There are so many things that i could write about. Right now i am in a thesis class which is my last requirement for graduation. Most people have trouble with a class like this because writing a long paper is very difficult for them. I am having trouble figureing out how to strech what would normally be a two week project for me into a 10 project. This may sound like bragging of some sort, but really when you've taken as many classes as i have where your grade is determinded almost exclusively on a series of papers, writing essays becomes kind of second nature, and i just happened to take mostly academic classes. I figured out that i have written around 50 essays over the past five years, minimum 5 pages, maximum almost 14. This one has to be 20-25. It's going to be a looooong quarter.
So today i want to write about liers. I don't know why this occured to me, but it did yesterday and i just felt really compelled to post it. We have all known some freaks in our days, not the good kind of freaks, the kind of people that challange your preconceptions by looking really intimidating or strange but who turn out to be really cool and fun and intelligent once you get to know them, but real, genuine bizarros. These people are not all bad, they do provide you with some great stories to relate to people (like in your SG journal for example) but they're the kind of people that just make you go "what the fuck?" You just have no idea how these peoples' minds work. I have had the pleasure of knowing four pathological liers in my time (i swear the number is six but i cannot remember the names of the other two). Lieing and stealing are my two big issues, the things that i think are plain flat-out dishonorable; lots of stuff is bad, but these are really bad. But while i can understand lieing even though i disagree with it, i cannot understand these four people.
Ryan: I knew Ryan from the 6th grade, we were kind of friends, the kind of friend you hang out with every day for a month and then not at all for three. Ryan's parents were divorced and his dad lived in Cali where i guess he worked for a tech company or something. When i was in 8th grade Ryan told me and my friend Josh (who has been one of my best friends since 6th grade and is not a lier) that his dad had sent him eight new, brand new laptop computers, that years model, and that they "only had some small problems like the screens didn't work" but that he was able to fix them and would sell us some of them for $50 each. We of course did not belive him for a second; laptops are not exactly easy to fix and he really had no technical expertise, and in fact we found it hard to believe that his dad would have sent him 8 laptops at all, but we decided on the off chance that he was telling the truth we'd give it a shot. He said to meet him at his house on Sunday morning and we could pick them up, so we went and knocked on the door....knocked again....We decided to wait at the park for a while and then come back, same thing. When we asked him about it the next day he insisted that he had been home the whole day, never left the house. We asked a mutual friend who hung out with Ryan a lot if he had seen any computers at his house. Nope.
Matt: Matt was rich. His dad was an owner or a board member of a shipping company and they lived in one of those really big houses in one of those really expensive areas. I hung out with him a lot in 9th grade. This one is a three parter. 1) Matt calls me, says "call me back at this number" then hangs up. I call him back and he answers, then begins to explain how the previous owners of the house tapped into the neighbors phone line to get free long-distance. Small problems, if your stealing phone service for long-distance that means there are extra charges on the neighbor's bill which they would notice, this is a rich neighborhood, if you can afford a mulit-million dollar house why do you need to steal long-distance phone service, they had a dial-up connection, so his parents most likely installed it so they could use the internet without blocking up the phone. Now to be fair, maybe this wasn't a lie, maybe he was just an idiot, but i doubt it. 2) Matt calls says his aunt found a Desert Storm surplus store online and bought for him a quart of mercury. I might be able to believe there was a Desert Storm surplus store, but i think the most they would sell would be used gas-masks and empty ammo cans. Plus, a quart of mercury? Mercury is, i believe, stored in lead containers, a quart with container would weigh probably somewhere in the rage of 30-40 lbs, the shipping would be astronomical, what would the army need with massive quantities of a metal that is liquid at room temperature, and finally you need a license to possess mercury because it is highly toxic. He called one day to say he got it, but "they ran out of quarts so the sent him an ounce in a container the size of a plastic easter egg", which when i came over he couldn't show me because his dog would smell it and then his parents would find out. 3) I used to play drums (not at all well) so Matt said for christmas he would get me a book of sheet music (which i could read better than i could play incidentally) for Offspring's Ixnay album that came with a CD. I asked him if the CD was the album or just the drum music and he said it was both. Then he said he was using his dad's shipping company to get it there christmas morning. Book never showed up. He said it must have been delayed or something.
Jay: Jay came in and out of school and i hung out with him sometimes. He was funny and very dramatic, but in a comedic way, he seemed like he should be in the drama club. In 9th grade Jay claimed to have improved on astrolite, the most highly explosive non-nuclear compound know to man, and all this with almost no chemistry background. Astrolite is not actually all that powerful, but it is commonly thought to be (thank you Wikipedia), but somehow i don't think he improved it.
Cody: We nicknamed him Chody. I used to hang out at his house a lot, his mom was one of those "cool" moms that would let us smoke and bought us beer on New Years. Cody made up so much shit i didn't even keep track of it. A lot of it i wasn't even privy to. His girlfriend was always catching him in lies about things he did with other girls when he was younger, and other small shit, nothing on the scale of demolitions or phone-service theft. He always claimed it was the anti-depressants he was on that made him act weird (and why he messed around with a girl i was dating, and would have messed around with another girl i was dating had she not been so repulsed by him; he didn't shower much, wasn't big on deoderant and ate a lot of meat and cheese). Another friend of his, Jy, and i got to be really good friends and know i consider him a brother, he is one of the few people that i can spend an entire week with and not get irritated. We were making fun of him one day and i started ad-libing all this shit, like that he was deep-throat and was the reason for the end of the Vietnam war and was where Einstein got all his ideas from, and then i said "and you can all read about it in my auto-biography, If I Was As Cool As I Wish I Was." We laughed our asses off about that, and still do every time one of us repeats it.
All four of them told more than these lies, these are just the ones that really stuck in my head because they were so outrageous and off the wall. The really weird part was that all of these guys were really likeable people, they were funny and nice and quick-witted, and people liked to hang out with them, till they found out that they were full of shit. I understand why a loser would make up stuff to make himself look cool, but why an otherwise cool person would make up stuff that adds nothing to peoples' opinion of them, and then completely ruins it when they are found out is beyond me. Bunch of savages in this town.
That's when you know you found somebody really special. When you can just shut the fuck up for a minute and comfortably share silence.
-Uma Thurman, Pulp Fiction
So today i want to write about liers. I don't know why this occured to me, but it did yesterday and i just felt really compelled to post it. We have all known some freaks in our days, not the good kind of freaks, the kind of people that challange your preconceptions by looking really intimidating or strange but who turn out to be really cool and fun and intelligent once you get to know them, but real, genuine bizarros. These people are not all bad, they do provide you with some great stories to relate to people (like in your SG journal for example) but they're the kind of people that just make you go "what the fuck?" You just have no idea how these peoples' minds work. I have had the pleasure of knowing four pathological liers in my time (i swear the number is six but i cannot remember the names of the other two). Lieing and stealing are my two big issues, the things that i think are plain flat-out dishonorable; lots of stuff is bad, but these are really bad. But while i can understand lieing even though i disagree with it, i cannot understand these four people.
Ryan: I knew Ryan from the 6th grade, we were kind of friends, the kind of friend you hang out with every day for a month and then not at all for three. Ryan's parents were divorced and his dad lived in Cali where i guess he worked for a tech company or something. When i was in 8th grade Ryan told me and my friend Josh (who has been one of my best friends since 6th grade and is not a lier) that his dad had sent him eight new, brand new laptop computers, that years model, and that they "only had some small problems like the screens didn't work" but that he was able to fix them and would sell us some of them for $50 each. We of course did not belive him for a second; laptops are not exactly easy to fix and he really had no technical expertise, and in fact we found it hard to believe that his dad would have sent him 8 laptops at all, but we decided on the off chance that he was telling the truth we'd give it a shot. He said to meet him at his house on Sunday morning and we could pick them up, so we went and knocked on the door....knocked again....We decided to wait at the park for a while and then come back, same thing. When we asked him about it the next day he insisted that he had been home the whole day, never left the house. We asked a mutual friend who hung out with Ryan a lot if he had seen any computers at his house. Nope.
Matt: Matt was rich. His dad was an owner or a board member of a shipping company and they lived in one of those really big houses in one of those really expensive areas. I hung out with him a lot in 9th grade. This one is a three parter. 1) Matt calls me, says "call me back at this number" then hangs up. I call him back and he answers, then begins to explain how the previous owners of the house tapped into the neighbors phone line to get free long-distance. Small problems, if your stealing phone service for long-distance that means there are extra charges on the neighbor's bill which they would notice, this is a rich neighborhood, if you can afford a mulit-million dollar house why do you need to steal long-distance phone service, they had a dial-up connection, so his parents most likely installed it so they could use the internet without blocking up the phone. Now to be fair, maybe this wasn't a lie, maybe he was just an idiot, but i doubt it. 2) Matt calls says his aunt found a Desert Storm surplus store online and bought for him a quart of mercury. I might be able to believe there was a Desert Storm surplus store, but i think the most they would sell would be used gas-masks and empty ammo cans. Plus, a quart of mercury? Mercury is, i believe, stored in lead containers, a quart with container would weigh probably somewhere in the rage of 30-40 lbs, the shipping would be astronomical, what would the army need with massive quantities of a metal that is liquid at room temperature, and finally you need a license to possess mercury because it is highly toxic. He called one day to say he got it, but "they ran out of quarts so the sent him an ounce in a container the size of a plastic easter egg", which when i came over he couldn't show me because his dog would smell it and then his parents would find out. 3) I used to play drums (not at all well) so Matt said for christmas he would get me a book of sheet music (which i could read better than i could play incidentally) for Offspring's Ixnay album that came with a CD. I asked him if the CD was the album or just the drum music and he said it was both. Then he said he was using his dad's shipping company to get it there christmas morning. Book never showed up. He said it must have been delayed or something.
Jay: Jay came in and out of school and i hung out with him sometimes. He was funny and very dramatic, but in a comedic way, he seemed like he should be in the drama club. In 9th grade Jay claimed to have improved on astrolite, the most highly explosive non-nuclear compound know to man, and all this with almost no chemistry background. Astrolite is not actually all that powerful, but it is commonly thought to be (thank you Wikipedia), but somehow i don't think he improved it.
Cody: We nicknamed him Chody. I used to hang out at his house a lot, his mom was one of those "cool" moms that would let us smoke and bought us beer on New Years. Cody made up so much shit i didn't even keep track of it. A lot of it i wasn't even privy to. His girlfriend was always catching him in lies about things he did with other girls when he was younger, and other small shit, nothing on the scale of demolitions or phone-service theft. He always claimed it was the anti-depressants he was on that made him act weird (and why he messed around with a girl i was dating, and would have messed around with another girl i was dating had she not been so repulsed by him; he didn't shower much, wasn't big on deoderant and ate a lot of meat and cheese). Another friend of his, Jy, and i got to be really good friends and know i consider him a brother, he is one of the few people that i can spend an entire week with and not get irritated. We were making fun of him one day and i started ad-libing all this shit, like that he was deep-throat and was the reason for the end of the Vietnam war and was where Einstein got all his ideas from, and then i said "and you can all read about it in my auto-biography, If I Was As Cool As I Wish I Was." We laughed our asses off about that, and still do every time one of us repeats it.
All four of them told more than these lies, these are just the ones that really stuck in my head because they were so outrageous and off the wall. The really weird part was that all of these guys were really likeable people, they were funny and nice and quick-witted, and people liked to hang out with them, till they found out that they were full of shit. I understand why a loser would make up stuff to make himself look cool, but why an otherwise cool person would make up stuff that adds nothing to peoples' opinion of them, and then completely ruins it when they are found out is beyond me. Bunch of savages in this town.
That's when you know you found somebody really special. When you can just shut the fuck up for a minute and comfortably share silence.
-Uma Thurman, Pulp Fiction