Why I Left Park Slope

My housemate was quite the luddite with only a vague awareness of what Twitter was, and it didn’t even occur to me that she might ever see this. I never mentioned her name, and we had no friends in common.

As it turned out, her daughter, whom I never met, found a question I’d posted online about living in her mother’s neighborhood about a year ago, and realized that I must be the new tenant. Apparently, my housemate’s daughter continued to keep track of me online. Or maybe she just set up a search to catch my use of the word “housemate.”

Anyway. I don’t know how long my housemate actually knew about this tweet, but she didn’t see fit to mention it until early March. We exchanged a couple of emails, in which we agreed that I should move out.

My take-away: It was all for the best. Although the situation that emerged from my tweet was surprising and a bit awkward, I don’t regret writing that tweet, and I don’t think the experience will change my online behavior in the future. I’m in a much better living situation now. And, well, that dinner would have been a lot more awkward than my tweet, or this post, and I’m not sorry that I missed it, or that I publicly (but discretely) expressed my desire to do so.