I am a time traveler from the 1990s.

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” L. P. Hartley’s quote has a life completely beyond its origin in the book The Go-Between. I think a lot of people come to viscerally understand it as they age. I’ll be 45 in July and I am beginning to understand myself as a time traveler from the 1990s. My husband sent me this Midnight Murmurations piece on The X-Files. I was bopping along reading about the experience of this person who is younger than me experiencing the show and then got to this part, which discusses 1993 technology like I might talk about the technology of a 1950s sci-fi movie: A bygone era is put to screen, with big mobile phones that you need to pull an antenna out of in order to use, chunky keyboards wired into bulbous PCs, giant spinning tape recorders, and rectangular cars. And this was when I realized I’m a time traveler from the 1990s, because I immediately thought, “Well yeah, that’s what technology looks like.” My brain exists in a…