2004 October

A harsh look at the brutal life of children in the City of God, the slums outside of Rio De Janero. This is one of those movies, like the The Killing Fields, that explores the role of journalism in showing us truths that we would rather ignore. It too is based on a true story. Despite its slick presentation, the movie manages not to glorify the violence that permeates it. It’s a story of kids and guns at heart, and it captures truths that probably hold as well in L.A. and Denver as they do in South America. It’s not an easy movie to watch, but worthwhile and incredibly effective.

Today I decide to take advantage of early voting while I’m in Denver for a meeting. I stop by a few polling places, but the lines are hours long. Finally I decide to get it over with, and stand in a line through the isles of a Safeway on Federal for over two hours. When I reach the front, the volunteer types at his laptop for a long time. He asks for my driver’s license and makes a phone call. He asks for my social security number. Finally he tells me that despite the fact that I have valid ID and a voter registration card, I cannot vote because I’m no longer in the database. My only option is to visit the Election Commission downtown. I do this, go through a metal detector at the door, and wait in a mercifully shorter line. The woman there verifies that I’m not in the database, and gives me an ‘emergency registration’ to fill out. She tells me that they’ve done this for almost 900 people like me - just today. Supposedly I can take my receipt to the polls on Tuesday and cast a provisional ballot.

I’m getting a strong feeling that this whole process is held together with string and tape, and may very well come flying apart on Tuesday.

Update: The book’s been published! It’s now listed on Amazon.

One of the authors of this book, Todd Fahnestock, gave a xeroxed, hole-punched, string-bound copy to Ann for me to read. She worked for him last week on a temp assignment. I don’t know anything else about him, but it appears he’s doing pretty well at juggling his career with a moonlight life as a fantasy author. I’m not a huge fantasy fan, except when it comes to great works like The Lord of the Rings, but once I got into this book I found myself enjoying and admiring it. The writing is imaginitive, epic, and effective, as fantasy writing must be to succeed. But it also captures multiple facets of love, eroticism, politics, and the difficult choices that can arise in all of these areas. It was a pleasant surprise that provided some much needed distraction while I scramble to finish my freelance work before starting my new job. I hope I see it in the window at the bookstore some day.

Once again we schlep our stuff, this time from the storage locker in Denver to a house we have rented near campus in Fort Collins. The process looks eerily similar to the scene when we packed up last March.

Charlie Kaufman comes through with another great script. While it definitely has the originality you’d expect from him after Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, there are fewer stunts and more genuine contemplation here. He didn’t write himself into this one either, and I had to check to make sure he was indeed the screenwriter. The title is from a wonderful Alexander Pope quote. The poetry of memory and tides of love flow throughout the film.

Lately the hobolog has been receiving a hundred or more SPAM comments per day, mostly from online gaming places. I can’t keep up with deleting them all. For now I have resorted to comment moderation, which means that you can still make comments but they won’t show up until I approve them. I hope this doesn’t discourage you from leaving your comments. The hobolog wouldn’t be the same without them.

Here’s a little background on this form of SPAM if you’re curious. The SPAM comments come from robots: computer programs that spew links to their web sites anywhere they can on the internet. Often they just look like nonsense if you read them, and you might wonder why they’d bother with such useless advertising. The answer is that they’re not advertising to you, the highly intelligent readers of the hobolog, but to other robots. The readers they are interested in are seach engine robots. The search engines use robots also to read all the pages on the web for searching. When links to a particular site appear more often, that site goes up in rank, which means it will appear higher in the list of results when someone searches for ‘poker’, for instance.

The SPAM robots are an irritating, stupid enemy. They never give up, and they never realize that their evil deeds do no good on my site because I delete their trash links immediately. So, instead of accomplishing their purpose here, they merely make things more difficult for the people who come here. Our battle with the robots has begun, ala The Matrix. It’s likely that neither side will win.

A brilliant young violinist from the country seeks his fortune in Beijing. I’m a sucker for coming-of-age movies, and musical genius movies. This is both. The characters are quirky and good-hearted, and the soundtrack is gripping.

I think I like these movies because I know that I too was a musical genius growing up. I never actually succeeded very well in getting the music from my imagination into an instrument, but it was marvelous music in there. I suppose it’s too late now to go to Beijing to pursue musical greatness. Maybe being a hobo who occasional coaxes a few surprising notes from a guitar or piano is not such a bad fate.

The phone call came today - I have been offered the job at Colorado State University! Ann and I will probably head to Fort Collins tomorrow to scope out a place to live. Sarah has a friend with a dog-friendly place to rent near campus, and there seem to be lots of others. Even buying a place might not be out of the question. After such a long time floating in our nebulous state with no long-term prospects, it’s strange to suddenly be able to look into the future. I should mention that it’s a 21-month job, so I’m not talking distant future, but it’s a big difference from not knowing where the money will come from tomorrow or next week. I might be able to move my things out of storage for the first time in over three years!

Today I had my first job interview at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. Ann suggested I bring a toothbrush, but I ignored her. I didn’t even look in the mirror before I went in.

The interview seemed to go well. I felt well-qualified, and I liked the people interviewing me. It wasn’t until I met Ann for lunch afterward that she made me aware of a chunk of something black, a bit of raisin maybe, in my teeth. It must have been there all morning. It makes me wonder what counts for more in an IT interview: knowledge and experience, or clean teeth?