The Pants On Fire Award:

What's the best/biggest/baddest/most successful/most sordid lie you've ever told?

It's kind of pathetic that I'm even attempting to write on this topic, because, well, I don't tell big lies. Period.

This is not to say I don't lie, mind you. I don't do it all that often, but it does happen. The thing is, though, I don't want to get caught at it.

My dad was one of those parents who was all "I did everything bad that could possibly happen, I will KNOW when you are lying to me, AND YOU'D BETTER NOT LIE TO ME!!!!" I knew damn well there would be very scary, awful, no good, very bad things happening to me if Dad ever caught me in a lie. Melesse asked me on chat if that worked, because she said that to her daughter. I said "It works if you're 6 feet tall and like to yell a whole lot."

Suffice it to say I was sufficiently scared enough to learn at an early age to watch what I lied about. And to this day, I haven't really told any big lies that I could get caught at telling.

My favorite "lie" is the sin of omission. I simply don't tell anything at all about a certain subject (for example, engagement). If someone in my family did blatantly ask, "Are you engaged?", I feel that I'd have to fess up, but as long as no one outright asks... Omission has gotten me out of many battles, I should do it more often.

And sometimes there's the "I want you to lie, even though I say I don't" situation where you pretty much do have to lie, but it's okay. For example, if Mom asks if anyone at Burning Man did drugs (yes, she's naive enough to not 100% know the answer to that on her own). Mom pretty much knows the real answer to that is yes, I certainly know the answer to that is yes, but she asks the question in a tone that indicates "You'd BETTER give me a no here or else you're in big trouble and I can't avoid having to do something about it." She can't handle the truth. Hell, I barely consider that kind of thing a lie any more. Yes, it's blatant and completely untrue, but if she doesn't want to know, I'm certainly not going to disillusion her.

When I lie, I deliberately lie about small things. Usually trivial things, even. In other words, things so innocuous that nobody will think to question the veracity of the statement. For example, if I er, decided that I didn't want to go to school or work that day, I'd either call in with or go home "sick" with a headache. Since I have so many of those anyway, nobody'd think twice about it, and how do you prove that someone had a headache anyway? Or alternately, I might explain that I don't have anything for the potluck because I tripped and dropped it on my way out the door. See what I mean? This kind of thing happens so often.

Dave, on the other hand, practically owns this topic. He thinks it's hilarious to come up with some big, elaborate lie and see if anyone believes him. He's a pretty good actor when it comes to things like this, but he likes to pick excuses that are complicated or could possibly be proven to be a lie, which worries me. The prime example of this is when he was working at some restaurant during the teen years and felt like going home early. So he arranged for a friend to call him, and then he ran out, panicking that his mom had had a heart attack. Of course, the first thing someone at the restaurant did was to go call his mom, who answers the phone. Ahem. Brilliant. He's improved since then.

The closest I've ever heard him lie the way I do was when he told me that he was going to be late coming into town one night because someone jumped in front of the train. I actually believed this because he'd told me stories about it happening to his friends before. With me, you'd better do a plausible lie...

Which, for all you know, this entry is just another one of.

In other news, my Renaissance costume class is going well, we mainly worked on a bodice pattern today. The bodice sounds like the main focus of the class, making other things if we have time. It's going to be a peasant outfit (not nobles like I'll need later), but what the hell. Now I'm stuck with the dilemma of getting fabric when there are NO fabric stores in this town. They're all in Sacramento, with a few strays elsewhere. It looks like I'll have to take the bus for an hour to Vacaville to get to anywhere where a bus may be close to dropping me off near a fabric store on Monday. Argh.

Dave may be able to visit me at the end of this week. Assuming they don't change his schedule again, he has Thursday and Friday off, but he gets to spend Thursday at the DMV. Fun, huh? I told him he could just skip coming down on Friday since he'd get to see me for a bit of the night and then I'll probably be at work again, but I don't think he's up for that. We shall see, I guess.

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