Liars

I was listening to the radio on my ride into work and the DJs were talking about epic lies. They rattled off a few doozies then asked the listeners to call in with lies they had told or had been told. I was blown away by the number of ladies who had guys that had tried to pull the wool over their eyes. Some of the stories made my toenails curl. The scope of the lies got me to thinking about things.

It takes a lot of energy to come up with a lie and keep it going. One lie becomes two and so on until it becomes a full time job to keep up with what has been said. Why not just tell the truth in the first place?

I was the victim of a lie and the sad part was that my gut was trying to tell me something was amiss but I chose to ignore it for a long while. As a teen I had a long term boyfriend who was a chronic cheater. I had countless heartbreaks because of that jerk, but stupidly I kept going back for more. One time, I even had a girl call me and tell me he was cheating on me and she knew that because he was asking her out! She knew he and I were dating and that's why she had the decency to let me know he had been sniffing around her door. He and I broke up once again.

The cheater boyfriend and I went our separate ways and years passed but I always wondered what became of him. I'm not sure why. Maybe I'm a glutton for punishment. You'd think that if someone treated you like dirt over and over, you'd finally get enough and wash you hands forever of them. And yet, I still wondered about  where he was and what he was doing. Fast forward about a hundred years and I happened to run into this person. I was really excited at first because I figured time and age might have straightened him out a bit. We saw each other a few times and each time I saw him my gut would start yelling at me that something was wrong. I tried asking him if there was anyone special in his life multiple times and he would always deny it. He didn't do anything outright that made me suspicious I just felt sort of funny about him.

After a month or two passed I finally started really hammering him about there being someone else. I just knew that there was a girl he was involved with. He finally admitted to being involved with someone he was totally crazy about. CRAZY about?!?!?!? What the hell? How could he be crazy about her and yet he was seeing me, too? When the cat was out of the bag, I was pissed. I mean, I was so pissed I couldn't even speak. Number one, I knew what it felt like to be the girl being cheated on. And I did NOT want to be involved in any way, shape or form of something like that. Number two, I had asked him repeatedly if there was anyone else and he denied it every time. He had many chances to come clean and he just kept lying and lying and lying.

Needless to say, I dropped his ass like a hot potato. It felt good to slam the door forever and drive away without looking back. My favorite phrase was 'suck it cheater boy'! A few months after I cut off all contact with him, I got a strange e-mail from a girl I didn't know. It turned out to be the girl he was crazy about. As it turns out her gut was speaking to her, too because she looked at his e-mails and found that my address had appeared a lot. She got curious so she contacted me. I am sure that she wanted to hate me for seeing her man but I straightened things out speedy quick. I let her know the date of the very first time I heard from him clear up to the final time he and I spoke. I told her that I accused him of having someone else and of his ardent denials. I told her about every single one of our get togethers - when, where, etc.. Now, there weren't any lurid details to tell her because I never went there with him (guess my gut was yelling louder than I realized) but I wanted her to know EVERYTHING.

The "other" woman seemed like a good person and she didn't deserve to be cheated on the way he was doing to her. I thought back to the time in high school when the brave girl called me to fill me in on that schmuck's indiscretions and I remembered how much I appreciated it. So I decided to pay it forward and let the poor woman who contacted me know what a douche bag she was dealing with. She already knew he had cheated on his wife (with her) and then she found out he was visiting with me as well.

I do not know what became of her - or him for that matter. I hope she's fine. I hope he gets what he deserves. One of these days, all of his lies will catch up with him because he's told so many, I don't see how he could possibly keep them all straight. As a funny side note, a mutual friend of Mr. Cheater and mine were talking a while back. He asked me if I had spoken to the cheater lately and I told him that I found it best to cut off all contact. I didn't tell about his cheating and lying, just that we had lost contact. His response? 'That guy is really effed up something bad."  I didn't need to say anything. It was that obvious.

The moral of the story is that if your gut tries to tell you something - LISTEN. If you think you're being lied to, you probably are. If you yourself think about telling a lie, think again. It's so much easier to tell the truth and maybe have a short time of being uncomfortable than it is to weave a web of lies that probably won't protect you anyway.

The Whisperer

I don't consider myself to be nosy. I'll go out of my way not to be nosy. I'm not usually an eavesdropper either but being in open areas or cubicles (like at the library), makes it hard not to hear what others around me are saying. Usually it's not very hard to tune out the voices of others, but I still hear them. Unless they start whispering. Whispering is like an auto alert to your ears to start paying very close attention.

I conducted a very serious, un-scientific study to find out if the sound of whispering causes the human ear to perk up in an attempt to hear what is being said. Specifically, if what is being said isn't meant for the person who is perking up to hear it. Do secrets make bystanders more curious? Does the nugget of information being whispered become informational gold to the unintended listener? The answer was a resounding YES. All of my research subjects admitted to straining to hear what was being said when whispering commenced. And they were referring to conversations that they were not involved in! They perked up to hear whispering in other people's conversations!  

Maybe it's the break in the cadence and tone of the conversation that gets one's attention. Maybe we're all secretly nosy. Maybe those of us who are mothers are trained to pay closer attention because we're used to listening for our children. (Facat: 9 times out of 10, when little kids get quiet it's because they're into something they shouldn't be.) But why do we tune in even as adults and even when we're not with kids who could be doing something wrong? Maybe it's some magical cave man thing all of us have in us - the fight or flight kind of thing - only this pertains to listening not fighting or flighting.

I am acquainted with a person that I shall heretofore call Sometimes Silent Sally - or SSS for short. SSS is a fairly (never hushes) talkative gal. The two minute 'break and chat' rule is totally lost on her. She'll go on and on and on for 30 minutes if you let her. And talking with her can't really be called a conversation because conversations require more than 1 person conversing and you can't get a word in edge-wise with this gal. For some reason, she feels the need to use whispers to emphasize certain sections of her monologue. They're not necessarily vital portions of the story, either. Maybe it's an unconscious effort on her part to keep the listener's attention (because she's been droning on for so long). Inevitably, I'm forced to ask her to repeat something because she's freaking whispering! Why?????

Sometimes, talking softly is mysterious and alluring but in this case? NOPE! I mean, why whisper about what kind of sandwich you're planning to order? Who gives a freaking frack? I don't! In case you think I'm being overly annoyable, let me try to demonstrate a typical conversation with SSS:

SSS: Hey girl, how's it going?

Me: great, what's up?

SSS: Well, I was just passing through the office on my way to the bathroom and I saw you sitting at your cube.

Me: Oh, yeah, well I'm here allrighty.

SSS: Well, I figured I'd go to the library after work because it's an open floorplan and I can talk out loud and whisper because you know, the librarians pull out their cat-O-9-tails on people when they try to reshelve books themselves.  And it's good fun and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah (blah until I pass out from annoyance).

You see? Randomness, I tell you!!! Meanwhile, the people that were in my un-scientific study are straining their ears to hear what the whispered phrases were. I don't want to be rude and I'm not meaning to talk badly about SSS behind her back - I'm just stating the facts. Maybe the next time someone like SSS starts whispering I should just plug my ears and state that I'm not into secrets because I can't keep my mouth shut. I wonder if that would work?