Typical Monday morning

Yesterday was, well, pleasantly odd, I suppose. I keep in touch with two friends (they're twins) who graduated from Bryn Mawr last spring, both English majors who are interested in film production. Natie lives at home in Tampa and is taking creative writing classes; Jenna is studying film at Full Sail in Winter Park -- and lives two blocks away from the indieWIRE offices! They filled me in on this fact last week after I told them all about Sundance, and I suggested that if she's interested, Jenna should go talk to Brian and J.D. and find out more about the company.

So I got up at 9.30 (not a normal occurrence on days when class is at 2.30) and bummed around online for an hour to try to find more contact info than just the office address (and hit a goldmine in finding about six blogs between the two of them, as well as a series of articles and press releases about the SF360 initiative) before giving in and just calling the office number, being slightly put off by the voicemail-staff-directory, and, finally, getting through to Brian!

And that was the oddest part -- a month after the fact, talking to someone I [sort of] got to know in three days, about a world and a profession I feel I know next to nothing about, and networking with him to expose someone else to that world. I enjoyed our chat, though; I do wish he and J.D. had been able to stay at Sundance for longer than they did, so that we all could have spent more time together. I just started reading more about SF360 last week, which he appreciated, especially when I admitted that I had no idea what the whole thing was about when it was announced at the SFFS/indieWIRE party at Sundance; all I knew was that indieWIRE is doing a website for them, I didn't realize what a big deal it actually is (in short, sf360.org, launching in early March, is a joint venture between the San Fransisco Film Festival and indieWIRE, covering news, photos, etc on Bay Area film & media. And p.s. indieWIRE is "the leading online publication dedicated to American and international film." Maybe I'm just being a star-struck college kid, but this is fucking awesome). Apparently they've just hired some sort of director for the project, who was the editor of the Arts Chronicle of San Francisco for ten years, so that's big news; and of course Brian's nervous about getting the site up and ready on time.

So...what an exhilarating way to start your morning! I emailed a bunch of web pages to Jenna for her to read up on this stuff, and who knows? Maybe there's some way that she can get involved. It's really fun to know someone who's just as interested in this sort of thing as I am, so that I can share all the cool news and information I find and then actually have a meaningful conversation about it...most people just want to hear about meeting celebrities. But by 11.00 I was feeling a great sense of accomplishment, having done probably the first bit of (at least semi-professional) networking on behalf of another person that I've ever done, and getting out of it a chat with someone I'm very fond of...and then I spent the next four hours working on my thesis.

Such is life at Bryn Mawr.