Armchair accounting

Great. Looks like somebody was able to gain access to one of my credit cards. A charge showed up from someplace in the UK! It's easy to tell on this one because I never use it (or pretty much any card except for the mileage thing). Called my card company and they've been terrific. No charges, account's on temporary hold, etc.

It's a lucky thing I happened to be checking my account the day after the charge went through. Over the last few years checking my spending and debt has become something of a minor hobby.

I came out of college & immediate post-college with ridiculous debt, though I know now it's a common thing and that my case wasn't nearly as bad as some people's. Still, when I finally tallied it all up it was a pretty frightening figure. I finally got my ass in gear in 2002 and set up a system. It's not anything earth-shattering -- it's just an Excel spreadsheet coupled with electronic bill payment. If you're grappling with bad post-college debt, you may want to give it a shot.

On one sheet I started recording how much and *when* payments were due. You can get the general idea of how much and when a bill's due over about 2-3 months of tracking. This helped me schedule regular billing dates to make sure that, if something bad happened, I could be sure the next paycheck would more than cover the next round of bills. This is easy for me because I get paid weekly. Might be tougher on monthly or bi-weekly.

Electronic bill payment helps because it keeps you on the schedule. If you still mail stuff in, you're bound to forget or lag far behind sometime and you'll be stuck with a double-payment or a compacted payment schedule one month that can throw the system out of whack.

After a while I was able to figure out when to hold back on spending, when to relax a bit, when it was okay to splurge, etc. It also helped me start saving up a bit too. I could start setting targets for saving up, start to stow stuff away for vacations, etc.

On the other sheet, and this idea came to me later, I started tracking principal on my debts. Cars, credit cards, student loans, everything. I could see how much it had gone down month over month and do projections based on that.

It's all really motivating because it gives you a really concrete sense of your progress. It turns it all into a kind of game -- just punch in some numbers and see how stuff turns out. It also motivates you to scheme a bit on how you can do better. You can see the impacts of, say, switching insurance companies, consolidating debts, etc.

There are probably better things and nice pieces of software out there that let you do this, but this has been working out really well for me. I'd often come out of months where there's been some kind of shock to the system from some unexpected expense with *extra* cash in the coffers from the things I do to compensate.

Good sports

I guess any day you dodge all the bullets is a good day. Of course, some would point out a good day would be best described without the use of firearm metaphors.

The Berkeley Tournament did seem a bit spottier than previous years, but it finished by 10:30, which I figure is on par with the usual. I wasn't there the whole time, though, so I'm still catching up on all the details. There's always some grumbling after CMAT, but it does sound a bit more serious this time around. Heard of a little incident with some China coach that seemed to be handled well. I was there to help close things out at the end of the day judging intermediates. I felt a little rusty frankly -- a few decisions I might rethink, but I'm generally comfortable with the scores I awarded.

I didn't spend the whole day at the tournament, for a change.(1) I was pretty clear beforehand that I'd be out that afternoon catching my first ball game of the year. I was all set to go rain or shine, but in what might be considered an act of divine intervention, we got partly cloudy skies with a few good breaks of sunshine as we watched the Giants roll over the Braves 12-6. Even got a bit of a sunburn watching it all. Possibly the most satisfying game I've attended in years. ery special thanks to the Flower (aka Lumber's better half) for the freebie!

The tournament after party was hot, crowded, and not broken up by cops, which again is something we had been worried about that didn't come to pass. It ran its course like all parties should -- with the front yard smelling like puke and folks trickling out slowly into the wee hours of the morning. Remembered chatting with some neighbors who had dropped by to see what the fuss was about and pick up a beer. Gotta love Berkeley.


(1) I was there by 8 am to help out with the judging, only to find myself milling about all morning. I think I'm just going to sleep in from now on and show up for the swing shift.

It's still whoring

I was actually writing down my thoughts on Kieu at about the same time I wrote about Eve, but hadn't really sorted out what I really felt about the movie.

Oh it's crummy. Make no mistake. But to a degree I felt vaguely wrong slamming it because it felt something like criticizing the illustrative quality of a pre-schooler's finger painting. It's not so much mean as it is pointless.

As always, the movie doesn't feel so much like a narrative with an actual plot as it is a montage of establishing shots. Dialog runs not so much like an interaction between characters as they appear to be monologues of two or more characters spliced together through some daring and edgy editorial pizazz (they aren't, btw). Absolutely every shot, even those in broad daylight, look like they were shot overexposed under the fluorescent glow of a Safeway produce aisle. (Maybe this is to be praised for consistency -- critical, 'climactic' scenes feature characters picking produce and riding Muni buses.) Equipped yet again with merely two facial expressions (blank & upset) and speech lacking inflection and syncopation, the protagonists are left utterly uncharismatic. The effect is predictable -- you don't care very much about their angst and life history and wish they would go bother somebody else.

That all just had to be said. But again, pointless. Through the forces of democracy(1) and the market, Kieu as a film will likely see little circulation outside of SFIAAFF. Lacking the option to see this film, there is apparently not much point in me warning you not to.

This entry can salvage a few broader points, though:

1) As mentioned last entry I'm perpetually amazed at how Asian American film makers rail against the mainstream media's portrayals of Asians, go to film school, buy/rent expensive equipment, apply to and get some fabulous grants... and then turn around and make films that show pretty much the EXACT SAME THING. Kieu is another example of this -- if this film was made by a non-Asian, people would be horribly offended at the yet again exoticized, emasculated, emotionally-constipated portrayals of Asians.

2) If you think review whoring is an issue with major studio films, you have NO idea how bad it is on the ethno-indie film circuit. At the very least major-releases get enough exposure that dissenting opinions will emerge. (I'm reminded of the murmurs about Sideways being overrated that eventually surfaced back in 2005.) With the ethno-indies you have a cacophony of well-meaning, softballing professional reviewers, reviewers highly connected to the projects and festivals, reviewers having a political agenda, and reviewers that simply don't have the time to write about anything beyond their 'picks' for the fest. The end effect is that you'd only really hear one kind of view. For example:

Variety review
SF Chron festival picks

They mean well, but this is NOT what's going to help Asian Am cinema in the long run. People need to start making better films, not better-reviewed films.

(1) As someone who's been denied the facility to rate films at SFIAAFF twice now, I've got to wonder if disenfranchisement runs rampant at the fest. In one case we had fled the theater halfway through -- if that's not saying something that should go on record, I don't know what is. For this one we were so apprehensive that we essentially procrastinated about leaving for the film and got there too late to recieve the ballots. The snarky slacker demographic is being seriously under-counted.(*)

(*) Sorry about the footnote. Been reading some D.F. Wallace lately and I'm just pedantic enough to think this whole footnote thing might be a good idea.