A private correspondence that anyone could see

"This Youtube account is just to do video blogs for my best friend . . . who lives all the way across the country. If your not her, then don't watch them. You wont understand them." After an hour or so of fishing in YouTube's mighty stream of new uploads -- mostly throwing back the video equivalent of old tires -- I found a video by a young woman from the East. It was just 10 seconds, but it caught my attention. The girl was snorting a line of white powder off her desk.

Who would put that on the Internet? I looked at the rest of her videos -- nine others, all messages to one girl. I'd stumbled onto a "private" correspondence between friends, one on the West Coast and the other on the East.

In a series of 15 videos between Anna and Dana -- those are the pseudonyms I'll use -- the best friends kept each other up to date about boy problems, their mental states and the trip Dana was planning to the West.

Dana was the rebellious one, with multiple piercings, heavy eyeliner and dyed hair. She talked a lot about the drugs she was doing -- not the prescription kind. Anna was the straight one -- tamer, more deadpan, no makeup. But both had a kind of fierceness to them -- and a sweetness. You could tell why they were friends.

Slowly I pieced the story together. They were friends on the West Coast, but Dana moved, and Anna changed schools. Anna was now dating Dana's best friend.

"I'm . . . scared to meet your parents," Dana said about her trip. "Because I'm kind of the reason you got kicked out of [school]. And I know your mom doesn't like me because I influenced you to do really bad things -- oh well, she'll get over it."

"I haven't been home much," Dana said in one made late at night. In a lot of her videos, Dana was high. "I haven't been in school much. I'm chilling with . . . the 54-year-old wife killer -- and that's lovely." It wasn't clear whether her companion's nickname was a joke.

Anna talked about her boyfriend. "I'm pretty miserable with the whole . . . situation. I'm not really sure what he wants, what I want, what we want."

At one point, she lost her train of thought. "Oh, my god, I'm going crazy right now because I'm on so many meds."

"I found out today that I have serotonin syndrome," she said in another video. "Which means I'm taking too much antidepressants, and it's bad for me. That's what my psychiatrist told me anyway."

Aren't they worried about their parents -- or some nosy reporter -- watching too?

Apparently not.

Read the main YouTube article here.