Current location:	work
Current mood:	contemplative
Current music:	Final Fantasy VII - Yuffie's Theme
Entry tags:	deep thoughts, quotes

If You Find You're Cast Adrift And Haven't Got An Oar
(Yoinked from Fark.com.)

An article about people--with attention drawn to users on LiveJournal--who fake their own death.

This is a really fascinating article, and it taps into one of my darker suspicions. Obviously, this does not apply to people I feel particularly close to online, which is as hard to define as it is in person: obviously, it's not just people I've hung out extensively with in person, because there are people I've only seen in person, say, twice, that I talk to pretty much every single day, and for that matter there are people I know in real life that I know are, how can I put this, prone to exaggeration. But, of course, I *am* a little bit more suspicious of people I've never met who make seemingly fantastic claims.

That's my caveat. To put it bluntly, I have trouble believing some people when they announce they're engaged, or that they're pregnant. (Fortunately, I haven't had too many people get very sick, either actually or otherwise.) Now, I never call people on it, because for one thing, there's absolutely no way for me to tell whether they're really lying or not, and certainly no way to prove it. Secondly, I like to give people the benefit of the doubt. And, lastly, Heinlein had a great quote about exaggerators:

"This sad little lizard told me that he was a brontosaurus on his mother’s side. I did not laugh; people who boast of ancestry often have little else to sustain them. Humoring them costs nothing and adds to happiness in a world in which happiness is always in short supply."

Robert Heinlein as Lazarus Long in Time Enough For Love

Only I've extended it to apply to anyone who stretches the truth about anything that doesn't affect me directly; it costs me nothing and if that's what it takes to make them feel better, I don't get my jollies out of disabusing people. But it is something to think about.

Now, of course, I tend to (forgive me!) humor younger people even more; I remember when my AOL profile, back in 1998 or whatever it was, said "Practically engaged" under my marital status because that's what I really believed it was. The Goalie and I were going to get engaged any day (God, could you imagine?) and we were going to get married and that was the end of that. And I'm not trying to say NO ONE marries their high school sweetheart (and despite my vehement exclamation a few sentences ago, I could do worse. The Goalie is not a bad guy, we're just wrong for each other.) But it must be pretty freaking rare at this point. So that's why I'm usually pretty dubious when someone announces they're engaged to their first serious significant other, although I'm polite enough to keep my reservations to myself. (Actually having an engagement ring does make me take you a bit more seriously, though.) I can't tell you how many "engagements" never make it to the altar, and how many "babies" never materialize.

(That's not to say that I don't truly empathize when real engagements get broken, or, God forbid, something goes wrong with a pregnancy--I hate to even type those words. But--and here is the crux of the whole thing--people who make this shit up are really, really demeaning the true suffering of the people who have actually gone through these things. It's kind of like, how dare you claim to have gone through that, when you have no. FUCKING. Idea. Back to my musings.)

The hell of it is, and probably another reason why I'm usually fairly tolerant of this, is that I know where this comes from. I exaggerated a lot as a kid. Don't they all, didn't we all? I don't really remember this specific incident, but I remember Vylette telling me, years later, that when I first moved upstate, I told her I had disarmed an attacker who had brought a gun onto the school playground where I lived in the city. Again, I don't remember saying that, but it sounds like something I'd do; I had a pretty grandiose imagination and I always wanted to be a brave hero. But, more than that, I wanted to be liked. We all do. We all want to impress people, we all want people to admire us. It's just that at some point, some people learn that people will like you even if you didn't disarm a nuclear bomb that you found in a daycare, and some don't. I'm not trying to say that I grew up and found out that I was special without having to lie. I'm saying that it doesn't even matter that I'm not spectacular. Corny but true, people will like you even when you're just being yourself. That's not to say that people won't admire someone who is a true hero more, but it won't make them like you any less. And true heroes are pretty few and far between, anyway.

Incidentally, I'm aware of the irony of me posting this after almost eight years of real-life drama that I've blogged about here; my grandmother dying of lung cancer, my mother suffering a stroke, and the absolute shitstorm that has been my engagement, just to name three. In my defense, I document my life so thoroughly--often with pictures--that it would be really hard for me to make up this many details without tripping myself up somewhere down the line if it were all fake, AND I have enough close proximity friends on here that someone would've called shenanigans by now. Plus, I flatter myself that I have proved a pretty trustworthy person over the years.

Iunno. Thoughts?