Wow. Wednesday already. Yes, I went backpacking this weekend. It was great. I will write about it soon. Really. I will.

Also, the great Linux experiment continues. I had Red Hat 9 up and running, but since RH9 is a couple of years old, I kept having to download and install new stuff. The dependencies would be out of date, I download more stuff. Vicious circle. Also, I am very comfortable compiling software from source, but it seems like you break as much as you fix when you do that on a RPM based system. So I fired up a third computer and installed Slackware. It is working very well. As a matter of fact, I am writing this from the Slackware box. It’s pretty good, but every time I sit at my computer to do something, I find myself tweaking. I think it will not be long until I put it on my P4. After I take a good image, of course.

Linux, yawn … compile, eyes glazing over. Yes, I am a geek, thanks for hanging in there. Here’s something different. For some reason, today I was thinking of a girl I knew in High School.

We called her Holly Hopeless. I guess I was kind of dating her for a while. She lived in a little row house with her mom. She constantly talked about her dad. He was rich. He lived in New York. On and on she went. The things she said about him were believable at first. But over time they became more and more incredible.

She would jet to New York to see him. He bought her lavish gifts, although she left them in New York. One day she called me, from her dad’s house. She was going on and on about the Broadway Shows and the Nice Restaurants. It sounded very sophisticated. I was actually a little intimidated. As she prattle on, it occurred to me that I had seen her earlier that day. How did she get New York? Helicopter, she answered. As we were talking, my friend called me on the line. I was a little doubtful about this whole thing, we compared notes. The notes did not add up. So I recruited him to help me. He called her home phone. Sure enough, she put me on hold, she had another call. He called me back to confirm it. She wasn’t in New York, she was there at her house. No Broadway. No sophisticated restaurants.

It seemed so obvious, after the lie was exposed. She cried. She said she was a pathological liar. She was seeing a shrink. She didn’t mean to do it, it just made her feel more special. But how did I fall for such obvious lies. I was smart enough to know better. The trick, I think, exists in two parts. First, I was ready to believe. I wasn’t looking for lies, I liked this girl, if she said it was so, then it probably was. Secondly, the lies were small at first. Lots of people have divorced parents. Sometimes the dad did spoil them, especially when he didn’t see them often. Once you accepted the small lies, it became easier for her to build on them.

If I was clever, I would use this story as an allegory, use it to make a statement. But I guess I am not that clever. It’s just a story, about a girl I once knew.