Pants on fire

I am not a frequent liar, not because I am morally opposed to lying per se, but because I don't like to spend a lot of time doing things I'm not good at. And I am not at all good at lying. I get caught up in the details and end up tying myself in knots over minutiae. Also, I have a very expressive face.

I lie so rarely, in fact, that I have almost total recall of lies I've told in the past. Like in high school when I told my parents I was going with my boyfriend to see Jurassic Park: The Lost World and instead went to his dad's law office to make out on the couch. I thought I was safe because it was a movie my parents wouldn't dream of seeing, but for some reason it came up in conversation for weeks afterward, and of course I had nothing to say about it except something vague about how it was just like the first Jurassic Park, except, you know, set in Manhattan. I ended up confessing the lie to my parents years later—they, needless to say, had completely forgotten the whole incident.

The inability to lie is generally seen as a virtue, I know, but every once in a while it would be convenient to be able to do it convincingly, if only to maintain the element of surprise. All last week I was so busy lying and thinking up more lies that I couldn't even blog. Not once. I was so full of secrets that I wouldn't have known how to write without them all spilling out.

See, CameraMan is conducting this show, and I wasn't going to be able to see it (because I am on the other side of the country), and I was just sick about it. So, I secretly begged for a release and GOT one, secretly offered up our hypothetical first-born child to United Airlines for a last-minute plane ticket, and secretly planned a trip to see his Sunday matinee and spend two whole nights with him (and the Bossy Cat, obvs). All week long I played the sad long-distance girlfriend, throwing in little extras for verisimilitude (Do you think anyone will video it so I can watch it later?). I even invented a whole rehearsal schedule and cocktail party for Saturday to cover the time I would be traveling, all the while plotting with a friend at the Trap to meet CM at Clyde's that night.

I think I did pretty well. I lied my face off all week, and he had no idea. Until about an hour before I arrived, when he called my phone 3 times and all 3 times it went straight to voicemail. He's pretty smart, that CameraMan, and he figured out the only reason my phone would do that is if I was on a plane. And he was right. So when I walked into Clyde's he wasn't as surprised as I might have hoped, but it was still a pretty great moment. I'd say the surprise was a success.

99. Fly across the country (or the world) to surprise someone.

What's so bad about lying, anyway?