Lies Men Tell

No, I'm not talking about no-good, two-timing scoundrels. I'm talking about dads, mostly. It would seem that the temptation to mess with the impressionable minds of children is far, far too much for even the best of men to resist. I grew up not knowing if I could believe anything my dad said. There was one time at a neighborhood picnic where he and another man (surely a father) tried to convince me that these really big corn chips were called "buffalo chips." I was in college when I learned that the word epitome is not pronounced phonetically - not because my dad couldn't pronounce it, but because he mispronounced it on purpose.
When I was in my twenties, I got a ride home from a church event with a young family. The father dropped the mother off at an Indian take-out place before driving me and the kids home. The little boy was concerned. "Where's Mummy?"
"Oh, she's spending the night at the curry house."
"She's not!"
"Sure she is."
This behavior is not confined to guys who have children of their own. I watched my brother do it when he was in high school. He and I had stopped by his best friend's house, and a little neighbor boy saw my brother and shouted, "Hi, J!"
"I'm not J, I'm Fred."
"No, you're J!"
"No, I'm Fred. J's my twin brother. He's not here; he's playing for the Sonics."
Ah, the old "I'm my twin" line. Who hasn't done that?
There's a notable exception to the title of my blog: the best female liar I've ever known, my college roommate, B. She could say anything with a straight face. She also had incredible endurance - you may not believe her at first, but she'd keep it up so long that eventually you gave in and agreed with whatever story she'd made up. Amy, a trumpet player we went to music school with, had lent a tuba player named Richie her car. Richie had spent his whole life in the city, and B managed to convince Amy that he did not posess a valid driver's license. She also persuaded another roommate of ours that mountain goats' legs are longer on one side than the other, so they could stand level while walking around the side of the mountain. The catch, of course, was that they had to go the right way; if they walked around the other way, they'd fall over.
I'm one of the most gullible people I know (although I like to think it's because I'm trusting). I have almost no ability to tell whether people are full of it. So when I watched the movie Napoleon Dynamite and was told that there really was such a thing as a liger, I didn't know whether to believe it. I didn't want to be taken in. It took me months to finally look it up on the Internet. Turns out that one is true.
Because we all know if there's one thing we can trust, it's the Internet.