saturday night i received a voicemail from a long lost college friend. as my faithful readers know, i finally dragged myself around to writing christmas cards this year... and, sadly, her card was returned to me. "unable to forward". i figured i'd get around to finding her info, but alas, the yellow-labeled envelope joined the Vertical Filing Stack of Death pile, along with other miscellaneous papers on my desk.

after some whitepages.com printouts [seriously, what did people DO before the internet?], phone calls to everyone in my hometown with my surname, conversations with an aunt, my parents, and my brother, SHE found ME. i felt loved. but also a little like a schmuck. a loved schmuck. that's me. although i have to say it's certainly not MY fault she wrote down my phone number on a DRY ERASE BOARD years ago and promptly lost it and then moved before i called back and before we could figure out what had happened.

anyway, i called her back, and to give you an indication of our friendship and personalities, she answered the phone with "hello?", like any normal human being, and i responded with "what the hell?!": conversation, catching up, hilarity ensued. it was a short call as i was on my way out, and so i called back tonight and we chatted and it was lovely and refreshing. and very, very funny. everything so different and yet so much the same. how can you NOT love someone that once replaced her jacket zipper pull with a disembodied barbie head?

so, you're now finding yourself asking: what's the point here, woman?

basically i'm posting this so that when she comes to visit here [now that she actually has pertinent, current contact information about me], she'll either be excited at being referred to online, or be totally and massively freaked out about it and wtf is with this blogging thing, anyway?

i'm going for the latter. [duh.]

tb has received my first foray into photoshop elements [thanks, jared!].

lots of buttons and options and newfangled controls... this could get dangerous.

"A blog can be like a mirror and I needed to see a reflection of a person I still recognized there after all the changes I'd been through. Because I wasn't finding myself anywhere else."

- from mrs. kennedy at fussy

so, the fussy entry from which the above quote is taken is more about the nuances and struggles of motherhood, as well as its portrayal in the media... but i think its applications can be applied using a much larger brushstroke. [as most good writing should.]

reading her entry reminded me of why i started this. sometimes i wonder about this whole blogosphere thing, and my own addition to the crazy mob... is it all just virtual navel-gazing? are we so full of ourselves that we really need to spill the overflow to the wired universe? creating our own self-aggrandizing dot com for our unlimited selfishness?

perhaps this is what drives the blogging phenomenon. but it is not what drives me. [most days]. a good friend recently shared with me how much she has seen me grow and change over the past several years... how i have started to come into my own... how i have truly begun to find my voice. and this little blog that could has played a tremendous part in that growth. the cause and effect are debatable -- did i start the blog because i had the strength, or do i have the strength because i started the blog? -- but in reality it's probably a decent combination of the two.

what drives you? in what activities do you find your voice? if you blog, why? what kinds of blogs draw you in?

i am just about to lose my shit here today.

everyone happy now?

I WANT TO GO HOME.

...you find yourself taking senseless pictures.

from a phone conversation with katie, fifteen minutes ago:

kt: i haven't even eaten any of my candy canes yet.

me: [confused by the sudden conversation change] uh... what?

kt: my candy canes. i haven't had enough time.

me: you... wait. um. did you just say what i think you said? you haven't had time?

kt: hey, it takes a lot of commitment to sit around and finish a candy cane.