5 Things Everyone Lies About
By Thoughtis
1. “Yeah, I totally speak [insert foreign language here].”
Lol, no I don’t. Here’s the thing, I took this stupid language in school for literally five years running, and you would think that, if nothing else, osmosis alone would have allowed me to absorb one or two coherent sentence structures. Hell, I even spent a little time in this country before, and beyond the few words necessary to ask for the bathroom and another beer, I was pretty much a helpless child. But that is far too embarrassing to admit. I don’t want to seem uncultured, or that I refused to learn anything in all of my classes. I just have to avoid anyone who might be a native speaker, don’t wanna get called out. But, really, though — who actually checks the “other skills” sections of resumes, anyway? Might as well add Polish.
2. “Yeah, I know a little bit about [insert topic of conversation here].”
Why is it so much easier in social settings to just lie and pretend you know anything about art, modern war history, wine, poetry, or local politics just to seem remotely informed about something than admitting the truth — that you’re an ignorant dumbass? I mean, really, how far are we really expecting to go in this conversation that we have zero knowledge about — the second someone follows your lie up with any kind of question, we’re just going to be staring blankly at them as a string of drool falls out of our mouths and we scramble to make up something that sounds remotely intelligent. From now on, we should just be open and say, “No, man, I don’t know jack sh-t about coffee, why don’t you do what you came here to do and give me a 45-minute lecture on all there is to know about this hallowed topic and get it over with.” They’d probably like us more that way.
3. “I don’t really spend that much time online.”
I think I have met one person in my life who actually can live up to this statement, and he’s kind of a strange, luddite hermit. He actually doesn’t really use the internet except for email and buying things he can’t find in stores, and doesn’t know what a meme is. I think we can safely say he has completely seceded from society. But for the rest of us, it’s not really kosher to just straight-up admit that we spend hours a day scrolling through our Tumblr dashboards (what cruel, cruel prince made that thing an endless scroll, by the way, life was hard enough as it was). We can’t just admit that we obsess over our Twitter follower count, or that we couldn’t bear to give up Facebook, lest we no longer have a way to look creepily into the lives of all the people we’ve stopped banging and/or would like to bang, but haven’t yet. Our online time is a depressing aspect of our life that it is never okay to fully cop to, but that we’re all more-or-less openly lying about.
4. “Ugh, I hate that stupid ‘Call Me Maybe’ song.”
No you don’t, you pathetic liar. You only hate it insomuch as it’s humiliating to admit that you play it at top volume, sing along to it, and still enjoy it no matter how many times you’ve heard it and it has become subsequently rooted in your brain stem to haunt you for all eternity. In fact, I recently overheard my boyfriend singing it in the bathroom against his will and cackled like a crazy, pop-song-loving witch at the song’s success over his feeble psyche. That song is f-cking awesome, and we can all stop pretending to be above it. I am tired of hearing our collective lies (I’m side-eyeing you especially hard, straight dudebros, you know you like it, too.)
5. “I just am really not into reality TV, it’s gross.”
Of course it’s gross! That’s the entire point of it. It’s the runaway train that will never stop moving, no matter how many murder/suicides of skinny blonde women and the people who love them are left in its wake. It’s degrading to us as humans, it shows the worst side of our capability to hate and destroy each other, and it essentially reduces us to animals flinging feces. But whether you’ve turned an episode of Jersey Shore into a drinking game, been sincerely moved by a backstory on X Factor, or have forgotten to eat and bathe while in the middle of a 12-hour Real Housewives marathon, you’ve done it. Maybe it was in the shadowy recesses of your room where no one could see you, but you’ve done it. And the fact that we are incapable of admitting it, and so quick to judge others for the horrible indulgence we know we’re not perfectly immune from ourselves, only shows the depths to which reality TV has turned us into enormous hypocrites. May God have mercy on our souls.