I recently completed a 10-day liver detox (trumpets and fanfare). It consisted of swallowing Chinese herbs three times a day and excluding all the best foods from my diet: coffee, wine, chocolate, heavy cream, steak, etc. I challenged myself to tweet each day about the cleanse’s deprivations—which were apparently so severe that one night I dreamt about cheesecake. It was Marisa Tomei’s cheesecake, but we don’t have time to analyze that now.

Here is a sampling of my detox-related tweets:

• I want cookie dough. #DetoxDay2
• Subsisting on rice cakes and peppermint tea. #DetoxDay6
• Looks like I picked the wrong week to stop eating most of the major food groups. #DetoxDay7

As you can see, I appended a hashtag consisting of “DetoxDay” and a number representing the day to each post. I was surprised to find that numerous other people had tweeted using the same tag:

Reading these posts made the world seem just a little bit smaller. (Impressively, the entries continue through day 28; that’s a long time to go without cheesecake.) I started doing Twitter hashtag searches on all sorts of things pertinent to my life: #ButtercreamFrosting, #WritersBlock, #CrazyDogs. It was fun getting different perspectives on inane subjects relevant to my existence.

I will leave you with a few takes on a daily occurrence in my house, #SpiderInTheBathroom:

So what are you waiting for? Try it! Warning: You will probably want to make spelling corrections to the search results.