"You Do Everything On Internet"

Went to the 'burbs last night for dinner with my dad and stepmother (so nice, even at 32, to be able to rely on the 'rents for dinner now and then - even though I am now capable of cooking "home-cooked meals," they're never as good as my parents' home-cooked meals!). We discovered that we had all been to see Little Miss Sunshine over the weekend (and all loved it, for the record).

My stepmother, knowing that one of my superpowers is the freakish ability to remember and identify actors from all kinds of movies and TV shows (even those I've never seen) asked why Greg Kinnear was so familiar - she knew she had seen him in something, but had no idea what. The husband and I immediately hit on As Good As It Gets as the most likely suspect, and the conversation would have ended there, if I hadn't suddenly said...

"...Wait, do you not know about imdb?"

"I-M-D-What?"

A few years ago, back when I was in grad school, before the husband was the husband and he was still toiling away in Boston, I flew back and forth to the east coast on a fairly regular basis, as we tried to see each other at least once a month. At one point, I mentioned an upcoming trip, and my stepmother, who had heard about increasing fares, asked how I had gotten such a cheap ticket. When I told her I relied heavily on Travelocity's Fare Watcher, and generally bought tickets online for those weekend trips as soon as prices dipped below a certain level, she sighed, and said, "You're so good... you do everything on internet!"

Since then, "You do everything on internet" has been code between me and the husband representing that generation gap between us and our parental units - we, who cannot imagine spending a day without looking something up online, v. them, who cannot possibly imagine why one would be "on internet" VIRTUALLY EVERY DAY (it blows my father's mind... of course, he's still on dial-up, but that's another story entirely).

And I'm sure it would have been invoked again last night, had I not suddenly remembered the conversation I once had with someone a good five or six years younger than I (for perspective, e-mail was a common tool by the time she was in college, whereas I got my first account junior year and rarely used it). After seeing Syriana and wanting to look up some "Hey, It's That Guy" or other, she said, "Wait... there's a web site where you can just find this stuff? For, like, any movie? Really?"

Maybe I'm just overly pop-culture-obsessed... but seriously, how does anyone, particularly anyone under 40, get through the day without imdb?