There was an Associated Press article out this week titled “50 things that changed our lives in a decade.” When I saw it I expected to read about politics and the war on terror. Instead, I read about real life and things we’ve all come to love, hate and rely heavily on in the past 10 years, such as cell phones, cable television and instant connectivity.

Remember when a blackberry was a fruit? Remember when green was just a color? Remember when you didn’t have to take off your shoes to board an airplane?

I remember going to their airport when I was a child to watch the airplanes take off. We’d walk right up to a window near a gate, see the plane back out and head for the runway. Can’t do that now. Can’t even get in the neighborhood of a gate unless you have a ticket.

When I graduated high school and went to college I prayed that my car wouldn’t break down between Jackson, Miss., and Baton Rouge. It never did, and I’m thankful for that. See, there were no cell phones, so there was no calling for help unless you got out of the car and walked to the nearest building with a landline.

(I don’t even think landline was a word then. There was no need. You either had a telephone in your home, or you didn’t have a telephone.)

When the 20th century rolled over 10 years ago, we had one cell phone in our family. And sure, we had cable television.

But we also had pagers to keep us connected with our jobs, we didn’t have a home computer, and we still had a VCR and a turntable and cassette tape player on our stereo. When we finally got a home computer and moved into the internet age, we thought our dial-up connection was a pretty cool thing.

Nowadays, dial-up would never do. It’s got to be a fast connection, a fast download speed and instant access to information.

And e-mail? That is probably the one thing that has transformed life as I know it more than anything else.

I remember when I graduated college and went to work. My boss would walk to my desk to talk to me. I’d get mail or telephone calls from sources, and I’d actually leave the newspaper building for hours at a time to research and interview for a story.

Now I sit in front of the computer hours on end answering e-mails. My boss doesn’t call much, even though I hear from her many times a day. Heck, I even get e-mails from across the building. Seems it’s a lot easier to do than get up and walk.

Maybe that’s why we’ve all gained so much weight.

Who would have ever thought a television set or a computer monitor could weigh so little and be so easy to move around? And who would have ever thought you could watch one show while recording another, then rewind the live show if you wanted to watch a scene again?

Cameras have gone from film to digital (instant access again), we care more about what celebrities are doing that ever before (maybe that’s cable TV’s fault), and we no longer have to ask for directions – we just listen to the lady fastened to our dashboards in our GPS systems.

It’s been nearly 30 years since I graduated from high school. I missed my class reunion and I lost contact with most of my classmates through the years, seeing as I was living in a different state. But with social networking sites becoming so popular on the internet in the last few years, I’ve reconnected with old friends, I’ve seen pictures of their families and basically, I’ve moved back into their lives. Just as they have moved into mine.

That’s just weird, really.

I sent a card to a friend recently. Not a text, not an e-mail. A greeting card. People used to do that regularly. I used to do it regularly. I used to get them regularly.

Not anymore. It’s email or text or a phone call from a cellular device. Or an instant message through Facebook, can’t forget that.

Sometimes I’d just like to go back to the good old days of worrying about waiting until 9 p.m. to make a long distance phone call, mailing payment on a bill and going to the bank to cash a check.

You think there may be an app for that?

Sandy Cunningham is publisher of L’Observateur. She can be reached at sandy.cunningham@ wickcommunications.com