(Re)Arrange Your House With Twitter: Final Analysis

Cristina and Lisa’s social experiment with Twitter has come to an end, and I am thrilled to present the final analysis of their tweets. First, let’s review their basic situation and the purposes of this experiment.

1. Cristina and Lisa share a life, two houses and a main area of interest in their profession, but they spend most of the time in two different cities: Cristina in New York, in the new apartment they have just purchased, and Lisa in North Carolina, in the “old” house they bought together several years ago and shared until a professional engagement brought Cristina to New York.
2. The house in North Carolina, having been lived in by the couple for quite some time, is already set up to accommodate their lifestyle, but the new apartment in New York presented a white canvas, as it were, to be customized as much as space and finances allowed. Our goal was to make Lisa’s visits as seamless and convenient as possible, by allowing her to travel light and to have the “perfect” setup waiting for her on her arrival. All this while accommodating Cristina’s needs on a daily basis.

By analyzing the hourly tweets of Cristina and Lisa over a two-week period, we set out to:

1. Capture their “life flow,” the rhythm of their daily lives, their routines and habits;
2. Gain insight into their relationship with their home and work spaces (they often overlap);
3. Understand what is important to them in their relationship with their space.

At the end of the first week, I printed out and analyzed their tweets, and reached a fair number of preliminary conclusions and tentative recommendations. Now the second week has ended, and I am curious to find out whether one week might have been enough to get a fairly good picture of their situation, or whether this second week has given us some deeper glimpses that we might have missed had we stopped the experiment after the first seven days. So, here goes.

First, some statistics:

Cristina:

• Total number of tweets in the second week: 205
• from computer: 205 (almost all from Twitterfox, a small number from Twitter.com)
• from iPhone: none

Lisa:

• Total number of tweets in the second week: 66
• from computer: 42 (Twitter.com)
• from iPhone: 24 (Twitterific)

They both did a great job again. The discrepancy in numbers is due not to the fact that Lisa’s commitment is lacking, but to the fact that her semester had already begun while Cristina’s was still gearing up.

New Insights into Cristina’s Life Flow

• Now that some more furniture has arrived, Cristina has been able to add to her morning ritual the reading of the paper in the kitchen. The best thing about this apartment is the light. The quantity and the quality. She can also read the paper in the dining room, where there is a new very large table from CB2.
• This week was very busy, between furniture deliveries and preparations for the new semester at school, so Cristina was even worse about her eating habits than usual: she neglected her shopping, cooking and eating, frequently skipping lunch and/or snacks or highly necessary cups of espresso!
• I can confirm that morning is the most important time in Cristina’s day, in terms not only of the ritual of awakening, breakfast, radio, communication with family, paper reading, etc. but also as far as setting the tone for the day. This week, in anticipation of the new semester and experiencing a mixture of anxiety and excitement about all the furniture deliveries and assembly, as well as managing and coordinating the various helpers, Cristina woke up very early several times, but I never detected a feeling of unease, which is comforting. She reads in bed, almost always on her Kindle ***an interesting detail vis-a-vis gadgets***.
• The home office seems to be gearing up nicely. Cristina is able to communicate with family via Skype, use Google Docs to collaborate with her Graduate Assistants (GAs), and of course do her own research and writing, and let’s not forget Twitter!
• Her days at work have been more intense but similar in pattern to those of the previous week.
• An important new development of this week has been that Cristina has begun to familiarize herself not only with her apartment but also with her building and her neighborhood. She is definitely a city girl, loves the fact that she can walk everywhere in very little time and that almost everything she needs is located conveniently nearby. There is a gym, so the next thing that is going to be included in her daily routine is some kind of exercise, like yoga perhaps. ***apartment vs. house — my outlook vs. hers, see below in the conclusion***
• I can foresee that evenings will begin to rival mornings in terms of rituals.  The slow, languid teeth brushing in front of the tv, the Kindle reading in bed, the takeout dinner with a friend in front of a movie… it all sounds lovely.

Observations on Cristina’s Experience of Her New Apartment

• The washer/dryer cannot be installed soon enough, as far as I can tell. This week Cristina has repeatedly tweeted about her procrastination with the laundry, and I’m sure it’s due to the fact that it’s not fun to go down to the basement. Once she installs the appliance in her kitchen the quality of her daily life will improve tremendously.
• The kitchen has already improved quite a bit with the simple addition of a table, and Cristina’s gladness is apparent from her tweets about her morning ritual. She might benefit from having a tiny tv in the kitchen.

Lisa’s Life Flow

• This week Lisa’s semester has really picked up, and therefore she has had even less time to tweet. But her routine seems to be much the same as last week’s. Much of her day is taken up by work, whether she is at home or at school. When at home, as always, work is conducted on the floor with a laptop.
• Lisa’s habits have overall been confirmed. I find it wonderful how in sync these two people are! Lisa too barely speaks of cooking, preparing food or eating (both Lisa and Cristina are miniscule women. They each weigh about four ounces.)

Conclusions and Recommendations

• First of all, I don’t think that the second week of tweeting yielded any very deep insights that I had not already intuited after the first week, but something very interesting did happen. The tweets became at the same time more self-conscious and more relaxed and meditative, like musings. Cristina and Lisa started to become accustomed to Twitter, and began to breathe into their tweets. Not to sound too new-agey, but that is what tends to happen. After the first week I was already impressed by how much the lives of these two very different people were in harmony. Through two very different routes, somehow they have arrived at the same place. Both appreciate simplicity, modern lines, organization. Neither of them wants to have to devote too much time to housework, but both need their space to be clean, in order and efficient. They are in the same field of work, are very devoted to their work, mix their work with their play. Lisa, after reading my analysis of the first week of tweets, commented that their lives are pathetic, probably in reference to the fact that they both work so much. I, on the other hand, find their lives to be very Zen. They have intertwined their professional and personal interests in a way that seamlessly weaves their “real” life into their “work” life and each component feeds and enriches the other.
• For the apartment in New York I recommend taking the maximum advantage of the storage space in the basement, freeing up as much of the space as possible in the apartment, so that both Cristina and Lisa can allow their minds to open to all the light and white surfaces that the apartment is now filling up with. Cristina repeatedly mentioned that she spends very little time in the kitchen preparing food because while she is doing it she can’t really “relax,” but her hints at the lack of a tv in there make me think that she equates relaxing and watching tv to a high degree. So I definitely recommend a small television in the kitchen. Lisa would like a microwave, and I think it would be a good addition, since cooking is not high on the agenda. A microwave is also useful to heat up leftovers that have been frozen, and since these two eat like sparrows, I think it highly likely that there will be plenty of leftovers.
• The dining room now has the lovely white table from CB2, but I think it should also house the sofabed for guests. It might seem, at first glance, that the best room for guests would be the study at the end of the apartment, but I don’t think that would be a good idea. Cristina’s mother from Italy comes to visit once a year or so, and naturally, having come so far she tends to stay for a while. Both Cristina and Lisa are early risers and immediately sit down at their computers to check emails and flex their brain muscles. If there were a guest in the study they could not do this, and in the long run it might make the hosting experience stressful, when it doesn’t need to be. If the guest were sleeping in the dining room, they could just slip by, move into the study, and everyone would be happy.
• The bathroom has acquired some new fixtures and seems to be very functional already. One day there will be money to redo the tiles and things like that, but for the time being I would say it’s fine as it is.
• Storage has been added to the bedroom, as we had all reached the conclusion that this is the room in the house that receives the least amount of “love” from the two women. They sleep in the bedroom and read in bed, but no significant amount of daytime is spent there and it is not a focus of their domestic attention.
• I would definitely invest in a radio wiring or wireless (even better) system throughout the house, so that NPR can follow them around during their morning routine.

As a final note, I would just like to speak about my friendship with Cristina for a moment. We have been friends for over a year now, I think, and I have been able to follow the acquisition of this apartment from the first glimmer in her eye to the furnishing and inhabiting phase. When she first started talking about buying a place I encouraged her to buy a house rather than an apartment. For nearly the same amount of money she could have much more space for herself and perhaps also a tenant, like I have. But she stuck to her guns and said that since she spends most of her time alone, a house would make her feel lonely. That an apartment building is a small community, where you can hear other people around you. I must say that now that it’s all over, I think she did the right thing. Both women care about the shape of the house, but neither wants to spend too much time taking care of it (they have too many much more interesting things to do) and I couldn’t agree more. This way, they have the best of all worlds. A house in North Carolina, an apartment in New York, two spaces perfectly in sync with their respective environments.

I am going to be visiting the apartment again very soon and taking a new set of pictures, so stay tuned for the completion of this wonderful and inspiring experiment. Thank you, Cristina and Lisa, for allowing me and the world into your wonderful lives. I wish you joy and serenity in your new place, and I think you’re off to a great start!

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