a break from all the excitement and just need a night on the couch watching movies with some hot chocolate.

And when someone asks me, “what do you like to do?” it’s also not the greatest answer.

“I like doing new things”.

How terribly vague.

I’ve tried pottery and I didn’t love it. I’ve tried knitting and I couldn’t do it. I’ve made my own clothes which is fun, but terribly stressful because I’ve never been able to afford a sewing machine that doesn’t constantly break the needles.

Cooking, I like cooking. If you follow me on Twitter, I tend to post pictures of the things I create in my kitchen. Still not my niche though. I cook for one and it’s not exactly gratifying.

With my inability to find something I love to do, I was considering taking up alcohol as a sport. Kidding.

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So, tonight around 9pm when I was done working, I had something of a manic episode where I needed to CREATE something. Nothing in particular, just anything. Then I remembered that I have three boxes of art supplies in my house that I haven’t touched since I moved last October.

The minute I pulled them off of their shelves, and even dug one out of the cobwebs in my garage, I felt good, and I remembered that I do have a hobby. Something about taking out those boxes got me high.. and excited.. and inspired.

For the next three hours I was cutting pictures out of books, ripping labels off of old prescriptions I have at my house, chopping old tubes of acrylics in half because they were too old and dry to open, and finding objects I could use in whatever mess I was putting together.

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I even found some old rubber letter stamps to incorporate. I couldn’t find an ink pad so I just used them with acrylics and I didn’t worry if the paint smudged or if the spacing was perfect. I used Mod Podge to glue everything together and didn’t use a paint brush, glue stick or anything other than my hands.

When I was done, I was inspired to create more. So much so that without even thinking, I threw on my bag and got in my car to drive somewhere that had an instant polaroid camera that, at the time, seemed absolutely necessary to my final production.

When all was said and done, I looked around at the pile of book cutouts, tubes of paint and other scattered paraphernalia and could not have been happier with the mess that I created. Something about taking a rectangle and compiling as much of your world into it as possible is relaxing to me.

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For me, making a multi-medium collage is the act of collecting all of my thoughts in one place. Once they’re there I can leave them and create new ones.

If you’re wondering where the heck the grand finale is - a photo of the collage - you’re going to be disappointed. The point of this blog isn’t to show off my new artwork, because it’s personal to me, and it doesn’t matter to me if anyone likes what I made. My point is just that I was inspired to do it in the first place.

I don’t know how I forgot that multi-medium collaging and painting was what I love to do. I still buy clearance books at the bookstore for the purpose of cutting things out of them. I still buy items out of the quarter machines and put them into a box labeled “things I’ll make something with”. I just forgot why I was still doing those things.

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Maybe one day my grandchildren will look at this thing I’ve created and wonder what the hidden meaning was behind covering all of the white space with handwriting, and then covering it up with white paint (it’s because I didn’t like the clutter). Or why I spelled the F word with a P (it’s because my dog chewed the F stamp).

Or maybe they’ll just wonder if they have a bi-polar gene because dang that old lady was CA-RAAZY.

It’s so easy to forget who you are and what makes you happy when you have so many people pushing you to make them happy.

All I know is that even though I struggle to write a blog and email newsletter every day for work, that what I did tonight inspired me to write a personal blog of my own. And that hasn’t happened in a really long time.

Cheers to whatever relaxes you.

“Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer.”
- William S. Burroughs

A review of the new Tweetie for Mac app, and how it can be improved.

Tweetie for Mac was released today. While the stoners are out celebrating 4/20 with a blunt, I’m downloading a Twitter client. That’s how I roll, folks.

Anyhow, let’s first just say that Tweetie is very pretty. Though, that’s as much of a compliment to an application as it is to an American Idol contestant from Paula after they’ve just destroyed a song.

In the Twittersphere, it’s being compared to Twhirl, TweetDeck, Seesmic Desktop, Nambu and DestroyTwitter. I was persoanlly hoping it would be the lovechild of Twhirl and TweetDeck.

So let’s take a gander at Tweetie for Mac. What makes it original? What makes it worth $15 bucks (soon to be $20)?

As much as it pains me to say so, pretty much nothing (so far). The paid version of this app removes ads, it doesn’t add any extra features, which I’d gladly pay for. So far, I haven’t gotten any ads (though I’m sure that will get fixed soon enough).

I’m on the side of paying for a product that you actually like, to support the company that makes great apps.

However, I paid for my iPhone app. It works great, I love Tweetie for iPhone.

Unfortunately, Tweetie for Mac doesn’t replace my current Twitter clients. At this moment in time, I can’t add multiple accounts, not because the functionality isn’t there, but because it’s broken.

When it’s fixed, it might just replace Twhirl, but not TweetDeck.

Update: Someone just posted on why this isn’t working and how to fix it yourself (worked for me):

“If you are having problems adding a second account to Tweetie for Mac, the solution is very simple. For some reason when you enter your name and password and then press enter, the password is erased making it unable to authenticate your information. So, the only thing you need to do is after entering your information you will place your cursor on the username field before pressing the add account. And that’s it, now you are able to add all your accounts!” (via randrambles.com)

Another error I’ve come across is the “limit exceeded” error, which I’ve gotten several times since I installed. As of now, Tweetie hasn’t updated in 18 minutes. All I get is this message:

Work it out Tweetie, work it out.

I understand they launched, oh, TODAY, so I won’t dwell on bugs.

So rather than hash it all out in a long boring post, here are the features that would make Tweetie for Mac worth $15, not just in my personal opinion, but also from what I gather from the feedback I’ve heard on Tweetie for Mac so far.

1. Groups - Sometimes you don’t want to read everyone’s tweets. Sometimes you’re just courtious. People with thousands of followers (not me) can’t afford to use Twitter if they have no way to filter. TweetDeck does this fairly well (though, I’ve been unable to add certain people to my “People I Actually Read” feed due to some glitch).

2. Trends - A lot of people want “trends”. Some people use them to decide what they’ll blog about, some use them to figure out what hashtags to use, and some just use them to Twitter about, in order to show up on the timeline. Either way, “search” (which Tweetie for Mac offers) doesn’t cut it.

3. Delete a Tweet - My biggest pet peeve with Twitter applications is when the developer chooses not to include basic Twitter functionality. If I accidentally send a tweet, my thumb hits the enter button, or I just don’t proofread well enough, I WANT TO DELETE IT AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE. Asking me to log into Twitter.com to delete it won’t remove it quickly enough to go unnoticed by my followers. Twhirl makes it simple:

4. Favorite a Tweet - With that said, I’d really like the little star symbol. Twhirl gives you a little star up in the right hand corner of every Tweet. Again, simple. In Tweetie for Mac you right-click (a feature I only discovered moments ago).

5. Growl Support - Tweetie for Mac seems to have been designed to reflect something of an IM client, with it’s neat feature for displaying whole conversations. So it’s a little strange to me (and apparently to many others who have commented about it on Twitter) that they didn’t include Growl support, which lets you know when you have new Tweets.

6. More prominent 140-character count - This is just a simple form over function flaw. Sure, that tiny faded character limit sure is cute, but I want to see, pretty immediately, whether I am over my 140 character limit. I mean, 140 characters is the central concept behind Twitter.

Tweetie for Mac vs. Twitter.com

7. Alerts - When someone mentions you, your brand, or something you want to respond to, I’d love a notification, or a separate feed to check on a regular basis. This would be, per Twitter account of course, something I’ve seen mentioned several times in the Tweetie for Mac discussions.

8. A little more direction - I love how sleek and clean Tweetie for Mac is, don’t get me wrong, but a little “text over icon” hover would be great. If I’m recommending Twitter apps to my friends new to Twitter, I wouldn’t recommend this app simply because it’s not entirely easy to figure out at first glance (though I think that’s what they were going for).

9. Basic functions - I’ve been at this for an hour or so, and I still can’t figure out how to DM someone without manually going to File > Direct Message or opening their profile and clicking on the “wheel icon” to message them. I also haven’t discovered how to retweet or even follow someone within Tweetie for Mac. If this exists, we need to be able to do this from the main window. Update: Right-click. Yeah, I didn’t see that one coming.

10. Refresh - I’m a manic refresher. When I post a tweet, I want to make sure it went through, so I can walk away, or get back to whatever else I was doing. Am I missing something, or do you really have to wait until Tweetie for Mac has refreshed the entire feed to see your own? In other apps, it shows up immediately.

I still have love for Tweetie though, and there are some things that Tweetie for Mac does VERY well.

Conversations - The ability to read an entire conversation, like an IM, is wonderful.

Profiles - In Tweetie for Mac, you can see not just a basic profile, but a persons most recent Tweets, perfect.

Design - Despite the few things I mentioned, Tweetie for Mac is very pretty, the ads (which are now showing up by the way) are unobtrusive at the top, and it loads quickly.

Unfortunately, Tweetie for Mac seems to only be ideal for those who have a personal account, only following those who they want to read about, and who have been using Twitter long enough to figure the app out pretty quickly. I’m not sure those three things always go together.

So, what are your gripes about Tweetie for Mac? What would you need to see added before paying $15 or $20 is worth it to you?