February 27 1998, Friday

To meet the requirements of Virginia Unemployment, one must file two job applications per week. I'm kind of slack about requirements of this nature. I hadn't actually filed any new job applications yet this week. So today I went out to satisfy obnoxious requirements in one hectic dash. I rode my bicycle to the University of Virginia department of personnel and filled out applications for two different positions, filling out two different forms identically, assuming such busywork to be necessary feeding for the lumbering low-tech bureaucratic gigalumpalus (only to find out one form would have been sufficient). I wondered if maybe this wouldn't count as two different job seekings, and contemplated maybe asking around at Entré Computer to see if they had any job openings. I walked by the place, but when I looked in on the place it all seemed so stiff and formal. Wearing a clean white shirt, shiny shoes and a tie doesn't tell me you know anything about computers; I'll bet they'd be considered geeks of greater formiditude if they wore bath robes to work.

I

n the course of filling out University of Virginia application forms, I realized that my Virginia Driver's license was about to expire (after five golden years of proving my age to skeptical alcohol retailers). So I went on an epic ride in the north central sector of town in hopes of finding the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV). I thought it was located up there somewhere, but I was wrong. I found myself in a part of town where I'd never been before. It came as close as Charlottesville gets to an industrial district, with big trucks backing up to drab windowless rectangular brick buildings, where ash and grey seeped into the very pores of the plants that called the place home. There were a few black children on bikes playing hooky. I remember when I used to play hooky and ride my bicycle. My parents understood the need for occasional days away from the same old hum drum. They used to let me write my own excuses and forge their signatures.

I went back to Kappa Mutha Fucka and fired up the Dart and then checked the phone book for the real location of the DMV, and then took care of business. The only test I had to pass was a vision test. The "O" looked a little like a "Q" but I passed.

N

ext I went downtown and picked up a form with which to apply for a city job. There's an opening for an Internet specialist at the library.

Back at home again, I built a makeshift ramp for the Dart, raised it up, and changed the oil. By this point I had made plans to drive to Malvern, Pennsylvania to pick up Jessika, our new housemate.

I played around some with my spark plugs, taking one out and examining it. It didn't look too bad, aside from being somewhat corroded. But somewhere in all this I realized I'd pulled off two spark plug wires without knowing the order in which to replace them. I put them back on in what looked like a logical order, but I was wrong, and the engine performed very poorly. The fact that the car ran at all with the wires reversed should say something good about the slant six engine.

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n the evening, I was watching premium cable teevee and drinking Beast Ice. Matthew Hart came by to get yet more of his stuff, and I realized I wasn't mad at him anymore. I broke the considerable ice by mentioning the new channels we get at Kappa Mutha Fucka, and somehow we ended up talking about the fact that the death of others doesn't affect us very much. His grandmother (who had bone cancer) passed away the other day, and Matthew was sort of dismayed that it had hardly affected him. The same for Shira. For my part, I've barely been moved by anyone's death. And it wouldn't please me for people to be immobilized by grief if I should drop dead tomorrow. Life is precious for those who have it.

L

ater on, Deya and I watched bits of the classic 80's Sci-Fi action adventure, The Terminator. My lunatic brother, who is a big Arnold Schwarzenegger fan, has a copy of The Terminator, and I've watched it dozens of times, but today I saw it in a different way. It suddenly looked rather dated. Everything looked very 80s, especially with Deya there to point out the 80s elements. The colours were pastel, people wore headphones, and hair wasn't hair unless it had been winged back. I also realized that the movie is actually a bit more clever than I'd orginally thought. Time travel introduces mind boggling complexities into plots, and in the Terminator, there's enough ambiguity in the dialogue that you're left to sort out some entriguing things. Did, for example, the guy who went back in time to save Sarah Conner know it was his duty to father her child, the guy who would one day lead the resistance against the machines? Did he know he would be killed soon after saving her life? The movie never really tells us, because it would be hard to do so without being self-contradicting.