Hulu.com is a Web site that lets you watch TV shows, movies and clips from your computer. Hulu is a proper noun. I congratulate its founders (NBC, etc.) on their invention of a new word. Maybe someday soon people will say they “hulued” their favorite programs instead of saying “watched on Hulu,” a la the G word. As you might expect, I have some thoughts on the whole verbification of nouns, but I’ll save them for another time.

In the 14 months I’ve lived in my apartment, I have not had access to television. I have a TV and DVD player, so I’m not entirely out of the loop, but I decided against cable (or even “bunny ears”) because I know my own propensity toward laziness. I opted not to have Internet access, either, until very recently. For the record, I watch Mad Men, the one show I can’t live without, at a friend’s house.

So I’ve been reading, socializing, exercising, napping and conceptualizing a blog all this time. And then someone introduced me to Hulu, the most profoundly enjoyable time-suck of 2008 (well, next to Scrabulous, but that’s gone now). Now, I can proudly parrot Colbert and Stewart jokes, join in conversations about The Office and otherwise participate in the minutiae from which I was once ostracized. And that’s as good as it is bad; for socially awkward people, trivial references are invaluable in most contexts, at least much more so than literary ones.

The moral of the story: you should visit this site, but you should also set your phone alarm or oven timer or something. While you’re there, I encourage you to watch Split: A Divided America, an hour-long documentary about our nation’s history of political divisions. It made me feel much better about my own cynicism over the upcoming election.

Remember what Hitchcock said: “Television has done much for psychiatry by spreading information about it, as well as contributing to the need for it.”

- Nicole