Ubiquitous digital photography has changed our relationship with nostalgia.
I’ve gone through a predictable rebound effect; The number of photos I took exploded in the first decade of the 2000s and in the last few years I’ve tried to be choosier. Even though I came into my 20s with digital cameras, I’ll likely tell my children someday about how I once had many experiences without any camera handy — no cell phone, or at least not one with a reliable high-quality camera.
As such, here’s a list for my own purposes of memories that only I hold.
- 2004: Skydiving, well, I have the photos but I lost the video (that I bought, and got on a CD-Rom)
- 2005: That meteor shower over Death Valley
- 2006: A private dinner in a small Florence restaurant after hours with special friends
- 2006: Jumping 30-foot cliff into a deep pool in the Smoky Mountains
- 2006: Driving a horse carriage in Old City as a licensed tour guide
- 2007: First meeting Joe Fraizer in his gym
- 2007: Watching real boxing at Legendary Blue Horizon (around writing this story) before it closed
- 2008: My longest hitchhiking trip of my life, and what that sunset felt like
- 2008: That Turkish bathhouse, where I talked about returning to Philadelphia
- 2009: Those sneakers I ran my first Broad Street Run in
- 2010: That lunch with Anne after I quit to go full-time with Technical.ly
- 2011: The first Philly Tech Week event
- 2011: Getting on-stage for an open-mic standup night (It went well enough!)
- 2012: Walking down Calle el Donde in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic was a large, serious faced Dominican woman wearing an oversized black t-shirt that said ‘I’m the guy you have to blow to get a drink around here”