Lies My Teacher Told Me

My friend Pablo is a New York City public school teacher and he looooves to lie to his students. If you know Pablo, then that's not a big surprise - as I've mentioned before, he convinced our classmates in Spanish class that he slept in a bed made of tupperware. His skills also allow him to haggle at Best Buy and get his iPaq fixed by Hewlett Packard for free. Some of his college friends thought he was majoring in piscatology. It is definitely not a good thing to be gullible around Paulito.

He has convinced his students that the principal is his mother, and that in fact, half the teachers are related; that an absent science teacher was going to be on the next installment of The Apprentice, which, by the way, many of the teachers wound up believing too; that an absent social studies teacher had quit to become a Vegas showgirl; that there's pool on the roof of the school.

Beyond the lies he's told to his kids, he managed to convince a dude who was hitting on his friend in a bar that he was from Ireland, wouldn't drink American Guinness because it's shite and was getting his master's degree in ceramic engineering. And when we were in high school, he had me believing for months that he had a girlfriend from Ramsey.

Kate, who, aside from being one of my oldest and dearest friends, is also Pablo's best bud from high school, is also a skilled liar. She convinced her boyfriend that she had shaved her head except for a tuft of hair in the front; had her roommate in college believing that she showered with her underwear on because she didn't like to be naked; and invented a lesbian lover named Mudabwe from Kenya.

Watching the two of them, you'd think that you could learn how to lie. But I'm truly terrible - it's the physical turning beat red and the giggles that I just can't stop. It's like my own internal lie detector, which forces me to be honest. I've come to believe that telling an intricate lie requires just enough truth to seem real, the ability to think on one's feet, and maintaining eye contact and a straight face.

Can you lie to a liar? I've never seen Pablo pull a fast one on Kate, but just this past year, Kate convinced P that his official title in her wedding would be "bridesbutler." Awesome. So here's to the liars, who make me laugh and keep me from falling into a pit of gullability.