REVENGE OF THE NERDS: Is Aaron Sorkin the Sexiest Man Alive?

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The first computer I remember is two miles long. Slate grey metal above and below, to my left and to my right. Every step an echo. I look back at the open door leading to the foothills. Another step and then a sound like the water heater in our old apartments. I stand transfixed before a hallway without end. Over my shoulder black components click and pulse, stacked one atop the next.

“How far does it go?” I ask.

“Too far.” Russell says. This is my father’s friend whom we have come to visit and he does not want me running off. “Stay where I can see you,” he says.

Even now, I wonder if that tunnel of light so many people say they’ve seen in near-death experiences looks anything like the inside of Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.

As it turns out SLAC is not really a computer, but a multipurpose laboratory for the study of things like antimatter and photons and galaxies and other far-out stuff I do not now nor will I ever even partly understand. But there were plenty of computers in my future. My hometown, Palo Alto, is also the birthplace of Apple, IBM, and now Facebook.

The first boy on our block to have a computer was a studios sort my friend and I christened “Lowly Worm.” We were not impressed. We were much more concerned with hair, ours and his. We were thirteen and we were very short sighted.

It would be another 8 years before I had one of my own: a laptop PC on which I typed out my college entrance essays and then paper after paper on 19th Century novels and French Literature and poem after poem after poem. Sadly, an alarming number of these poems were about some boy or other and I in my haste failed to note what poem went with which boy.

Later I bought a desktop after my third car accident and began writing my first memoir. That was fifteen years ago. I am still writing my first memoir. But it isn’t the desktop’s fault. As it turns out, writing of that sort is best done by hand. By then the Internet had come along and again I was fascinated by the tunnel of light before me; endless, enchanting and mutating.

As I watched THE SOCIAL NETWORK I couldn’t help but squeal (out loud, in the theatre) when I saw the Eichler that the young entrepreneurs shack up in while creating the “monolith” that sucks away so much of my time these days. And now, as I sit typing this blog post on my new MacBook Air I’m thrilled to see Aaron Sorkin accept a well-deserved Golden Globe for best screenplay. Smart Girls have more fun, he says. His daughter is watching. And all I can think is wow, great hair.

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