A few weeks back, in a late-night effort to reunite myself with my 2000s photo files trapped inside old hard drives, I had to climb through a time portal, attaching chains of old Firewire cords attached to adaptors, attached to other adaptors, stuck in a stalemate of new tech trying to connect to old.

The first two didn’t connect, but finally, I was in. On the hunt for childhood photos of my youngest daughter, born in 2009.

What did I actually end up finding? A folder simply labeled “Sprint phone”, full of pixelated, downright shitty pictures. Pics of NYC, where I lived at the time. Pics with 2007 then-high tech filters on them.

It felt quite good to be back in 2007 for a brief 30 minutes. A simpler time. A time when I lived in NYC, talked with people more than looked at my phone, and when AI wasn’t coming for all of our jobs.

Did I find the pics I was looking for on those old hard drives, hell no. Too many to look through. I bringing a bunch of prints I found in a box into CVS to have scanned back into digital files, and uploaded them up to the Yearbook Mafia website of Jostens.

Probably going to print up a t-shirt that says my grandma found a way to plug in all these old hard drives and all I got were those shitty Sprint flip-phone photos.