Dating, Dolphins, and Dancing (Disco/freestyle)
Your parents did it, your grandparents did it, and you do it (and if you’re thinking you don’t, then you’re doing it to yourself right now). Lying!! We’re all big fat liars, people have been telling lies since, well since people have been people. Essentially, despite how much we like to laud ourselves as a species; humanity is made up of, lies, liars and the lying liars who tell them.
Now far be it from me to advocate lying, there are times, I’m sure, where honesty really is the best policy. No doubt it’s best to tell the truth, if a doctor asks for your blood type. you might even say it’s best to always be honest with those in authority… But if you’ve ever been sat behind the wheel and heard the immortal phrase “sir, do you know how fast you were going?” you’ll know the correct answer is “No” even though you’re fully aware you’ve been hurtling down the M1 doing significant fraction of the speed of sound.
Clearly then, we’re all liars. Now, granted some lies are worse than others… it’s clearly not as bad to lie about eating the last of the Crunchy Nut Cornflakes, as it was for Jowly presidential prankster ‘tricky’ Dick Nixon to declare “I am not a crook”… So it’s fair to say there’s bad lies, and there’s good lies, we all know that. Anyway, at this point you might be wondering, what place has this essay on lying got on a dating website… Well I’ll tell you. It’s all about a third, much more fun, kind of lie. The pointless, yet brazenly ambitious lie…. the lie that’s so extreme that it goes beyond unbelievable, a lie so absurd, that it victims don’t believe anyone would be silly enough to make up such a tall tale…. And therein lies its genius.
Let me explain….
It all started a few years ago, the summer after graduation to be precise. Being a young, hungry go getter, my time was occupied by seemingly endless rounds of high pressure drinking, and meaningless sex. For a long time the only blot on this happy summer landscape, was the occasional horror of a job interview (one of which even led to some kind of job I think), but these were a necessary evil. They maintained the high levels of parental pride, that had followed number one son’s graduation… pride was obviously of little use to me, but the flow of parental cash that accompanied it, was funding my salubrious lifestyle
All was well in the world, not so much as a cloud on the horizon… Until the day we decided to get ambitious. An old friend and I were enjoying a sunny afternoon in park, when we decided it would be a good idea to change things up a gear. To that point, we’d still being living the student life. Going to student bars, drinking student booze, and scoring with student girls… but then it dawned on us, we were no longer students… We were proper people now! Ok we weren’t encumbered by the trappings of being ‘proper’ people, y’know like jobs or responsibility, but hey such niceties didn’t concern us… we were masters of the universe, we could do whatever we liked… or so we thought.
Our plan seemed sound enough too us, we’d ditch the usual Weatherspoons and cheesy club, and we’d head into soho or Mayfair, and blow some of Mum and Dad’s coin, trying to woo the Friday night after work girls… what could go wrong?! Well the answer, it turns out, is quite a lot! See, in our little world of drunk undergraduate girls, and the occasional sixth former, we’d been like kings. Graduates no less, about to set out on long and exciting careers, yadda, yadda, yadda. That had been our meal ticket, we were cool, older, exciting. But that night, we were out of our element, we were boys in a man’s world. Turns out, that people with actual careers, aren’t that impressed by a couple of 22 year olds, with no job and not much in the way of drive, or ambition either…. To these people we were NINJAs. No, not the good kind, no sir-ee! NINJA, as in No Income No Job or Assets. Honestly, we’d have been better received it we’d told people we were carrying a highly contagious strain of bird flu…. A change of tack was clearly needed!
The answer seemed obvious, we’d overcome this problem with the power of lies, if someone asked what we did, we’d say we were bankers, or lawyers… easy, problem solved. Sadly our new plan had more problems than Britney Spears at a custody hearing. The biggest of which being, What happens when the girl you’ve just told you’re an investment banker, is a real investment banker? It’s an episode I’ve tried hard to delete from my conscious mind, suffice to say there was some errr unpleasantness, and a great deal of embarrassment… now let us never speak of it again.
The solution to our problem came to me, drunkenly and without warning. It was the following night… to this day, I’m not sure exactly where we were, or where the answer came from… if I’m honest I cant even remember what the girls looked like (although when I tell the story to my mates, they’re always gorgeous). But anyway, it was somewhere in the West End, Paul and I had managed to strike up a bit of a rapport with a couple of kinda classy (by our standards anyway) girls. Then came the dreaded question… “so what do you do?” . Now there could be any number answers to this question, and I will never know how or why, without any conscious thought, the next words to leave my mouth were, “I am a Dolphin trainer”
Somehow, I managed to deliver this line with glib matter of fact-ness, and rather than seem absurd, it sounded credible! Certainly credible enough for the girls to become interested, enthralled even… But I wasn’t done yet, not by long shot, I was in the zone. Suddenly I was talking again, out was coming this incredible back story…. Facts about dolphins, sea conditions, echo location the problems of tuna fishing. I was practically talking in tongues! Any question they had, I had an answer, and good one too. All those student days vegetating in front of the Discovery Channel, were finally paying off. Through some process of osmosis, I’d absorbed enough information on marine biology do a passable impression of Jacques Cousteau!
And the lies just kept on coming… Apparently, I’d been an exchange student at the University of Miami, where I’d met and fallen in love with a beautiful, and brilliant American girl… love struck and unable to leave her, I’d risked everything to get a full time transfer to the Universty of Miami. Our fairytale romance blossomed, we’d even discussed marriage. Then one day, she’d been offered her dream job, a chance of a lifetime, a two year research assignment studying the eco systems of coral reefs, in the Cook Islands. She said she’d turn it down, but being the gentleman I was… I told her to take it…. I loved her too much to see her waste the opportunity of a lifetime.
Obviously distraught by the loss of ‘Tiffany’, I’d messed up my final year at university. I was on the verge of giving up my dreams, and coming back to London to work for my dad, when a friend had taken pity on me and got me a keeper’s job at Sea World. From then on I’d trained dolphins and been involved in ground breaking research into these, amazing animals….. I was just back in London for a break, because it was hurricane season in florida, so training dolphins was impossible.. Blah, blah, blah!! I mean it was all total utter nonsense, bollocks of the highest order! but I’d damn near convinced myself it was true, let alone the girls! My mate Paul, was standing there bemused but entertained, and the crazy thing was…. It worked, it worked like a charm.
This technique of the Brazen lie continued for quite some time, Paul developed his own dating alter ego. He was a dancer (disco/freestyle), having seen him dance, I thought this was a risk, but in all the months we tried this routine he didn’t get caught out once. He even got business cards printed! And while travelling through Australia and South East Asia, he decided put it as his occupation on those landing cards you have to complete before clearing customs. So no doubt immigration records in various countries, state that they were visited by a slightly portly dancer (disco/freestyle) during late 2003. As for myself, well I stuck with the dolphin trainer line, I developed it too. I actually started doing research on the web, so I could weave even more detail into my big fat lies. These days I actually know a whole hell of a lot about dolphins… I can tell you that the Bottlenose Dolphin, is the most intelligent of the dolphins. In fact in terms of relative brain size (something called encephalization quotient or EQ ) Bottlenose Dolphins are second only to us humans (probably above George Bush) in terms of Braininess. The Dolphin has an EQ score of 5.31, us humans do best with a score of 7.44, but when you consider a dog only gets 1.17, and even a chimp only scores 2.49, them cute, smiley dolphins are smart cookies!…. So smart I reckon they’d approve of my lies. Hell they probably lie to get action with the ladies too. After all, Dolphins are one of the few other animals that enjoy recreational sex … Sneaky little suckers!
By Dan
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