Leila Sales

Six and a half years ago, in the spring of 2004, I wrote a humor article for my college newspaper in which I said the following:

My mother often laments the fact that she wasn’t there for the destruction of the Berlin Wall. Similarly, my father cannot get over missing Woodstock 35 years ago. Never mind that he went to Altamont and totally saw people get killed and stuff. Woodstock was the cultural phenomenon of a century, he says, and it is a tragedy that he missed it.

This is how I feel about the first day of thefacebook.com at our campus: The cultural phenomenon of the century.

This week, the opening paragraph to the lead story in New York Magazine reads as follows:

I poked Aaron Sorkin. It happened the day before we first met, and it seemed an appropriate initial interaction with the man who wrote The Social Network, the movie that’s about to become the unofficial origin fable of perhaps the defining cultural phenomenon of this still-new century.

The thing is, when I used that phrase, I was kidding.

This is not the first time I have written something, and then it turned true. But it’s still weird for me. It’s always weird.