This is my 10,000th Tweet

This is my 10,000th tweet.
I've been on Twitter since June 2009. That's

5 tweets per day...

151 tweets per month...

for 66 months.

Probably one-third of those have been re-tweets of someone else's genius, which leaves me with 6666 original-thought tweets.

According to this excellent article about succinct writing from Rands in Response, the average tweet is between 14 and 20 words. I tend toward longer tweets, so let's say I've averaged 18 words per tweet.

18 words X 6666 tweets =119,988 words

My curiosity is brimming. What else could I have written in 119,988 words?

According to CommonPlaceBook.com:

I could have written As I Lay Dying (56,695 words) twice and still had 6598 words left over to write the U.S. Constitution (4400) and O. Henry's "The Gift of the Magi" (2163).

Or Sense and Sensibility (119,394) with 33 18-word tweets to spare.

Simply to read my tweets aloud (let's throw the re-tweets back in for this), you'd best allow 1384.6 minutes. That's 23 hours.

If it takes me a minute to think of each tweet and post it (or read a tweet and re-tweet it), I've twittered away 10,000 minutes. (That's 166 hours and 40 minutes.)

In 166 hours I could have watched (or played in!) 52 NFL games, which average 3 hours and 12 minutes each.  According to this crazy distillation, the football is actually in play for only 11 minutes of each game--but let's save that thought for another day.

In 166 hours I could have watched all 85 episodes of Mad Men (47 minutes each) with 100 hours left over to attend the New York Philharmonic's performance of Handel's Messiah (2 hours 30 min.) 40 times.

I could have watched 555 18-minute TED talks.
I could have run 909 11-minute miles.
I could have prepared this Creamy Chicken Cordon Bleu Casserole 181 times.

This is not to say I regret my tweeting. I've connected with hundreds of interesting people (I follow 1601; 1019 follow me), and I am daily directed to blogs and articles that expanded my thinking.

But it is best to remember from time to time that all of life is choices.  I could have driven from New York to L.A round-trip twice.

I could have crocheted 12 baby blankets.
I could have ridden Secretariat around the Kentucky Derby course 5000 times.
I could have had Shrek makeup applied 111 times.

Wow. Maybe that's what I should have done.