Jenni and I watched The Kite Runner this afternoon. As I was watching the movie I kept noticing that I was having a hard time getting into the story. I would start thinking about the characters and the author and the director and the actors. I would get so focused on the meanings of everything that I would lose the heart of the story.

That seems pretty much par for the course for me as of late. Particularly since I’ve started working on the computational modeling stuff quite a bit I’ve been sort of dissecting everything that goes on around me.

For example, I was just in the Giant buying some noodles and there’s a woman whose job it is to come up to the front of the store, pick up any items that were brought up by customers but not purchased and then shuttle them back to their proper places on the shelves. She’s in her mid-50′s and looks somehow beaten by the world.

When I see her, I consider, “what does it do to a person’s cognitive functions to have her job?” More than that, I see how doesn’t make eye contact with anyone, just looks steadily down and goes on her way picking up boxes with a blank look on her face, and think, “what did it take to get her to accept doing this crappy job and what can be done now?”

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Jenni and I have been discussing addiction the last few days. I’ve been thinking about it quite a bit following a discussion with one of my cousins about cutting off his dreadlocks.

His family had been pushing him to cut them for years since they never really bought into the Rasta lifestyle. What finally brought him around was his court date after the police raided his grow houses.

So he’s all cleaned up now and attending narcotics anonymous meetings. It’s been about three months since everything went down and he’s still waiting to find out what exactly the government is planning on doing.

One of the things he has working in his favor is the near complete lack of money. He had a friend who had an idea for a raw foods vegan grocery and he lent the guy pretty much all his money and cosigned on the lease for a building.

The grocery has since failed, taking with it any profits from his growing.

He has a social problem in that his parents don’t agree with his lifestyle and want him to shape up into something they respect more. He has a legal problem in that the government doesn’t like the plant that he enjoys growing. What I am not really convinced of is that he has a moral problem.

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