Really? Like, really?

Alright, so I'm a few days late. But here's the story anyway.

I went to the copy center at the student union to get Carla's blog printed and bound a couple of weeks ago. There was too much to bind into just one book, so I got it split into 3 - divided by years. I had 2 of them bound, but thought I was missing some pages on the 3rd and took it home printed but unbound.

So I went back last week to finish the job, after realizing that I wasn't missing pages at all; the year 2008 just doesn't have any blog entries until July. All I needed was the last group of pages bound, so it should have been a quick, simple visit. But it wasn't.

When I walked in, the only woman in the copy center was sitting at the very far end of the room, her feet up on the back counter, talking on the phone. She asked whomever she was talking to to hold on a moment. Grabbing a crutch, she hobbled over to me, and I told her that I just needed these pages bound and that was all. "Sure, no problem!" she replied happily. 2 minutes later, I was on my way out the door with the book in hand and $1.25 less in my pocket.

If only.

Her real response: "Do you think you could wait, oh, like an hour for my student to get here, and then he'll do that for you? I hurt my foot real bad and I can't stand on it."

Keep in mind 2 things: 1) It takes less than 2 minutes to tape bind a book (I watched her student do it for me the week before, and all he had to do was put the pages in the machine and it did all the work), during which standing is absolutely not required. 2) She was standing in front of me to tell me this.

I don't know how long I stood there with a blank stare on my face before I managed the words "Really? You ca...really? You really can't?" I had a hard time forming complete sentences, because I was dumbfounded. I just couldn't believe the words I had just heard come out of her mouth. She was really going to stand there in front of me and ask me to wait for an hour because she couldn't stand on her foot.

I mentioned that she had somehow managed to walk over to me, to which she replied something to the effect of, "Yeah, but that's about all I can manage. I really need to sit down right now." The aggrandizement reminded me of the time that my sister walked to just outside of the door to the room my mother was in, laid down on the floor, slowly dragged herself to where she was visible by my mother, collapsed, and pathetically whispered, "Mom...I threw up. *Cough, cough.* " Oh, please.

So I responded with an attitude similar to the one with which I responded to my sister, and said, "Hmmm. Well, dramatic, yes, but unconvincing. Don't ever become an actress." And then I walked out.

It was the meanest thing I could think of.

Carla's blog

I have a professor whose good friend is dying of ALS. I suppose that's a little redundant to say, since it's a fatal disease - everyone who has ALS dies from it, unless another tragedy occurs on top of it all. But I digress. This woman, Carla, has a blog (www.carlamuses.blogspot.com) that she's kept since 2006, about a year before her diagnosis - and it's attracted quite a following. I don't agree with all of her postings or her opinions, but overall the blog is inspirational - and many parts of it are very moving. She now has only a few months to live.

My sweet teacher knows very little about computers, and was concerned that at Carla's passing the blog would disappear into the void of cyberspace, or that after not being used for a while it would be taken down and never be seen again. She seemed so upset about it that I had to do something, even though I knew that blogs don't vanish the moment their owners die. Besides, what if the unlikely event happened that blogspot.com went down? Then Carla's words would be lost forever. Mine too, come to think about it. But mine aren't nearly as poignant or thought-provoking. Unlike Carla, I don't have what could be called a cult following.

So I decided to put Carla's blog into print form, and give it to my professor as a gift. I knew that having her friend's words forever accessible would mean a lot to her, and for days after coming up with the idea I had dreams about the look on my teacher's face when I handed her the book entitled "Carla Muses", and about the tears of joy that I hoped would well up in her eyes. I've only seen her cry once. I set to work copying and pasting each of Carla's blog entries into Microsoft Word, and adding the comments (most posts had more than 10, and many had 20 or more comments. I told you she had a following.). I hadn't anticipated quite the volume of work it was going to be! In the end, I had over 350 pages of text. But I really enjoyed doing it.

I haven't given the gift to my professor yet; our schedules haven't meshed lately and so we haven't been able to meet since the holidays. But I'll post her reaction when I do. This post was actually meant to be a different story; Carla's blog is background information that leads into the intended tale. Now that I've taken the "introduction" and turned it into a full-length post, the rest of the story will have to wait until tomorrow. It involves a phone, a crutch, and an overdramatic woman who should never try her hand at professional acting.

Oh the suspense.