The first camera I ever held was my dad's Canon 400D. It was bigger than my head, and it wasn't mine. I didn't know what an aperture was. I pressed the shutter a few hundred times, and almost everything came out blurry. I'm not sure I've been that happy with a camera since.
At ten, in the Vienna airport, I photographed the light pouring through the terminal windows on my mom's iPhone. It had been bought in Japan, so the shutter sound couldn't be turned off, and the whole terminal heard me work. Afterward I found the editing sliders and dragged every one of them as far as it would go. I showed my mom. She said it was very special. I kept both versions.
There is a photo of me at seven with my hand in the air. I don't remember the question. I remember that the hand went up first.
The LEGO never left. It went from a hazard on the floor to a box, and from the box to the space under my server, where it holds up two fans because rubber bands couldn't. Most of what I know I learned this way: the wrong way first, then the parts bin.
At sixteen, one of my lungs collapsed. It was the first machine I couldn't take apart, and the first problem that didn't care how early I started. Everything else here I began before I was ready. This one I could only wait for. It healed at the speed it healed. I learned what none of my toys had taught me: some things arrive when they arrive, and wanting them sooner is just another way of not being there.
Later, I bought a camera with no screen.
Next year I'll help train a language model from nothing. For months it will produce the equivalent of blurry frames: half-words, sentences that don't finish. I'll be one of the people reading them. I hope I'm as patient with it as someone once was with me and the sliders.
Right now I am the worst person in the room at ping-pong, at calculus, and at parallel parking. The people in those rooms keep handing me the paddle anyway. I'd like to keep a list like that for the rest of my life, with different things on it.
The 400D is at the bottom of a box somewhere in this house. The battery is almost certainly dead. I never really put it away. I just keep picking up things too big for me, and pressing.