When I was a kid who was on the verge of not being quite a kid anymore – you know, twelve-ish – I was obsessed with what I might be like when I grew up. I should clarify. I didn’t really want to know what job I’d have or whether or not I was going to marry Joseph Gordon-Levitt, I wanted to know what I was going to be like. What kind of jokes I’d tell, what I’d look like, whether I would have figured out how to smile in photographs without looking like a complete doofus. Whether I’d be cool.

I had a pretty good grasp of temporal reality, though, and knew that time-travel wasn’t in the cards, so I did something that strikes me as pretty cool a decade later: in lieu of hearing from my future self, I wrote letters to her, so she’d hear from me. I found one over spring break, from my fifteen-year-old self, and reading it was a really interesting experience. For one thing, there’s a really meta opener (something like “Hi, me! What are you like now?”), and the body is all really painfully earnest – a whole paragraph devoted to my high school boyfriend. But Little Nina did something unexpected and smart toward the end. She made a list. The theme of the list was “things you might have forgotten.”

There’s nothing like being told by your younger, shorter, angstier self that it doesn’t actually matter if you’re cool in the future, because this is what you were like at this one precise moment in 2006. So I haven’t forgotten those things. Or I unforgot them, I guess. I have forgotten a lot, if only because it didn’t make it to the list, but I preserved part of myself that way.

So in the spirit of this delayed-action omphaloskepsis, I have decided to write another letter using a piece of technology that was around in my junior high/high school days: FutureMe.org.

And that’s what I’m doing right now. The year range goes through 2064, though I don’t think I’ll get that ambitious. Maybe I’ll just shoot for 2019, when I will presumably have forgotten some of the agony and ecstasy of my first year of grad school. I’ll make my list of things to unforget, and then I’ll send it, and then…well, I guess it’ll sit in some darkened corner of a server for the next five years, and then show up in my inbox. Anti-climactic, maybe. But time travel still counts as traveling.