Secrets and Lies

I had an interesting experience concerning secrets and lying with my cousin Marlo today. In the past couple of days Marlo, Michelle (Marlo's younger sister), and I have been charged to keep a secret. Usually, it's not that difficult to hold a secret between the three of us. No one really wants to know. As interesting we all think we are, and really we are, other people, and by other people I mean the rest of our family, seem to clasify our interestingness as obnoxicity and thereby ignore us. But this time around "The Grown Ups" want to know. The Grown Ups are the older generation in our family. (They are also known as "The Old Ones," "Them," "The Aunties and My Dad," or "Our Parents".) However, it was one of The Old Ones that asked us to keep this secret.

So to which commandment do my cousins and I adhere to? Keep An Old One's Secret or Honor The Aunties and My Dad. Well in this matter of morality we went for the first one. It seemed like a good decision. In any case it ended up being the funnier one. Today at lunch, Crazy Auntie Number One called Marlo up. Now this is a bit of a digression, but a discussion of Marlo and her phone must be taken up at this point. Marlo lives by her cell phone, or as I like to refer to it nowadays: MOE-bile (that's a little pronounciation help for you there). She uses it so frequently in one day that a night's worth of charging isn't enough to sustain the life of that poor bugger. Sorry if I've gone a bit English on ya gov'na. So in order to keep receiving calls today, she had decided to have all her calls forwarded to my phone.

That's where the fun started. Not a full 10 minutes after setting her mobile to foward her calls does my phone start fielding 3 calls at a time. The first from some number she couldn't t recall, the second from Crazy Auntie Number One, then one from some woman named Ana whom I don't know. Now I don't avoid people by not answering my phone. If I don't pick up it's usually because I forgot to change the ring setting after class. Marlo however in order to avoid The Grown Ups from time to time doesn't answer her phone. She didn't warn me that the tactic for keeping the secret was to avoid The Old Ones at all costs. So what did I do but naturally answer the phone. After about three minutes of throwing the phone back at one another to avoid spilling the secret, for it was certainly what The Old One sought, Marlo dropping my poor phone on the ground ON PURPOSE to get it to hang up, and sliently flicking each other off, Marlo finally started to talk to C.A.N.O. In this conversation Marlo managed to rattle off about 10 to 15 lies. Now our family may be OK with Stealing and Cheating (according to Marlo "It's just how we were raised"), but good liars we are not. To go with those 16 or 23 lies that Marlo told were about 52 shredded napkins, countless somersaults in her booth seat, and 5 distinictive evil eyes directed at me.

It was a sight to see. We had all 3 customers and 13 employees of Noodle Planet staring at us intently. At least they recognize our interestingness or insanity, same thing.

Moral of the Blog: Lying sucks, it wastes napkins, which kills trees and therefore makes me feel guilty in two ways.