The Art of Not Lying



            When we were kids, we were taught that honesty was the best policy.

            What our parents, teachers, babysitters, and other mentors failed to point out was that in the real world, unbridled honesty can be hurtful, inconvenient, counterproductive, and, to be honest, (ha!) a little stupid.

             Nevertheless, I’ve always been a big supporter of honesty. I tend to put a lot of trust in people, and when that trust is betrayed, it’s especially hurtful. I’ve only had a handful of big “betrayals” in my life, but I’ll bear the scars of each one forever. That’s why, years ago, I made a sort of covenant with myself to lie as little as humanly possible.

Sounds pretty simple, right?

…well…

I learned pretty quickly that it’s damn near impossible to be honest in the real world. My life, like all of ours, is like a mine field of delicate situations, fragile egos, social taboos, and political correctness. If I’m not careful, I’m going to be in a war zone, and it’s going to be ugly.

Just ask Jim Carrey.



Fortunately for me, I came across the sidhe and decided to follow their lead.

Now if there is anyone out there who isn’t going “what the hell are sidhe?” we need to get married. Like right now. Set the date.

For the rest of you non-nerds, the sidhe (pronounced shee) are a race of fey from Celtic culture, and they are beautifully represented in *Laurell K. Hamilton’s Merry Gentry novels, to which I’m quite addicted. In spite of the gratuitous sex scenes, I highly recommend them to everyone. I’m not a reader of fantasy myself, but I’m completely hooked on the world Hamilton created in this. For those interested, this link provides a good synopsis and a reading list to get started.

Anyway, the sidhe are many things—shiny, for one, immortal, powerful, long-haired—and their culture as portrayed by Hamilton is way too rich for me to even begin to describe here. But one thing the sidhe don’t ever do is lie. To lie is to be an oath-breaker, and that’s an actual death sentence in their culture, or at the very least grounds for exile. However, the sidhe are also political animals, and honesty is quite a liability in politics. In their thousands of years of existence, the sidhe have developed silver tongues. They won’t lie, directly, but they will twist words with such skill that, as Merry puts it, “they can convince you that the sky is green and the grass is blue.”

A fantastic series!

Right. Well, now that I feel sufficiently outed as a nerd (like you didn’t know), I won’t say much more about the series, save that the sidhe taught me a very good lesson. I’m a writer, a spinner of word webs, if you’ll accept such a cringe-inducing metaphor, so the sidhe version of honesty is something I can definitely pull off. After a few years, I’ve become very, very good at it.

Since I’m sure people are lost, I’ll provide an example. Here’s a situation: a friend invites you to a party on Saturday, which not only doesn’t sound fun, but you know from past experience that your friend will end up drunk and crying for no apparent reason and you will inevitably end up having to babysit them the entire night.

I know in this situation, there are people out there who would be very blunt, and more power to you if you’re the kind of person who can say “I’d rather not spend a Saturday night holding back your hair while you vomit and sob hysterically on the bathroom floor,” then more power to you. I’ve learned that in my own life, it’s best for me to be more delicate, especially since I tend to have a very venomous tongue and can hurt people even when I don’t mean to.

So anyway, rather than make something up or be painfully blunt, a sidhe might say something like this:

“I haven’t been feeling very well this week. I’m going to take it easy this weekend.”

Read: I’ve had a minor tickle in my throat, and I’ll be ‘taking it easy’ by not being babysitter to a crying drunk.

This is a twisting of words by stating two arbitrary facts that people naturally put together due to the structure of the phrasing. Also, the phrase ‘taking it easy’ is very vague and individualistic. To your friend, ‘taking it easy’ might mean sitting on the couch watching Scrubs reruns. But to you, ‘taking it easy’ might mean base jumping from 600 feet instead of 875.

Yeah...not on my Bucket List.

I know, it’s triksy, isn’t it? Normally I wouldn’t employ these tactics on such a small thing. I’d most likely say that I didn’t feel like going to the party. You know, be honest, but not brutal. But to prove my point I’m writing things I could say, should this be a touchier situation, using sidhe tactics.  If this were a more difficult situation, a sidhe could also spread the truth excessively thin by saying something like:

“Well, my cousin’s wedding is that weekend, and I was going to try to make it out there.”

Read: My cousin’s wedding is that weekend, and I was going to try to make it out there, but last week my mother informed me that it was going to be a small private ceremony with no reception, so now I no longer plan to go.

            Now that kind of wordplay I do very, very rarely, and it’s only in excessively touchy situations. I remember when I had to meet an ex’s parents for the first time. They were ridiculously religious, like Ozzy-is-Satan, Bible-phrases-posted-all-over-the-house, washed-in-the-blood-of-the-lamb kind of Christians. I, by contrast, am an eccentric, overly-opinionated agnostic who makes music mixes that feature Cradle of Filth alongside Reliant K…and whose eye begins to twitch when someone tries to tell me that a long-dead teacher of bastardized Buddhism is my saviour.

Ahem, sorry for that, but I was raised in a very conservative, religious area, and I had Christianity crammed down my throat from a very young age. It’s not the religion itself that bothers me, but the way many people execute their beliefs. That can be said for any religion, but Christianity was my personal childhood bane.

Needless to say, it was a delicate situation. I’m strong in my opinions, but I’d rather not have the parents of my current boyfriend completely despise me, or spend every visit trying to “save” me. So when the inevitable “are you Christian” question came up, I answered it carefully.

“I was raised with Christianity,” I said, “and even though I don’t currently go to church or anything, I’m very open to the belief in a higher power. Everyone has to have something to believe in.”

This satisfied them (thank their God) though of course they had me go to church with them a couple of times. I obliged, of course, because I’m respectful for the most part. That and I’m insanely curious about religion and I rarely give up an opportunity to study it up close. Of course, the Sidhe-to-English translation is:

“I was raised with Christianity…but not by my parents. More like I was surrounded by the children of reborns who couldn’t understand someone who doesn’t believe in Jesus. And though using the word very is pushing it, I’m open to the belief in a higher power…but definitely not yours. Everyone has to have something they believe in, as there are many things that exist, like trees and water and machinery, therefore belief is just an observation of the world around you.”

PS, I don’t want to hear any existential retorts to that last section.

Anyway, I’m much more comfortable with twisting words in that sort of situation rather than the drunk friend party scenario. Using specific words, like saying I was raised with Christianity rather than around Christianity, is still the truth, but the listener has different inferences about them.

Inferences…to? About? With? Hm. Grammatical calamity.

Also using the word currently in the phrase “I don’t currently go to church.” That is entirely true. I don’t currently go to church. But adding currently sometimes leads the listener to infer that I had previously been a church attendant. Given the beginning of that conversation, they probably ended up thinking I went to church with my family when I was a kid. In reality, my parents are agnostic, if not atheists, and I was raised without religion in my household. Though I didn’t say anything about being a Christian as a child, my boyfriend’s parents inferred it, and that combined with my “openness to a higher power”, kept them off my back than if I had spoken plainly.

            I know that this kind of truth-spinning is an ethical grey area for a lot of people. But before any friends of mine start questioning everything I say because I threw in a weird adjective, let me just reassure you: I only “speak sidhe” when it’s needed. If I don’t like how a shirt looks on you, I’ll tell you. I won’t say “dear God, what the hell were you thinking buying that?” but I’ll be honest. I speak sidhe in emotionally or politically delicate situations, like that situation with my boyfriend’s religious parents. I do it for my own conscience, not to manipulate or trick people. To me, there’s nothing worse than a liar, and when friends lie to me, I feel way more hurt than I let on. I pride myself on being someone others can trust, and someone that doesn’t really have a thin skin. I’d much rather have honesty than pretty lies 99 out of 100 times.

            Unfortunately, you can’t go through this world without lying at least a little bit. In my years of speaking sidhe, there are only a handful of situations where I will lie.

1.      Surprise parties or celebrations. I will absolutely lie through my teeth if someone’s throwing you a surprise party. Sorry. But I hate spoiling surprises. I’ll apologize profusely afterward, but hey, it was a surprise party, not an assassination.

2.      When someone else is on the line. A frequent use of this—if a friend shows up at my door needing a place to crash (emotional breakdown, needs a safe place to come off of alcohol or drugs, needs to nurse a hangover, kicked out of their place for some reason, etc, etc) and they don’t want me to tell anyone what went on, I won’t. Omission in itself isn’t really a lie, but if their roommate were to ask me where my friend was or what they were doing, I would lie to keep my promise.

3.      When someone has told me something in confidence, and someone else asks me about it. I will absolutely lie, feign ignorance, etc. I am, more than anything else in this world, a lock box for my loved ones’ secrets.

4.      In a joke/when performing/sarcasm. Duh. But people have gotten on my case about that, thinking they were clever, “Aren’t you lying when you’re onstage as a character?” Dude, really? Come on. I am also the queen of sarcasm, which can be a form of lying, if you’re a nitpicking douchebag.

5.      When I’m running around Chicago like a drooling fangirl scoping out film sites for The Dark Knight and my friends and I get to Hotel 71 where they filmed Bruce Wayne’s penthouse/Joker crashes the party scene and the lady at the desk says that the penthouse is actually a loft space that isn’t open to the public and you can only see it if you need to rent the space and I say that I’m getting married to my fiancé Jack Napier and we’re thinking about using the space for our reception so we all make an appointment with their wedding coordinator the next day and I play the role of excited upcoming bride planning a 200-person wedding and answering questions about where I met my fiancé and how he proposed and what he does for a living and our wedding colours and music preferences and catering options and budget.**

…but that last one hardly ever happens.

And I assure you, it was entirely necessary to my wellbeing.

Guess who Jack Napier is a reference to?

One last thing I adopted from sidhe culture is that my word is my bond. If I promise you something, it’s done. I’ll do my absolute best to keep it. I don’t say the words “I promise” lightly. Now of course I have broken promises, but I do all that is humanly possible to keep them. In fae culture, breaking a promise is punishable by torture and death. An oathbreaker is the worst thing you can possibly be. If you ever ask me to give me my “solemn oath” that something is true, or to keep something a secret, or to do something for you, and I give it, it will be done. Period. I know it seems kind of silly, but I take promises and oaths seriously.

But before you go getting my solemn oath to do your laundry, remember that if it’s something I really, really don’t want to do, I will totally speak sidhe to wriggle out of it.

“You have my solemn oath that I shall do your laundry.”

“…ten years from now.”

*For those of you who recognize Laurell K. Hamilton’s name, she is the author of the Anita Blake Vampire Hunter series. A lot of you are probably going “Oh, Dee’s obsessed with vampires, she must love Anita Blake!” For the record, no, I don’t like Anita Blake. I’m very picky about my vampires, and for some reason the Anita Blake series just doesn’t appeal to me. But Merry Gentry, though lesser known, is a fantastic series.

**This incident, which happened last year during spring break, came to be known as My Big Fat Fake Wedding. It’s one of my fondest memories and may actually come up in this blog at some point, as I am someday going to have a Big Fat Fake Bachelorette Party.