My chinese teacher told us this story the other day, jokingly (?):
When my son was younger, he had a stomach ache and went to me and said “Mom, my tummy hurts.” And so I turned to him and said, “Ow, cancer!”
She then proceeded to laugh. Almost everyone in the class did too. I’m not sure why—maybe they didn’t really hear it? Maybe they didn’t want the teacher to feel uncomfortable? I think something got lost in translation there.
To many of my friends, I have to tell (or warn) them when I’m telling a true story. When I was a very little kid, I had a bad habit of lying a lot, but I think in middle school I shaped up quite a bit. In high school, I started bull-shitting people a lot but it was never meant to deceive people. Either people would know I was joking, or the joke was on them.
I guess, there were also times when I lie compulsively when first meeting people. I once told my friend’s friend I met at Berkeley that I went to Davis. My friend later told him that I didn’t really go to Berkeley. That guy replied, “No… He told me. He showed me his ID. Why would anyone lie about that?”
I think it’s something I’ve grown out of because my college friends believe me whole-heartedly. I don’t know what I have to do to get my old friends to trust me. I almost feel like I’m worse off telling them something is a “true story.” Maybe from now on, I’ll just say I saw it on the internet.
You can trust anything I write here. I would never lie to the internet.