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Lies and Prevarication

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PinocchioWe’re told — I forget where, offhand — that the present generation receives the word “lie” as unforgivably rude. So, to spare any Millennial blushes, let  us discuss the Art of Prevarication.

Isn’t it amazing, what people get away with? They get away with it so frequently and so sublimely that they regard it as part of life, their natural privilege.

Ms. Neighbor — the one who was prevented from boarding my ship because my son had the cojones to go across the street and tell her “no!” — called the day before yesterday to wish me luck in the surgery and mumbled some sort of apology that I didn’t hear fully because I didn’t want to listen to her voice and so hung up on the answering machine. However, my son, a born diplomat, had told me that I should go over there and tell her how sorry I was that he ordered me not to take her in and extend my sympathies on her predicament.

He’s so polite.

So this morning I returned her call and reached her at her house, soon to be her former house. Said she, “Oh, dear, oh dear, I would never have suggested it if I had known you were going to have surgery yesterday!”

Say what? REALLY?

Does she think I don’t recall saying, “But I’m going to the hospital tomorrow for a second round of breast cancer surgery”?

Does she think I don’t recall her saying, “Oh, but I can be of help to you! Now my refrigerator can fit right here…”

Well, of course she does. Or she thinks she can make me think I don’t recall it, not quite like that anyway.

One of the things that accomplished liars prevaricators understand is that most people tend to believe the most recent thing they’ve heard. You can kind of “overwrite” a previous conversation or fact by saying something different with enough confidence, especially if your listener is elderly or not too bright.

I guess she thinks I’m a little bit of both. 😉

She must be an accomplished manipulator. That’s prob’ly why her relatives don’t want her moving in with them.

It wasn’t until I was in my 40s that I became aware of the number of people who lie as easily as breathing. So repressed was I as a child that even to this day I find it uncomfortable to fill in a fake name, phone number, and email address on a form to get another nuisance “member card” for some retailer. So it seems to me that an awful lot of people are very, very good at lying, and they do it as a matter of routine.

When I was about 45, I met and befriended a young couple who practiced insurance fraud. The ways they collected would beggar your imagination. They awed me. I’d never met anyone like that. Interestingly — or, hell: maybe “not surprisingly” — their professional prevarication slipped over into their personal lives. You really couldn’t know for sure when some story one of them told — whether it was an episode of ordinary daily life or some High Drama — was true or not.

There’s an art to prevarication. It’s like acting: you have to practice at it. Method prevarication, as it were.

The result of coming to know people like Ms. Neighbor and the Insurance Fraudsters is unfortunate: most of the time I don’t believe anyone. When a student comes up with some excuse for why she can’t turn in thus-and-such a paper, I assume she’s lying. When a salesman claims he’s required to tack on thus-and-such a chargeable service, I assume he’s lying. Today I question the truth of just about anything anyone says. And about a quarter of the time, I’d estimate, that’s justified.

Maybe that’s just Life in the Big City?

Image: Pinocchio. Enrico Mazzanti (1852-1910). Public domain.

 

 

 

Never Rains but It Pours…

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damNAtion! Is this EVER going to stop????

So, having been rescued from a potentially bottomless fiasco, come yesterday afternoon I’m sitting here staring into the computer, trying to decide whether to start on the client’s latest barrage of chapters, whether to try to figure out what my own character is going to say next, whether to give up and just cruise the Web for awhile, or what…when the phone rings.

It’s the brand new English Division chair. “We have a problem with your online course,” says he.

“Which one?” I ask. I figure the 235 section hasn’t made and he’s calling to say he’s canceling it.

“The 101.”

“I don’t have a 101 section,” I say.

“I mean the 102 class. A student called…”

…Ohhh SHIT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I think…

“…and said she couldn’t figure out why your assignments don’t jibe with the textbook. We realized your syllabus was written for the 10th edition. But they’ve bought the 11th edition.”

“WHAT?”

“Yes, we’re using the 11th edition. The admin says she gave you a copy.”

“No. I never got a copy of the 11th edition. I had no idea.”

The mailboxes in the departmental mailroom (needless to say, adjuncts do not have offices or even a corner of a desk in a bullpen) are set up so it’s hard to tell whether your name refers to the slot above it or to the slot below it. People often take mail for the wrong person, and so probably what’s happened is some other adjunct took the book out of my slot, months ago, and since of course I rarely go out to the campus, I had no clue. Chances are I wouldn’t have had a clue anyway, but I might have noticed a new text sitting in someone else’s mailbox.

I would know if a new text had been foisted on me, because every time that happens — which is about every two or three years with the damn Seyler book — I fly into a soaring rage. It invariably means I have to COMPLETELY rewrite my syllabus, a time-consuming, hair-tearing nuisance. Seyler doesn’t just throw in some new “selected readings.” She jacks the entire textbook’s organization around, so you’re forced to re-do everything.

The constant churning-out of new textbook editions has to do with the used-book industry, which exists solely because textbook publishers, seeing a captive audience, gouge students ridiculous amounts of money for their products. Seyler’s Read, Reason, Write is a prime example. At the high end, the thing is worth about $30, new. But as we scribble, Amazon is selling the damn thing for $116.84. Or you can rent it for a mere $87.99.

When a book is sold and re-purchased in the used-book market, the publisher earns nothing on the resale and the author earns no royalty. Since profits and royalties on a required textbook that costs $120 are significant (especially when it’s written for an almost universally required course like freshman comp), naturally publishers and their authors resent this commerce. To get around it, they cobble together new editions every two or three years.

So in the first year after publication, they make a bundle. Second year, they make a little less. By the third year, they’re going broke, as they DESERVE to be doing given the way they rip off the students.

At any rate, what this means on the microcosm is that the instant I regain consciousness from today’s fucking medical misadventure (as my friend Harriet pointed out, even though the doctor probably did what she was supposed to do in following the new DCIS excision guidelines, nevertheless the result is an unnecessary second surgery for me), I’m going to have to spend the better part of a day rewriting the syllabus. Actually, it won’t be the instant: the department is snail-mailing the book to me, so presumably it will arrive toward the end of the week. That will blow away my weekend.

Meanwhile, though, it develops that SOME of the classmates have the 10th edition! They presumably read the syllabus and also happen to order their books online instead of at the rapacious campus bookstore. So, students who a) were sharp enough to read the syllabus closely up-front and b) are smart enough to figure out that you can get these things a lot cheaper at Amazon and waypoints ended up with a textbook that works with the syllabus. Students who, as students are wont to do, simply went into the campus bookstore and purchased all their texts in one swell foop have the 11th edition.

I’m reluctant to make students who had their act together at the outset go out and buy an outrageously overpriced new text. If I’m to resist this shearing of my little flock, I’m going to have to create an adjusted syllabus for the people who have the 11th edition and let the ones who have the 10th edition use the existing syllabus.

Just imagine the grading nightmare that’s going to create.

I could deep-six the reading reports — that would get rid of 11 busywork assignments for them to have to write and us to have to read. But then I have no source of steady interaction in what is a 100% online course! So that’s not going to work.

There are only so many things you can say about how to write a freshman comp essay. And so really, there’s no good reason for them to buy the 11th edition (except that we as faculty are required to make them do so, by way of enriching the bookstore and the publisher).

[And, to make everything perfect, after I paid Luz $80 to make my floors glow in the dark yesterday, the dogs just frolicked through the mud and ran into the houses. Doesn’t matter: When my son comes to babysit me, he;s bringing Charley, whose snowshoe-sized feet will track in three times as much mud.]

So what I’m leaning toward is to keep the present 11 busywork projects (the so-called “reading responses,” which ask students to synopsize a chapter and then apply the chapter’s principles to one of the chapter’s selected readings) for those who already have the 10th edition and to create 11 new busywork projects for those who bought the 11th edition. The projects are essentially the same: synopsize the content/show how it works. It probably doesn’t MATTER what the chapter number is and what new reading selections Seyler has substituted for the old ones.

Except for the enormous hassle of trying to figure out which chapters in the new edition correspond to the chapters in the 10th edition, it may not be that difficult to simply let them write their “reading responses” on 11 chapters, any 11 chapters. It WILL be a hassle: this bitch of an author revises chapters by moving contents from Chapter A to Chapter B, so you end up with a new text whose chapters don’t correspond reliably with the old text’s. It will be a confusing, time-consuming, INFURIATING headache. But once that’s out of the way, it shouldn’t be that hard to score the busywork.

Isn’t teaching “fulfilling”? Isn’t it “rewarding”?

PBPHBPBPBPBTTTTTTT!!!!!!!!!

Bizarre Day on Wisteria Lane…

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Yesterday was bizarre. That’s about the only word for it. I swear, we no longer live in a Monty Python Show. We seem to have moved to Desperate Housewives’ Wisteria Lane.

I’m racing around trying to get out the door to meet my friend and business partner in Tempe for lunch at the fancy restaurant we favor, there to celebrate her birthday. The doorbell rings. The dogs go batsh!t.

It’s my neighbor cattycorner across the street. She’s sold her house and is moving out, apparently having fallen on hard times. The sale closes on Friday, the 29th.

As it develops, she has not found another place to live. She had arranged, she says, to stay with a friend who was going to put her up for a month while she looks for a new place. But said friend went on vacation to Puerto Rico and just returned to the states — with a Boy Toy in tow! This guy is moving in with the woman, and now Neighbor is dis-invited to stay there. Would I do her a favor and let her move in here? Otherwise she doesn’t know what she’s going to do.

Holy sh!t.

A month or two ago, when the house sold (it was underpriced by about $30,000 and so got snapped up instantly), while the three neighbor ladies on this end of the block were out in front yakking, she mentioned that she hadn’t even looked for a place, and I said, jokingly, that if push came to shove she could move in here.

That was before I had the last surgery and long before I was told I have to have MORE surgery tomorrow.

Caught point-blank and face-to-face, I didn’t see how I could say anything else than “uhhh….ohh-kayyy….” The puppy is squirreling around. I pick her up and put her in her X-pen to get her out of the way.  Now suddenly Neighbor is planning where she’s going to put her bed (meaning I have to move furniture out of one of the rooms) and talking me into letting her put her refrigerator in my garage (do you know how much a fridge running in a 110-degree garage will run up a power bill?!?) and saying words like “one to three months” and going on about how she’ll start looking for a place to stay after she gets her money from the sale (while I’m thinking…don’t you get your money on closing day? the kids aren’t moving in for a month because they want to do a bunch of renovations…can’t you ask if you can rent the place for a week or two while you look for an apartment?)

She wants to start moving in on Thursday. That’s the day after tomorrow: when I’ll be recuperating from surgery!

This conversation goes on until I say I have to leave because I have to drive to the far side of town. Neighbor is shoveled out the door.

Now I’m running late. I fly around the house trying to finish getting dressed and write a check for the  editorial work my friend has done, which I intend to pay her for over lunch, and get ready to shoot out the door. Last task is to stick the puppy in her crate so she can’t defile the floor. And…and she’s GONE!

I call and call, search and search, and I can’t find her. I figure she slipped out the door when Neighbor left. So next thing I’m out in the street screaming like a fishwife for Ruby. Neighbor comes over; they look around. Finally she explores the house and finds Ruby in her X-pen, where of course I’ve  forgotten that I stashed her. This is what happens when old ladies get distracted by unexpected and potentially hassle-laden new developments when their lives are already disrupted by repeated cancer surgeries.

I thank Neighbor, pick up Ruby, and shovel Neighbor out the door. Ruby, squirming in a frantic effort to get out the door, too, hooks a hind claw in my shirt — my favorite shirt — and tears a hole in it.

Shit.

Lock up the dog. Change my clothes, fly out the door. Meet my friend.

Have an amazing meal, as usual, at Tricks. Then we go over to The Shoe Mill, the single best shoe store in the Valley, where I need to buy a couple of pairs of the expensive Europoean shoes that don’t hurt my feet. There I buy two pairs of Naot sandals, all my sandals having simply worn out, and we each buy a pair of Pikadillos, actual shoes of the sort grown-ups wear. None of these are cheap: my tab is almost $600.

Well, I figure since I buy good shoes about once every four years, that works out to $150/year, so I don’t feel too bad about it. And I wear those kinds of sandals almost every day, since I live in jeans. One pair is a little dressy-looking and will be perfect for church (we’re required to wear black shoes to process), and another is an amazingly cute and astonishingly comfortable platform.

But meanwhile, as time has passed and discussion has been had, the whole idea of Neighbor moving into my house at all, to say nothing of one day after I get my boob cut open again, sounds worse and worse. I didn’t like the idea much at the outset but now I’m getting worried. I’ve lived alone for 20 years, and I like it that way! If I wanted someone living with me, I’d have someone living with me. Notice that I live with dogs: they can’t kipe my food, they don’t talk back, they don’t leave their makeup on the bathroom counter, and they don’t want to watch mindless television into the middle of the night.

I discuss this with Wonder Accountant, also a Wisteria Lane resident and friend/acquaintance of Neighbor. She suggests a written agreement and points out a number of pitfalls, not the least of which is “what are you going to do if she doesn’t want to move out after three months?” I want her out after one month, not three months.

Discuss with Insurance Broker to see if taking rent money from this woman will affect my homeowner’s insurance. He says not but is concerned about liability if one of the dogs bites her. He suggests I require her to take out renter’s insurance, about $15 a month. He asks what I’m going to do if she doesn’t want to move out after three months…

Discuss with Realtor Pal, to see if he can help find her a place to rent — he says the rental market, especially in the “reasonable rent” category, is impossibly tight right now and it could be difficult to find her a place to live. Because she’s getting so little from the house sale, it’s not going to be easy to get her into a condo or patio home, either:  she underpiced to begin with and then she agreed to give huge allowances to rereoof the place ($10,000) and do the pool repairs and apparently some other things, and then she discovered the house had a $45,000 lien against it to cover the care of her crazed father, Carlos the Knife, as he descended into his final dotage. He says that she should get her money on Friday when the deal closes and in fact if she asks they should cut her a check on the spot. By the way, Realtor Pal asks, what am I going to do if she doesn’t want to move out after three months?

Now I’m feeling behind the barrel.

Phone rings: it’s my son, wanting to see how I am and, while he’s standing in line at a deli to buy his dinner, to lay plans for the next Surgery Day. I explain what’s going on. He says, “I’ll be right over.”

He arrives, riding his white charger.

This man is an automobile insurance adjustor. His job is to spend the whole damn day, every day, listening to people’s sad stories, fielding their demands for compensation, and telling them “no.”  He pours a bourbon and water. I tell him the story with all its convolutions.

He says, “You stay here. I’ll take care of this.”

Mounting his white charger and taking up his white lance, he gallops across the street and presents himself at Neighbor’s door. Drawing from deep wells of testosterone-fueled swagger (God, but men are amazing creatures!), he informs her that he has unilaterally decided that his mother is not taking on a roommate one day after she has breast surgery. He tempers this by claiming that I’m actually a great deal more fragile than I look, and says he has decided this is all a very bad idea.

She says no problem, she’s sure she can find someplace else to stay.

So. Thank God and my doughty son, I’m out from under that. What a flap!

Today, then, all I have to do is deal with the plumber, deal with the cleaning lady, deal with the new 102 class, deal with new copy sent by paying client, prepare for surgery, and call in to the hospital after 4 p.m. to find out when it’s scheduled. Doesn’t that all sound like jolly fun?

At least I won’t be moving furniture out of the spare room…

$4333 an Hour??

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So along comes an itemized statement of charges from the Mayo Clinic, for the surgery, the anaesthesia, the this, the that and the other. Are you ready?

Are you sure you’re ready?

Be forewarned: it may not be possible to be ready.

Okay, so you’re really ready…

Thirteen thousand dollars.

That’s right: $13,000.

Think of that. The whole adventure from start to finish took about three hours.

$13,000/3 = $4,333.33 an hour

{sigh} Reminded, once again: we’re in the wrong business.

The Worst Threat the World Has Seen Since WW II

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The Guardian is running a story titled “‘Apocalyptic’ Isis beyond anything we’ve seen,’ say US defence chiefs.” Now, it’s true, The Guardian tends to exaggerate. But lemme tellya: this one is no exaggeration.

I lived in Saudi Arabia for ten years, in one of the remotest parts of a remote kingdom. We lived among the local people, who, during the 1950s, were still dwelling in conditions Europeans would think of as medieval, culturally and materially. No love was lost on Americans among the Saudis, and let me assure you, the murder of an innocent victim such as James Foley as a device to express hatred, vengeance, dominance, and menace was culturally acceptable then and it remains so now.

The West in general and the United States in specific have made so many bone-headed mistakes in the Middle East that it is impossible to keep track of them. Those stupid moves are coming home to roost now. With the ascendance of the kind of people who make it a religion to hate the West — to some degree with good reason — and the suppression of ruthless dictators who had a vested interest in keeping the peace, we do indeed face an apocalyptic threat. The Moslem extremists who are fast seizing power are fully capable of and feel justified in exploding nuclear bombs, releasing poison gas, and spreading engineered disease in cities filled with civilians, in any country on the planet. And sooner or later they will do so.

The most serious recent  mistake the West has made was to support the overthrow of strongmen like Saddam Hussein and his ilk. That is because we operate under a fundamental error: we believe, as though it were a religious tenet, that because democracy works for us it must therefore be best for everyone else in the world. And that is not true.

Democracy does not necessarily fit every culture. That is especially so for cultures that spawn groups capable of the atrocities we’ve already seen — atrocities that, you may be sure, are just the beginning. We need to butt out of the governance of other people’s countries. If a dictator is what’s needed to keep extreme jihadists under control, then a dictator is who should be in power. But stupidly, we failed to take advantage of the strongmen who were in a position to do that. When we should have continued to cultivate them, we dethroned them, or encouraged the locals to dethrone them. This was exceptionally stupid.

Our longest-running mistake in the Middle East has been to build dependence on the region’s oil supplies to support America’s enormous, spendthrift energy needs. This forced us to intertwine our economy and our politics with cultures that are not our friends and never have been our friends. Surpassing exceptionally stupid. We would have been better off to dig up all of Alaska, Canada, the Dakotas, the Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico than to establish the kind of dependence that we have now and have had for decades. When you compare the two evils, the former would have been less harmful to the United States as a nation and to the West as an alliance of technologically developed nations.

Our second-oldest mistake — hang onto your hats, folks, because I’m about to surpass myself in political incorrectness — was to support the establishment of Israel and maintain an alliance with it.

Think about Israel from an Arab point of view: This is a Western sovereignty populated mostly by people with European cultural roots that was forcibly planted on soil stolen from Palestine. Western allies supported its development shortly after the Second World War for a simple, truly evil reason: no one wanted to provide homes and safety for the millions of Jewish refugees from European tyranny. Instead of opening our borders to the beleaguered victims of a murderous time, we exploited a specious religious belief that a plot of territory on the Mediterranean was a God-given “promised land” to the Europeanized and Americanized descendants of an ancient nomadic tribe. After all, we persuaded ourselves, the Jews were there first.

Well. Maybe. But consider an American analogue. Let us suppose the European Union decided that Virginia should be removed from the governance of the United States and returned to the Pamunkey and Mattaponi Indians, on the theory that they were there first and Virginia is, after all, their land. Imagine how that would go over! It’s just about as rational, though, as ripping out a chunk of Palestine and handing it over to the descendants of the Hebrew tribes.

Given that Israel has systematically oppressed the local Palestinians and as we scribble is in the process of killing hundreds of civilians in its own defense (2000 Palestinians vs. 68 Israelis), it’s not surprising that Arabs feel a certain resentment toward the West.

In my opinion, ISIS is the worst threat to Western civilization that we have seen since Adolf Hitler. We need to crush this outfit NOW, even if it means dropping plutonium bombs on Syria, Iran, and Iraq, killing innocents along with the criminal extremists, and letting God sort them out. We cannot allow ISIS to gain any more power, territory, weapons, or political influence — period. If stopping ISIS means killing everybody in sight, that’s what we need to do.

We need to go all-out in building an energy infrastructure completely free of any association with any Middle Eastern country, even if it means despoiling our lands, raising the price of gasoline, building more nuclear plants across the nation, and perforce limiting the amount of power we expend.

We need to quit sending military aid, economic aid, and political support to Israel, even if it means evacuating every person of European ancestry and Jewish heritage and finding homes and jobs for them in Western countries. How about Virginia for starters?

My mother was not an educated woman. But she was perceptive. Sometimes she said things that amounted to metaphor. Once, she remarked, in so many words, that “Armageddon will come out of the Middle East.”

It sounds extreme. But she was commenting on an extreme situation.

World War III will come out of the Middle East. And WW III, given the kinds of weapons we have now and the fanaticism of our opponents, could very well be the Western world’s Armageddon.

Postscript, 8/23/2014: Don’t believe me? Well then, take a look at this authoritative article by Ed Husain, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a senior advisor to the Tony Blair Faith Foundation. It appears in this morning’s New York Times. What Mr. Husain describes exactly reflects my own experience of a decade in Saudi Arabia.

Stuff Not Done, Booze, and Wasted Days

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So today after the time-sucking faculty meeting, I’d planned to…

a) make a Costco run;
b) drag another stack of Medicare & Medigap checks to the credit union;
c) return something to Petco and get the dog vitamins I forgot while buying the useless piece of junk there;
d) do all the college tasks I’d listed during the meeting;
e) have a nice lunch/dinner (big meal happens at mid-day here…supposedly good for your diet);
f) write 16 weekly posts for the online 102 course;
g) write more of the current difficult scene in Fire-Rider II;
h) return strange beads I didn’t order to Fire Mountain;
i) write a post for Plain & Simple Writers;
j) write a post for Funny about Money;…

…and so on.

Welp. Got the Costco run done. That’s something. I guess.

At CC, I bought one of their wonderfully delicious (salt-saturated!!!!) roasted chickens. And some sugar snap peas. And some asparagus. And…well, you can’t have chicken without white wine, can you? A bottle of cheap white.

By the time I shot out the door, a stiff breeze had come up, bearing dark clouds from the west. Weather reports had threatened more storms this afternoon. The area up around the college and over where the Costco was hard-hit during the recent monsoon blasts, and it looked like another one was blowing in fast. Decided the checks and the dog thingies could wait until tomorrow. Besides, after two hours of cooling my heels and trying to look interested in the new chair’s every word, I was getting damned hungry.

So flew back into the central city, flew in the house, wrung out the dogs, and proceeded to saute those lovely peas, slice that nice hot juicy chicken, and tossed together an amazing salad with tender little raw asparagus spears, beet, tomato, yummy sweet mini-peppers, LGOs, and on and on. And, well…naturally, took a wrench to the wine bottle’s screw-on cap.

Decided to write a post on the baleful need for a wrench, a pair of pliers, and a heavy-duty pair of scissors or tin snips in the kitchen drawer.

Sat down to eat. And drink.

Yesh.

After consuming a half-bottle+ of that soda-poppy wine, I staggered back into the back of the house and fell face-first on the bed. Slept until five-freaking thirty!!!!!!!

Helle’s belles.

Wine is dangerous. I’ve learned, actually, that hard liquor makes a lot better choice of boozie-poos. Believe it or not.

I love wine. It tastes so good. And it’s so easy to dispense. Just tip the bottle over and presto-changeo! There’s another whole glassful! So when I’m eating that big meal in the middle of the day, I tend to merrily keep pouring enough to go with the food still on the plate…and to lose track of how much I’ve had.

I love bourbon, too. But…making a bourbon and water requires a process. You have to get up off your duff, walk into the kitchen, get the bottle down, get out the jigger, get out a glass, fill it with ice, measure the booze, pour it into the glass, and top it off with filtered ice water from the fridge.

That is what we call a hassle. Enough of a hassle to get one’s attention and say “that’s enough of THAT!” So as a practical matter, when I’m drinking hard liquor I don’t drink anything like as much as I do when I’m pouring wine.

You also have a lot more control over how much alcohol goes into a given mixed drink. Lately I’ve discovered that a half-a-jigger of bourbon mixed with the usual amount of water and ice is not a heckuva lot less satisfying than a whole jigger. Really, bourbon-flavored water is what we’re lookin’ for here. So that means that if I pour two drinks to go with a large meal, I’m actually only drinking 1.75 ounces of alcohol — the amount the gummint classifies as “one serving” of alcohol.

You can’t do that with wine. Well. You can. But who would?

It’s along about 9:40 p.m. now. I did manage to write a new post for P&S Writers. Fed the dogs. It’s raining, a much quieter, softer, gentler, cooler rain than we’ve had of late. I’m sitting on the patio watching the juice run out of this computer. The charge is down to 6%, and soon the thing will give up the ghost.

And so, to Netflix.