» Pathological Liars

Pants on fire, pants soiled with urine.
In college (Uni to you) I had the pleasure of sharing accommodations with pathologialest liar I've ever been heaped nonsense on by. During our brief acquaintance, she informed me of the following projects she was working on upon the completion of her degree:
- Quentin Tarantino film project - she had met with Quent, and he was nice. Also tall. She took a lot of fictitious phone calls from Quent.
- Scholarship at the Bolshoi Ballet school. A cursory glance at her would tell you that she had the ideal, pear-shaped dancer's body.
- MIT, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, University of Awesome et al had been recruiting her for a advanced degrees in everything from performance art to cryptozoology.

This was only very briefly annoying. After the sting of the insult to your intelligence subsided, it became obvious that she was just barking mad. After the first whopper was laid upon you, it became fun. Story time.

This tale is not actually about her, though. It is about me, and the sudden and total failure of the mechanism in your brain that prevents you from saying something that, however honest, is not socially acceptable.

One day a group of us were sharing a cigarette in the common area when, improbably, the subject of breast feeding came up. The girls of the group debated the merits on the basis of mother-baby bonding, nutrition, etc. Pathological liar chimed in. She testified for formula, as she was raised on it from birth, and as you can plainly see, she turned out perfectly fine. Eyes rolled collectively. Actually, she continued with extraordinary sincerity, she had no choice. Her mother was in a serious car accident seven months into the pregnancy, and was in a coma by the time she was due. Her mother woke some nine months later. It was clear from not only her tone, but because this did not fit into pathological liar's modus operandi of self-aggrandizement that she was telling the truth for perhaps the first time since she graced us with her insanity.

We all sat in silence for a few moments, pondering the tragedy of the situation. Then I offered sympathetically, "My god. No wonder you're so fucked up."

I continued studying the ground for a second or two, as my brain brought the socially unacceptable comment filtration and awareness systems back online, and then looked up to see a number of stunned faces staring back at me, agog. I peed my pants slightly, then stammered the most impotent attempt at retroactive comment-to-joke conversion. "Ha-ha." I said. "Just, you know..." Mercifully, pathological liar was the quickest to recover. She laughed, playfully slapped me on the shoulder and left to make a phone call to Quentin Tarantino.
(Fri 30th Nov 2007, 19:47, More)