When I was 10, some kid found a robin egg during recess. A posse of us gathered ’round, as if a bird egg had never been seen before, each of us elbowing our way closer to it. I was desperate to get my paws on it, but knew nobody was going to just hand it over. And as we all know, desperation can make people do desperate things.
“Give it over here,” I said. “In science camp, we learned how to tell if the bird is still alive, you know, in the shell, er whatever.”
Where the hell this colossal lie came from I can’t tell you. I didn’t even go to science camp until the following year, and even then all we learned was weird stuff about banana slugs’ relationships to redwood trees.
But my big, fat lie worked and within seconds, I held a light blue egg in my doughy little kid hands.
“Now what?” one of the kids asked.
I panicked, but knew I could never let them see me sweat.
“Well, you just hold it up to your ear like this and listen really, really hard.”
I then pressed it closer to my ear, finally smashing what turned out to be a rotten bird egg into my hair, forever ruining my rep as a budding orthinologist. It was also the first and last time I suckered anyone into anything.
From there on out, like some kind of bullshitting karma, I have been fooled over and over again by others. My friend, Kris, likes to call me “pretty” when I believe things such as “hockey goals only count if it’s a back-handed wrist shot.”
Don’t get me wrong. If you want to sell me a used car, I will see right through you and your leaking brake lines.
However, if you are someone I know and trust, you can tell me just about anything and I will believe you. I may have scored high on the SATs, I may have legitimately dated a man in Mensa, but damn it if I don’t go totally blonde at times.
About a week ago I received a text reading, “Will you make that cake again? Allison really wants it but she is too shy to ask.”
This was utter bullshit. Not only is Allison never too shy to ask for anything, she is a staunch pie advocate.
But I covered the cake pans in Pam and made the fruity shortcake from scratch and drove it up the mountain anyhow, filled with the feeling that I was a rad, cake-making friend and prepared to tell Allison that, honey, if you want a cake, never be afraid to ask.
Turns out, her husband just wanted the cake for himself.
And because I am not only gullible but also an insufferable know-it-all, if you tell me hockey goals only count if it’s a back-handed wrist shot, I will repeat this as gospel and fight to the death over it in public situations. This is deeply funny to everyone else but me.
So obviously, I enjoy hearing when someone else has been gullible.
A good friend, who happens to be an actual rocket scientist, believed her dad when he said the family cabin belonged to Chuck Norris.
Now, if someone told you the family rented a cabin from Walker, Texas Ranger, wouldn’t you WANT to believe it? Chuck Norris’ cabin is easily the sweetest, ass-kickingest cabin in the world. He also makes an incredible cake from scratch and pioneered the backhanded wrist shot in hockey. It’s true.
Jeanine Fritz writes about the technicalities of hockey every Friday in the Colorado Daily.
