fraternity) and the house in Tahoe.
As the site’s user base nearly doubled throughout that spring, from 5.5 million users to ten, and everyone’s sense of responsibility magnified by the week, I had the idea, selfishly perhaps, that a pool house would be a better way to lighten up and bring us closer than a frat house. After all, what better way to establish good cheer and team spirit than around a pool, drinks in hand, sun shimmering off the water? “We should get a house with a pool,” I said to Mark one night that spring during the Friday happy hour. He flashed his characteristic look of askance approval, smiling, but looking half-away, as if to retain his sense of executive control. “That’s a good idea,” he said, pulling out his BlackBerry (huge by today’s standards) to dash off an email with the request.
I was stoked about the pool house. At that point in my life, I was in need of two things: an outlet for my revolutionary energy and a new career that would work out in a way that grad school had not. Throwing my entire lot in with Facebook (to the point, even, of moving in with my coworkers at a company pool house) could turn out to be perfect. My interest in the Hotel California had not faded a bit since the days when my friend Dana and I drove the highway to San Diego searching for it. What more perfect metaphor for American society, and its obsession with belonging, with scenes of darkness and excess, with cults that you fall into and find it hard to leave? It felt like America was right there with me, ripe for a new experiment in community spirit. And the pool house would be my Hotel California.
As we were moving into the summer house in Menlo Park, I placed a Hotel California LP on the mantel in the empty living room. I smiled to myself as I regarded it sitting there, with its picture of a classic Los Angeles hotel illuminated golden behindpalms, unnoticed by my colleagues milling around the house. In addition to the record and my clothes, all I brought to the house that day were a few books that I’d packed to help me make sense of this new scene about which I knew little. Joan Didion’s famous words from Slouching Towards Bethlehem were on my mind that afternoon as the sun set on our new house and I settled my things into my room. “California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things better work here, because here, beneath the immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.” We, I felt that day, was me, a conglomerate of one, at the end of a line and the beginning of another, staking a claim to what I suspected would be a new gold rush.
Unlike the office with its domineering male energy, the house felt relaxed and cool, I thought with satisfaction, as I toured it in a denim skirt and flip-flops. A seventies ranch home of no architectural value, the house was solid—a little better, as most things are, for the wear and tear. The front yard sported Edward Scissorhands -like topiary bushes and a perfectly green lawn. As is typical in suburbia, the front living room sat in shadow behind closed drapes and went largely unused. The back den with the requisite seventies-porn-movie-style wet bar, stone fireplace, and sliding glass door to the pool, was where we would socialize. It was a little like being in The Brady Bunch, without parents.
Mark’s room was across from mine, small and bare, but he didn’t stay there. He had a famously minimalist apartment nearby (he claimed to own no furniture and have only a mattress on the floor for a bed) but he kept the room as a social placeholder, comingover with his friends or his girlfriend on the evenings and weekends to hang out. When he was at the house he invariably took up position under a Roman-looking tent by the pool, pacing back and forth while he mulled over the day’s business. In his sandals and
As the site’s user base nearly doubled throughout that spring, from 5.5 million users to ten, and everyone’s sense of responsibility magnified by the week, I had the idea, selfishly perhaps, that a pool house would be a better way to lighten up and bring us closer than a frat house. After all, what better way to establish good cheer and team spirit than around a pool, drinks in hand, sun shimmering off the water? “We should get a house with a pool,” I said to Mark one night that spring during the Friday happy hour. He flashed his characteristic look of askance approval, smiling, but looking half-away, as if to retain his sense of executive control. “That’s a good idea,” he said, pulling out his BlackBerry (huge by today’s standards) to dash off an email with the request.
I was stoked about the pool house. At that point in my life, I was in need of two things: an outlet for my revolutionary energy and a new career that would work out in a way that grad school had not. Throwing my entire lot in with Facebook (to the point, even, of moving in with my coworkers at a company pool house) could turn out to be perfect. My interest in the Hotel California had not faded a bit since the days when my friend Dana and I drove the highway to San Diego searching for it. What more perfect metaphor for American society, and its obsession with belonging, with scenes of darkness and excess, with cults that you fall into and find it hard to leave? It felt like America was right there with me, ripe for a new experiment in community spirit. And the pool house would be my Hotel California.
As we were moving into the summer house in Menlo Park, I placed a Hotel California LP on the mantel in the empty living room. I smiled to myself as I regarded it sitting there, with its picture of a classic Los Angeles hotel illuminated golden behindpalms, unnoticed by my colleagues milling around the house. In addition to the record and my clothes, all I brought to the house that day were a few books that I’d packed to help me make sense of this new scene about which I knew little. Joan Didion’s famous words from Slouching Towards Bethlehem were on my mind that afternoon as the sun set on our new house and I settled my things into my room. “California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things better work here, because here, beneath the immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.” We, I felt that day, was me, a conglomerate of one, at the end of a line and the beginning of another, staking a claim to what I suspected would be a new gold rush.
Unlike the office with its domineering male energy, the house felt relaxed and cool, I thought with satisfaction, as I toured it in a denim skirt and flip-flops. A seventies ranch home of no architectural value, the house was solid—a little better, as most things are, for the wear and tear. The front yard sported Edward Scissorhands -like topiary bushes and a perfectly green lawn. As is typical in suburbia, the front living room sat in shadow behind closed drapes and went largely unused. The back den with the requisite seventies-porn-movie-style wet bar, stone fireplace, and sliding glass door to the pool, was where we would socialize. It was a little like being in The Brady Bunch, without parents.
Mark’s room was across from mine, small and bare, but he didn’t stay there. He had a famously minimalist apartment nearby (he claimed to own no furniture and have only a mattress on the floor for a bed) but he kept the room as a social placeholder, comingover with his friends or his girlfriend on the evenings and weekends to hang out. When he was at the house he invariably took up position under a Roman-looking tent by the pool, pacing back and forth while he mulled over the day’s business. In his sandals and
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