12 Monkeys, Looper, the Terminator series, Star Trek IV and other franchise episodes, Hot Tub Time Machine, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, and of course the Back to the Future trilogy.

You know when you watched these movies, you got a little jealous of the characters’ being able to just jump around the space-time continuum like that. But time travel on screen always involves some sort of object that you don’t already posses: a spell cast by a witch with mommy issues, a torpedo in a state of temporal flux, a really dorky ex-boyfriend, etc. What if I told you there is a way to travel through time instantly using only items you not only already own, but already use regularly? What if I told you that you probably already time travel several times a week? And what if I told you that you could go back in time without inadvertently making your parents fall in love with someone else, or that you could go forward in time without being completely lost in the new technology and dystopias you’d find there?

You’d need some easing into the idea, right? Well, let’s start with the obvious methods of traveling backwards.

1. Timehop: If you have a smart phone and a Facebook account, you can download this handy app and it will instantly make your life into one of those “This day in history” pull-a-day calendars that you used to give your social studies teacher for Christmas. Not only will the thing show you your Facebook updates from the past seven plus years, but if will show you the pictures you took with your phone on this day last year. Since my personal method of grocery shopping is to write a list on my fridge and take a picture of it before I go to the store, I am constantly and pleasantly reminded that I eat a lot fewer Hot Pockets these days.

2. Doing Laundry: The dirty-clothes hamper is like a cross-section of the earth’s crust, or like the rings of the tree, with each layer showing you a little bit of your own past in a vivid, if someone gamey, sensory experience. Oh, look, this sweatshirt! I’d forgotten about that binge-Netflix day. And look, here at the bottom! My three favorite t-shirts that I stupidly wasted in three consecutive weekend-days instead of spreading them out over the two (let’s be honest and put it closer to three) weeks between loads and wearing them on weekdays when people actually see me.

3. Leaving Tabs open on an Internet browser: Why do I have a whole window seemingly devoted to Bernese Mountain dogs? I’ve got a Wikipedia page, dogtime.com, and adoptapet.com all open here…oh…right. It all started with an argument over whether it was “Bernese” or “Burmese” and spiraled down from there into a pipe dream of getting another dog.

Which brings us to the methods of moving forward through time, which is always more depressing, even without the dystopias.

1. Old pets: One day, your dog is exuberantly dragging you up the hills of Pittsburgh, the next, she’s struggling to get up the stairs to bed because you forgot to give her her glucosamine pill. Now, everyday when you get home from work and she’s lying on the couch asleep because she didn’t hear you open the door, you’re rushing to make sure she’s still breathing and your mind teleports you to a future in which you no longer sweep up mounds of hair or pay out the nose for dog food and vet bills, but you have a hole in your heart that is disproportionate to the little daschshund mix you’ve had since you were eleven. Oh good, she’s still alive. Back to the present.

2. The Paycheck: This can go one of two ways, depending on your individual level of “adult”: a) long-jump ahead, a la “Car insurance will cost this much in six months, and we’re going to want to buy a house in a few years, so let’s put this much aside and use the rest of this to buy groceries and maybe a nice gift for Bob’s sister’s baby shower” or b) a short sprint to the nearest finish line, vis a vis “Okay, so I’ve got X dollars to get me through the next two weeks. Using the crystal ball that is previous experience, I am seeing the next four days turning into a party of Chinese take-out and a trip to the book store across the street from work, and the ten days after that becoming an existential crisis, wherein I struggle to justify a Netflix account when I could really use the extra $8 to get the car’s gas gauge off empty.”

3. Netflix: Netflix is good for all sorts of time travel. Besides the obvious methods—teleporting back to a simpler time when femme fatales were the height of feminism and sex was really just a puff of a cigarette after a fade-to-black—it can also be used to relive a childhood spent watching Buffy with your older brother when your mom was sure you were asleep. But more recently, for me at least, I’m looking at picking up a new show, and I go to the Recommended For You section. This suddenly transforms Netflix into a portal to a dystopian future, wherein the last two, maybe even three seasons of any show are always terrible, but even so, I won’t want them to end, and once they do, I’ll be back at square one, trying to figure out how I’m going to spend that hour between when I get home from work and when I get hungry enough to make dinner…so maybe Ugly Betty, with only four seasons, really isn’t worth it.

Mary Margaret Healy

Mary Margaret is a 2013 English, history, and secondary education grad who went rogue and became a Social Worker in Pennsylvania’s Child Welfare system. Specifically, she works as a caseworker in the Statewide Adoption and Permanency Network finding families for children and educating the masses about foster care, adoption, and permanency planning. She made it over the grad-school hurdle with gold stars and warm fuzzies and is on to the next big adventure: the unknown of adulthood. Her major writing dream right now is to finish her science fiction novel that explores the concurrent futures of child welfare and artificial intelligence.