I’ve been on medical leave since the end of September. I promise I haven’t been rotting away. I’ve been keeping my brain busy despite the chronic pain, digging into my past lives to understand who I am and where I’m going next. The journey started with my OneDrive account and ended with me scraping the bottom of the barrel in Dropbox. I have so much data scattered all over the internet, in various cloud hosting services, and elsewhere where I’ll have to beg for access to text and images that once belonged wholly to me.
One of the projects I plan to pursue is to reclaim my LiveJournal archives from high school. (I am not stylizing it as LiVEJOURNAL, even if that’s what Wikipedia alleges.) I did the right thing by downloading the archive of my college years and storing it in various cloud accounts and on the desktop, then scrubbing it from the internet. But for some reason, I left behind my high school blogs, cringy as they were. I think it’s because I felt that no one would find them since it was with a username I hadn’t used since 1998–an entire three generations before the moniker “ohthatflo” appeared. Now, those archives are stuck in Russian purgatory. I have no idea how I will get into that account, considering I nuked the email address associated with it over 20 years ago.
I’m also trying to get into my old Geocities account. Or rather, a mirror of my old account hosted on Geocities.ws. I had managed a bit of traction there a few years ago when I first got the gumption to retrace my past. I should follow up on that before another company buys the rights to my teenage ramblings from 2002-2004.
Above are a few breadcrumbs from my dive into the past. They’re screenshots from when I did the MacLife show with Roberto Baldwin way back in the day—a decade and a half ago. I found them on an old Tumblr account. I was a literal child fresh out of college with a degree in journalism and all my trauma intact. I also went through a season of hairstyles during that period. What was it with millennials refusing to grow out their hair between 2009 and 2011?
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