Valentine Tweet Marathon!

As an act of perseverance, and compassion, I will attempt to draw a valentine for EVERY single one of my Twitter followers tomorrow, February 14, between the hours of 7 AM and 7 PM. I will draw the valentine on a 4 1/2” x 5 1/2” pre-cut card, take a picture with my phone, and tweet it directly to each follower, real-time. Call it a “Valentine’s Marathon” if you will.

With 1150 followers, I’ll have roughly 40 seconds per valentine (or 96 an hour), so I will have to act swiftly. However, it is my goal to make every card unique to the individual follower. By doing so, I will respond to each person’s handle/picture/bio as seen below. Obviously, with such little time, these cards won’t be mind-blowing, but who doesn’t like to get a hand drawn note for Valentine’s Day?

Why? Well if there’s one day in the year I’m heartily encouraged to show my love and appreciation to someone, that day is tomorrow. Traditionally, Valentine’s Day is spent expressing ourselves with gifts and “valentines” for people we care about. However, interesting enough, in lieu of all the people I care about in my personal life, I spend much more time sitting in front of my computer every day: working, searching, writing, emailing, scanning, printing, G-chatting, and of course, Tweeting.

I have developed great relationships with people in my personal life because of Twitter. That being said, everyday I have conversations with designers and illustrators on Twitter that never go beyond the monitor in front of me. In spite of this, I wonder how I can honor these virtual relationships? Can it be done outside of technology? And besides the typical gifts we give each other on Twitter—like a mention or a retweet—what would it mean to make an analog gift for someone who is following me?

Note: Twitter says you can’t tweet more than 1000 times in a day, and because I won’t have a lot of time, I will have to double up on many of the tweets. Oh, and I won’t create valentines for any new followers than the ones I have now. In the next week or two, I will put a website up so you can see all 1150 together.

Statistical breakdown:
1 Tim
15 Red Sharpies
12 Hours
1200 pre-cut cards
1150 Followers
5 bottles of water
2 coconut waters
3 pre-made sandwiches
1 Bag of Hershey’s Kisses
Andre 3000’s “The Love Below” on repeat

This is going to be fun! (maybe impossible!?) I guess sometimes you gotta be mad for love!