I carved a jack o lantern for the first time in years last night.

Over the weekend, M and I finished moving out of and cleaning up our Missoula house, and are now full residents of Kalispell.  It’s good to have her up here, coming home to an empty and quiet house last week was jaring.  This past Saturday we celebrated our 7th wedding anniversary by doing not much: walked around town, had a late brunch, watched a movie, went out for steak at the Lolo Creek Steakhouse.  The extent to which we enjoy ourselves so much in mundane circumstances (like when we got stranded in Butte last fall) has always been an important hallmark of our relationship, and goes a way towards illuminating why last week felt so off.

We’ve now moved residence four times in the past 26 months.  Even though we keep getting better at it, I’m not anxious to do it again for quite a while.

A big part of the comfort that comes with routine has to do with the future, and future plans.  So it is only fitting that yesterday I started training for the 2011 Wilderness Classic.  My plan isn’t fleshed out in detail yet, that will wait until the date of the race is set.  But I know that I’ll want to follow the three month rule; set a training goal three months out that will require fitness of the same category of the classic, prepare for that, reassess after, and fine tune from there.  This week, and for the next month, the only hard training rule I’ll have will be twice daily core and balance strength sessions, so that a winter of aerobic and backcountry training can go on at max capacity and injury free.  The three month trip will likely be a big wilderness ski traverse at near race pace.  I’m leaning towards Yellowstone.  Once I have them, I’ll write more about my plan.

A few weeks ago M and I saw The Social Network, and it proved to be one of the most satisfying and interesting mainstream films I’ve seen in quite a while.  Years, in fact.  The film is well written, the acting is always good and often spectacular, and the film centers around an unanswered question that is central to 21st century life.  Justin Timberlake is in it, and I’m happy to report that, absent the credits, you might not even recognize my e-doppelganger.  He’s transparently repitilian as the founder of Napster, creepy, charming and utterly credible.  Expect the movie to win Oscars.

The Social Network‘s thesis is that the virality of social networking online bespeaks a mass social pathology, that fulfilling our needs as social beings virtually is an unhealthy way to do so.  The largest and most unified criticism of the film has been the extent to which it relies of cliches to tell its story, especially insofar as Mark Zukerburg’s creation of Facebook is explained as revenge against both the social elites of Harvard and his own recently ex-girlfriend.  This story of woe, and the images used to move it along, are indeed enormous and well trodden cultural tropes, but I think that is both fitting and effective in the film.  If you take the internet and social networking as a categorically new influence in human history, and I think you have to, then the ways in which 24/7 electronic media has shaped popular culture must be taken into account.  A large part of the allure of social networking is that social norms, especially for those under 35, have become so iatrogenic.  The lions share of this transition has to do with contemporary media and its capacity to create and spread myths.  Films, TV, and Youtube have crafted a heightened, hyperbolic, even absurd image of what high school and college life ought to be.  Not only is it appropriate to use that myth to explain the rise of social networking, it is also appropriate to seek alternate methods of existing socially in the world.

This is where I think the film comes up short.  While the portrayal of Zuckerburg is even handed, making him neither demonic nor pathetic, I was left with the sense that Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher saw him as a weak figure, and by extension do not view the use of social networking as an explicable reaction to cutural circumstances, but merely as a sad reaction to thing people should have delt with better.  The question of whether virtual socializing is a healthy substitute for actual socializing is a very good one, and in the end I’m not sure Sorkin and Fincher took it quite as seriously as they should have.