Socially Networked

I just finished watching The Social Network. It's the best movie I've seen in a long time. (I recently saw Garden State which is also an excellent movie. It made me laugh and cry. So that's good.) The Social Network didn't make me cry and I laughed just a couple times, but I was damn intrigued. It made me, at least for the moment, think about a lot of things. Here's that list.

- college (missing it way more now)

- the east coast (how would my life have been if I'd gone east instead of west?)

- Napster (That was my era, man. 1999. Downloading 80s hits and sexy rock songs and TV theme songs for hours at a time without standing up from the computer. One night it was a contest between Moira and me about who could "get" more songs. We stayed up until dawn and Moi had to catch a flight early in the morning. But why wouldn't we forgo sleep to get more songs?)

- Facebook. (I remember so vividly the night that I signed up for Facebook. It was 2006, I think. Sarah and I were staying at the Madison Governor's Club and Concourse Hotel in Wisconsin for admitted law students weekend. You think that's dorky? NEVER MIND. The point is, at the time, I was anti-facebook. I thought it was pretentious. Back then, you had to have an .edu email. I had two of them: @oxy.edu and @umn.edu, but still, it pissed me off. The same reason that most things about Harvard annoy me was the reason Facebook annoyed me. I'll chill on Friendster and MySpace where the masses can go, too. But then. Oh, then, Sarah convinced me to use my oxy.edu address to open a Facebook account. The first "wall post" on my facebook account is an inebriated list of *funny* inside jokes that Sarah and I formulated while in that Madison hotel. Is there any easy way for me to locate that now? And, on that fateful night that I joined facebook, one of those great jokes was our friend Jota...)

- Jota. Speaking of Jota. We met in Valparaiso, Chile in 2002. He was a Junior at Harvard. Now he's a fancy pants successful New York lawyer, but I still remember him as a skinny, beer-drinking, Che-loving, Sur America-obsessed, Ivy League liberal who I wasn't sure I liked when I first met him. Well, that was before I knew him as a kind, lovable, one-pecked genuine guy who would be my friend for long after we left the Southern Cone. He's great. I hardly ever talk to him, but when I do, it's absolute fun. It usually involves boxes of wine and Sarah, too. So, Jota, you were at Harvard 1999-2003...Why in the hell didn't you invent facebook.com?)

Anyway, it's a great movie. What else should I see before the Oscars?