guest blog: courtney

welcome to the first day of my vacation! i am running around my house like a crazy lady trying to get ready to go before my lovely friend candice gets here to take me to the airport (we live like 3 blocks from each other and never hang out. it’s quite sad. but yay for her for taking me to the airport! major loves to candice everyone!) and i just stopped long enough to tell you all that courtney will be our first guest blogger! you miss me already, don’t you (i know, mom.)

this lovely lady (holy cow, we’re old enough to be ladies. like for real, not just we call each other ladies because we’re girls) and i go way back (which is why she gets to be first).  like to the days when she was just a twinkle in her daddy’s eye.  okay. this is derailing quickly.  anyway, she’s my bestie, i love her, i’m sure you will too, if you don’t already.  courtney (you can find her music blog here) and i have been friends for a long long time and she has been there for me through some really awful ideas.  and some times when i’ve just had a mental breakdown and had to cry on her shoulder. even though her shoulder was in tennessee. and i was here.  so we were on the phone (court, i’m still so sorry i freaked out like that. i’m a mental case. but you know that.) and i was crying. it was dramatic.  okay. derailing again.  read on.

RaeLeigh was my first real audience.

Within moments of reading the first few pages of Harriet The Spy (to this day, I remember this as one of my favorite books), I had pulled out an old half-filled composition notebook left over from the previous school year and I started writing.

I was in the fourth grade.

It didn’t take long before the entries evolved from two lines here and there about the kids I watched walking down my street to full detailed descriptions of my best friends and minute by minute recounts of my days as a ten year old. I fell in love, I became addicted, and I spent year after year, notebook after notebook, recording my life.

But it was all for my eyes only.

I was always in love with the whole computer concept and remember dreaming about software that would allow me to write my journal on the computer and lock my parents out of it. When the internet finally came along and I discovered an early attempt at a social network with, oh yes! a journal feature, I jumped at it and started writing there.

I was in seventh grade.

While I was stupid and logged into that account on shared school computers, forgetting to log out once in awhile, while an ex-boyfriend found the things I’d written about him and us and everyone else, those were never MEANT for an audience. They were public, but on a website next to no one knew about, and Google didn’t even exist yet. The search engine of choice was Yahoo! Or AltaVista.

Oh my God, you guys, do you honestly remember how different the internet used to be? It’s kind of insane.

But then I found a best friend in a girl who had been more of an acquaintance for my entire life. She had been a ride home from football games, to school ridiculously early in the morning for color guard, someone I said hello to in the hallways and drank Shirley Temples with at the company Christmas parties (dads = colleagues) but one summer, we suddenly just clicked.

And she said,

“Try this thing called Diaryland.”

So I did.

I had just finished the twelfth grade.

(Also, by the way, this is pretty much exactly what it looked like all those five and a half years ago.

Way to be, Diaryland. Way to be.)

So she started a diary. So did I. We muddled our way through learning terribly basic HTML and writing for each other instead of simply changing the colors of our pens or the slant of our fonts simply because it suited us.

It wasn’t exactly blogging. It wasn’t writing in a diary anymore, though, either.

It was like…

passing notes.

Internet notes.

There was no option to “leave a comment.” There was no way to tell if anyone but the two of us were reading our semi-literate ramblings. It was her, and me, and it was the start of our own little community.

And in our little community we called each other on our landlines (ewwww, right?) while we were logged on to one another’s diaries and we read them out loud to each other.

Because….?

I don’t know why.

It was fun?

But it was us. We drove around town listening to Sara Evans and talking about boys. She dropped me at my house on her way home, and we both immediately hit “DIAL” to hear the screeching of our modems telling us we were connecting, we had the means to WRITE about what we’d just done together so that the next afternoon we could call each other and rehash it YET AGAIN.

Those were the freakin’ days.

Obviously we’re both still blogging. I write more than she does. We don’t get to drive around belting out Suds in the Bucket at midnight in order to get the creative juices flowing. We almost never call each other to read our blog posts aloud, and if we were to, it would be from cell phones, more than a thousand miles apart instead of cordless phones separated by a block and a half.

There’s no more of that awful screechy modem thing going on anymore either.

Oh my God, you guys, do you honestly remember how different the internet used to be? It’s kind of insane.

Insane in a good way though, right?

Google is an intricate part of our entire global society. We can communicate instantly. We can make new friends in moments and find old ones even more quickly.

Facebook, twitter, music, tv.

Information at our very fingertips.

On our computers.

On our PHONES.

Man.

No, it’s definitely gotten better.

Evolution at its finest.

It all keeps getting better.

Especially this thing I call an amazing friendship with the one and only RaeLeigh: Big Sky Girl.