A couple of days later I was talking with Soup Boy. Soup Boy is certainly popular with the ladies, and has a healthy and active social life. He was bugging me about working fourteen hours every day and not getting out and meeting people. In my own defense I mentioned my encounter at De Brug. I started to describe her, but I didn’t get far.
“Black hair down to her butt?” Soup Boy asked.
“Yeah, ” I said.
“I know her. Damn, it’s a small town. She’s a trip. And she’s hot.”
“She just broke up with her boyfriend,” I said.
“Reeealy…”
“Yeah, we spent the afternoon disparaging North Carolina. He sounded like a real goober.”
“I never could figure out what she saw in that guy.”
“Well, she’s not seeing it any more.”
The conversation continued like that for a while, mostly at Goober’s expense. I wondered if I would hear from her again about her writing. She had said her life could fill ten books, and from what I heard from Soup Boy, she might not have been exaggerating.
Two days later Soup Boy and I were on a tram, and he says, “I have some gossip for you. It’s about Cleo.” It took me a moment to figure out who Cleo was, but then I was all ears. “I was at a party last night,” he said, “and I thought she might be there. I asked about her and they said she was in the hospital.”
“Holy cow.”
“Not the hospital, really, the psycho ward. I guess she’s kind of freaking out about her boyfriend.” She had seemed sad when I met her, but hardly freaking out. Still, people keep things inside. Then Soup Boy dropped the bomb. “Apparently she stabbed herself pretty seriously, a couple of times.”
Not even ‘holy cow’ could convey what I felt then, so I didn’t say anything at first. Eventually conversation turned to the futility of grand gestures of desperation, the fleeting nature of life, Soup Boy’s ex-girlfriends, and what a goober Goober was.
I understand her stay in the hospital was brief, but I have not heard from her since. I hope she does write her ten volumes, and I hope writing them brings her peace.
CA – I can’t comment on your blog. What am I doing wrong?
Jesse, did you notice the new box at the bottom of the comment form? It has a password printed in distorted text that a computer can’t read; to prove you’re not an automated spam computer, you have to type the text in a blank below the box.
Apologies for the inconvenience. I really wish I hadn’t had to do that, but I was getting wiped out. On one post, I got five automated spams, three of which were obscene and one of which was for child pornography. That was the final straw.
Please! No worries. I have no problem with typing in the password, I think it’s a great solution.
I did type in the password, but it never took – it just kept popping up a new comment box, with my comment already filled in, but a new passwd to fill in. I often run into problems on the web because I browse with cookies turned off. So I turned cookies back on, went back to your page and tried several test comments. Still didn’t work.
I had to use the password feature to purchase Rolling Stones tickets and it worked then. Bizarre.
Testing, Testing, can anybody here me?
Andrew,
No, you’re not “here, but you’re probably there, and I can’t “hear” you, but I can read what you typed.
Also, maybe someone could see if the “password verification feature” is working on http://desertsea.blogspot.com ; does my blog do the same thing as Carol Anne’swhen you try to make a comment?
Poor Shaz, such a sad story. Is is bad luck or life choices catching up with her or maybe alienation and lack of rootedness as perhaps the dark side of globalization?
If there’s a glitch in that word verification thingie, that might explain why I haven’t had any comments other than Pat’s on any of my posts since I invoked that protection.
I hope it’s just a temporary problem and the powers-that-be at Blogger will fix it quickly, if they haven’t done so already.
Has anybody else tried to post to my blog and had similar problems?
OK, I have experienced the phenomenon that Jesse describes. I was posting on Write to Say It, and the first two times I typed in the word verification, I got the warning that I had to type the letters exactly (never mind that I had made doubly sure I was doing so), and the window was refreshed with a new word to type. The third time, my comment went through.
If this glitch continues to be a problem, I may go back to not requiring the verification step. It’s a tough call to make: I don’t want to make commenting harder, but I don’t want to allow commentspam.
Pat and CA, tried it again yesterdayo n both blogs and got nowhere. We really need someone else to try, because it could easily be a MP not a YP.
Just to be clear, if you complain to blogger, I never got the warning you talked about. In my case it acted as if it is in an infinite loop: demanding a code, not ingesting it, cycling to demand another code. I hit the send button and it just pops up a semi-new page with new code. Also, this is done clicking the radio button for “other,” not fellow blogger or anonymous.
Pat’s blog let me post just fine.