Truth be told I am a liar. I have lied and most likely will continue to lie with the full knowledge that what is about to come out of my mouth IS in fact a lie. Am I powerless to stop it?  The answer is no. Are there circumstances where a lie is acceptable? Again, no. Why do I do it you ask? Is lying really much easier than being honest? No I don’t think so. Lying is less confrontational, it is easier to lie than it is to be honest but trying to keep track of the lies is near impossible and eventually the truth will come out.

There have been times when the phone has rung and rather than simply answer it I check the caller ID. No I don’t call this “screening my calls” I call it “am I really in the mood to talk to X”. If it’s someone that I have to be mentally ready to talk to there’s a good chance that the call will go unanswered at least 50% of the time. Then 40% of the time I’ll either “just be on my way out the door” or “just getting in”. The remaining 10% will be the calls that I actually take. Basically 90% of the time I’ll lie to those folks that I need to be ready to talk  listen to not because it’s easier for me but because it’s easier for them, or so I thought.

I recently put someone’s calls on ignore for a few days and when they asked me where in Sam Hill I had been for so long I caved. I told them the bare truth, that I have been really busy lately with precious time to myself and have not been in the mood to take their calls. Needless to say the next 5 minutes were quite tense as they insisted that what I had just said was mean spirited. When I asked them to pick between a lie and the truth they oddly enough, chose the truth but suggested that the next time they call and I’m not “up” to talking listening to them I should just say so and they’ll call me another time. Ya, right, like that will work!

Folks would call those types of lies “little white lies” and say they are harmless really but do they not harm someone. Are we not harming ourselves by not setting up barriers for the folks who call and suck the brains out of our heads. Are we not enabling their boundary free behavior by simply “being out” when they call rather than telling them that they can be draining to talk to?

Currently I am walking a road with someone who is seeing their own life unraveling as the lies are catching up to them. These are not the little white lies that hurt no one but rather the type of lies that leave everyone wondering just what is real and what is a lie. These lies will destroy not only the person’s life but also the lives of those who they hold near and dear. I am losing a friend and they are losing credibility because for them, it’s just easier to lie than to be honest. What a waste of a life, a love and a marriage.

I wonder….did they start with the line “ya, sorry I missed your call I must have been out”?

Well here it is December 20th and the only decorations I have up are the ones that Steve has put up. He put the outside lights up a while ago and this evening he brought the tree out of it’s hiding place and put it up. Sadly it’s been sitting up, naked,  for about 2 hours now and I could really care less.

There was a time when I would begin to get excited about Christmas in September and the closer December 25th got the more excited I was. Family dynamics, excessive stress and broken promises of sobriety year after year seems to have completely killed my Christmas joy or have I finally grown up?

As I sit here and stare at the bare tree I remember what Christmas was like when I was a kid. My dad would rant and rave as my mom, my brother and I loaded up the car and began a journey that lasted all of two hours back to where we came from. Every Christmas we would all gather back at my aunt’s house which was just down the street from where we lived when we lived in Quebec. It would be crowded, very energetic, loud and fueled with the excitement that kids always bring to Christmas. Always there was a current of tension that I didn’t understand as a child but it always took the edge off happiness as all the adults tip toed around the white elephant in the house.

There were a few occasionswhen I was either too young to pick up on the animosity or I found a way to escape from it that made Christmas blissful but they were very few. In the last 15 years the tension was brought to our house and both Steve and I began to resent the Christmas season. We made “rules of conduct” for my parents that no child should have to make just so we could keep the peace for a few days. What started out as a 4 day stay at our house got whittled down through the years into a few hours and in the last year we tried to avoid a visit all together.

Last year was the first Christmas without my mom and Christmas was exactly what we expected it to be, somber, reflective and somewhat empty. We went to bed on  Christmas Day complete with the obligatory drunken phone call from my father and that’s how Christmas has been in recent years.

This year  Christmas will be a little different as it seems the glue that held my immediate and extended family together was my mom and it is now crystal clear that the family Christmas will continue without me. This leaves me feeling neither sad, nor lonely or even slightly hurt, this year I feel much like the Christmas tree in the living room, up but not decorated.

Either I am a chameleon or I truly am an easy going, nice person. Over the last year I have worked at three different places and I seem to blend in really easy. Within a few days it’s like I’ve been there for years and we’re all one big happy group. It’s very cool but very unnerving at the same time and I often catch myself wondering…..what if……. I’m a lizard.

I worked with someone on Saturday that had me checking her for gills. From 8 am to 2 pm the girl just babbled, non stop, without end either to/at me or any other pair of ears that happened along. I had no idea that someone could talk so much without going hoarse or blowing up from gulping air. I had read an article the night before that stated people who smoke, chew gum or talk alot suffer from bloating more than the average person simply due to the amount of air they intake. OK, so I got the smoking part but I had no idea that  when you chew gum you also swallow air. No wonder gum is so filling

I tend to like things low key, low noise so Saturday was well, very trying. By hour number 2 I was convinced that she was simply nervous and took to babbling to battle her nerves. But oh no, by hour 3 she was just getting into her groove and I was desperately searching for a piece of tape. I even went so far as to try an escape into the washroom (as far as “public” washrooms go, this one is not on my list of ones I’d use) the girl stood outside the washroom door so she could finish telling me her story. You have got to be kidding me, right? It was an entire day of T.M.I.

The sad thing about Saturday is it was a holiday (pretty quiet) so there I was like a fish trapped inside a bowl that I could not escape and someone was tapping non stop on the glass. Actually she is a very nice girl with a huge heart but her enthusiasm about working with me more often is scary. I think this gig is going to work out very nicely for me though, we’re already one big happy group that has that feel of familiarity that only comes from time spent together. Gils or not, I have found myself surrounded by some very fine people who seem to truly care about one another beyond the premise of “what can you do for me”.

I had a conversation with someone recently and I confessed to something that I thought would be obvious by now. I’m a procrastinator who can come up with really good excuses and the root of it all is laziness. I will put off doing something until it must be done. I will come up with all sorts of clever excuses for why stuff isn’t done sooner but in the end it all comes down to my own laziness. So having confessed to this person whom by the way was truly shocked by my confession, they thought what I really need was to make a list of things I need to do.

Hmmm, a list! Truth be told….I have a list of all the different lists I have broken down into categories and sub-categories. They suggested that I make my list according to preference ie, put the stuff I don’t like doing first and the stuff I like to do last. Let me think……I have a list that lists the lists of stuff I don’t like to do and lists of the stuff I do like to do. I have even grabbed one of my lists, a pencil and a blindfold then set about eliminating one item from my list by poking at it blindfolded. Yes, it is possible to completely miss the paper when you’re blindfolded and because you’ve missed the paper entirely you can just skip doing something. Can you now appreciate the level of my laziness?

In a few weeks we will be leaving for our annual multi-week camping trip and I have tried to refine my lists into something smaller. I think by downsizing my lists I will get motivated to do things in a timely fashion and perhaps spend a whole lot less time running around like a crack addicted gerbil on the last day. That’s my hope anyway, but then again I only just booked my grass cutter and I’ve had 3 months to do that in. Sigh, am I hopeless or what?

Life was going along pretty good until Telus started running this new ad campaign. I have driven Steve absolutely crackers signing the chorus to this one. Could be that I will suddenly start singing it at all hours of the day or night for no apparent reason. Either way, much like immitating the female judge from “So you think you can dance” (no I DO NOT watch the show) when she laughs this is another activity that is now banished from our home when he is here. I will live through my laptop.