@irk (day 54)

I'm @annoyed at all @the @$*%*( @tagging that's going @on.   Seriously I can't read people's posts without being cognitively interrupted all the time.  Is it me?  Am I just programmed to pause at an @?  Is my inner voice too loud?  What, if, I put, commas, everywhere, would, that be the, same?  Yup, seems to be.   But the @ has the additional annoyance of being visually prominent.    I have to learn to relax with the @.  Love it, view it as decoration to be skipped or acknowledged after the fact.   Part of a well written text is the fact that it disappears.  I love the lilt of a good turn of phrase.   I love the flow of a nicely timed sentence.  So far the @ destroys that for me.  This annoyance was partially triggered by the cross-posting from twitter to facebook.  In the twitter world the @ has a function that is definitely not the same in Facebook.  I think of a post on FB as being addressed to everyone, but what sometimes happens with cross-posted tweets is that certain people are named or it's obviously a response to something and it feels like it ended up on my FB feed by accident.   Like receiving an invite to a party that's not addressed to you.   It's visual and cognitive noise.

ta@

A song for this rant.