But Facebook is an easy place to lie. How easy is it for you to post what is likely the most (or only) flattering picture of you at “just the right angle and lighting”? Or, you could “forget” to put your relationship status, (if you’re married, this is awkward). You could write whatever you want about yourself (who can prove it?) and your favourite movie that you list could really be that obscure indie film but no one will know if you’ve ever seen it.

Its hard to tell lies on Facebook. How can you tell if someone is making up what they’re writing or how they want us to perceive them? So this is what I am going to say — Facebook is to be taken at face value. The intimate views and understanding of someone will NOT come from there — pick up the phone and call someone to figure that stuff out.

Until I come back, feel free to read www.xkcd.com as he seems to be wiretapped into my brain anyways.

This is why when a man has come up to me in the past and said “I’m a doctor, lawyer, investment banker, professor”, I get that shiny glazed over look in my eyes and try for the nearest exit. If you’re picking me up based on your profession…yuck.

So what I’m addressing now is the all-too-common level of excitement women (and their Jewish mothers) get when they are going on a date with a doctor. (Or insert whatever profession there).

I’m just going to play devil’s advocate for a second here — but I can understand why people get excited by the idea of dating someone who is a ______.

Let’s use doctor as an example. One could argue that most doctors are intelligent, kind, and compassionate people. Let’s give them slightly above average ratings on those three characteristics. Then, let’s add their ability to make sacrifices (ask any doctor or current med school student, sacrifices must be made) and level of perseverance — I think that’s the most important one — and you could argue that they are diligent workers and dedicated to their goals. If you take away the status that comes with being a doctor, it doesn’t change the character traits. Now, this is not accounting for the douchebags I’m certain most of you have had the displeasure of encountering, just a bell-curve type of analysis.

The same applies to other things like a teacher (loves kids?), lawyer (I have no positive spin on this one), investment banker (dresses well, haha).

I gave him the short version of this long answer that I will now explain in detail.

Let’s take three parts into consideration:

1) People are icebergs — just like an iceberg, 90% is hidden below the surface. So that means that if you are recently getting to know someone, you are lucky to get the 10% that the world can see.

2) People are onions — they have many layers. Each layer you peel leads to more layers. Some people can be in a relationship for an incredibly long period of time and never get to each other’s core. Those are the relationships that don’t shake you.

3) People are ever changing and always growing (unless you’re boring, in which case, date someone boring and be done with it.)

Now for the math part.

If you want to be able to like 99.9% of what your partner is/does, you must a) be present for 99.9% of what they do and b) know 99.9% of who they are. This is highly unlikely unless you live/work/do everything together (kill me now) or have them followed by a cameraman. Moving on to a more realistic situation…

If you’re lucky, after a few months, let’s say you get to know 30-40% of the fundamentals of who your partner is and the quirks and idiosyncracies that make them who they are. At the rate that you are getting to know them, let’s say they are increasing “themselves” at that same rate (by doing new things, by learning new ideas, by trying new delicious cuisines). In the formative years, one could argue that the rate of growth is greater than the rate of you getting to know them. Maybe the inverse is true in the later years. If you are someone who does not share much, maybe it takes longer for someone to learn about you but you are still growing.

So we’ll start with you knowing 30-40% of your partner. But your partner is growing his database of “interesting fundamental things” at a rate of 5% per year. If you’re lucky, you’ll learn at that rate too — but you probably won’t, because you’re self-absorbed…so you’ll learn less. You will learn maybe 3% of the new things, while attempting to grasp the old ones, the formative memories and experiences that have shaped someone into who they are. Let’s assume, if you’re lucky, that you’ll learn 10% of your partner’s past experiences (past meaning, pre-you) by the end of your lifetime together. 10% is nothing. After you meet, things get factoured into the “shared memories and experiences” bin.

What does this mean? That if you’re lucky enough to have a dynamic, interesting partner, you will always know < 50% of what there is to know. They will remain interesting, enigmatic, and if you’re even luckier, you will assume that the rest of the 50% is as good as the half you do know.

To love 99.9% of what they’re doing now and who they are now is not factouring in the myriad of actions they have taken to become who they have become, and the endless number of memories you have the choice to make together.

There is so much left to learn.

The only thing that matters, really, is relative importance.

To the man in the desert, if you are distributing the water portions, you are the most important person to him right then. It doesn’t matter if someone, somewhere is out there curing AIDS because at that moment, the only thing that matters is the water.

That is the key to making yourself indispensable in an organization, in a relationship, in a friendship, in anything. You need to be the guy holding the water because there will always be someone smarter or better than you. You need to be what they need right now and to be what they need right now, you need to be thinking 10 steps ahead of where you are.

I decide whether its going to be a good day or a bad day and then I make it such. Some days, when I wake up with that heavy, deep-seated feeling of “this is not going to be a good day”, its harder to make it a good day. But, its still within my control.

Its different with people because people will always disappoint you. My ex-boyfriend used to say that he had no expectations, ever, and therefore no disappointment. I, on the other hand, let the buildup of excitement over something/someone happen, I let the expectation happen — but then the disappointment follows.

My argument was that I was always satisfied more than I was disappointed. That of 10 single events where it could go into the satisfaction/disappointment direction, say 8 out of 10 went well. 80%.

80% is a good number, 80% is a good value to allow yourself to build up an expectation for something.

But when you break down the stats to situations (work, for example) or people, the numbers are more easily manipulated. You can say, X person disappoints you 100% of the time…therefore, you need to either a) get rid of X person, or b) readjust your expectations. Sometimes its you and sometimes its them. If its 50/50, maybe its both of you. 50/50 is harder to figure out. And if you’re 100% satisfied, you shouldn’t change a thing.

If you were to change anything, the first things you should change are your expectations.

Dad said he was shocked. And ecstatic. “You signed a one year lease when you didn’t have to, you’re actually committing to something, you’re actually settling somewhere.” It wasn’t just the lease, I also went out and bought more furniture and tried to make the place look nice. To make it look like somewhere I would “stay for a while.”

I am someone with wanderlust in my heart mind.

Yesterday I craved Italy. I craved the ruins of the volcano I walked through that made my legs black and made me feel so small.

Today I crave the beaches of Tel Aviv. I wanted to feel the talc-like sand in my nose, scratching my camera lens like it did last year.

Tomorrow I will crave the River Liffey in Dublin. I will crave the marble slabs they have put on the bridge as benches. I will remember my naps there in the summer sun, melting my chocolate eggs.

Maybe one day I will crave Chicago and I will crave my bed the way I crave the beaches and marble slabs.

This was a big step for me.

As someone who is fascinated with truth, deception, emotions, micro-expressions, and social interactions in general, it should come as no surprise that I hold a lot of value to telling the truth, as truth is defined relative to me.

I don’t believe in absolute truth (or rather, that there is no such thing as an absolute lie) because I think the definition of lying is based on a social contract or a verbal agreement.

An example of this is the following: a friend of mine is in an open marriage and he admitted to me that he doesn’t have to tell his wife when he fancies or kisses another woman, only when he sleeps with her. In most relationships, even kissing, or thinking about kissing another woman and not telling your partner is considered lying. But, that’s not so in his case because that is what they agreed to.

If no explicit agreement has been made between you and another person, you can assume the basic “definition of lying” applies:

- misinformation/untruths;

- omission of pertinent information.

To take it a step further, I’ve further defined the second point to be something around the lines of “the omission of any information that would, if discovered/discussed later, cause a negative emotional response from either party, and/or cause resentment to build up (as in my case)”

That opens the doors to a lot of room for lying — lying if you don’t tell someone how you feel about something. Lying, if by not doing so, you lash out in a passive-aggressive way.

So — I plan on going into my beliefs on lying and the truth in a lot more detail in other posts. This post was where I wanted to discuss the importance of knowing the limits of your ability to lie. It is akin to knowing your own physical strength and ability to hurt someone in that fashion.

To be concrete — I am, objectively*, a fantastic liar. So, I just don’t lie. It is not easier to tell the truth, it is in fact, more difficult to hold yourself to that standard but I have moral objections to lying.

But, if it is of interest to you to learn to be a better liar, I will tell you how (including the obvious points).

1- Short and sweet, skip the details. This one’s called the “falsifiability heuristic” and can be translated simply to — why are they telling me so many details? But, the second part of this is that the more details you divulge, the higher the chance that one of them may be wrong. And, if one part of your story checks out as false, the likelihood of the rest being false increases. This is not reversible, if only one part of your story checks out as true, the likelihood of the rest being true does not increase. That’s human nature.

Here is an example: Your husband comes home from a late “day at work” and tells you that he was working on a project that ran late because of a tight deadline. The project was for Company X. The people that stayed late were your husband, his assistant (a woman), Paul and Joe. He ordered Chinese food from Restaurant X for dinner.

There are six facts that the husband shared. Six points that can be true or false and easily verified. So the next day you’re at the office bringing him something and you see Chinese food containers in the bin — that corroborates the story, but doesn’t necessarily mean he wasn’t there screwing around with his lady assistant. Then, you run into Joe and ask “how’d it work out, your deadline for Company X?” Unless his response perfectly corroborates what the hubby said, its enough to throw the entire story off.

Let’s say Joe says:

“Oh man, last night was brutal. We were here until midnight.” — Matches up perfectly.

“Yeah, it was a bit rough, we had to stay a few hours late but it wasn’t too bad.” — Red flag. What does a “few hours” mean?

“Company X? We haven’t worked with them in months!” — Doesn’t match up at all.

So my points are two things: the more details given means the more that have to line up. If someone is telling the truth, they can and may give as many details as possible (let’s say they like to tell their stories that way) and they won’t care, because it’s all true. The second point: not every part of a story weighs the same in terms of relative importance. What parts of the story above, if false, could still “allow” the rest of the story to be true? What parts couldn’t? On that same note, what parts, if true, allow the rest of the story to be false? (The restaurant boxes in the bin.)

On another tangent — this is something people often do. They give us only the information to verify the parts of a story that we want them to verify. Kind of like putting only certain references or work history on a CV. In the above scenario, say hubby came home and you were suspicious and so he says, “you know what, call Joe and ask him!” You should say, no, I want to call ____ or I want to see ____. When I hire people for any freelance jobs with a lot of risk, I ask for a list of three references. I always call the references starting with the one they list third, never the first one. It’s not to say any of them would lie to me, but one of two things happens when people list references on a CV: they list the best one first (the one they think will give them the best review) and, if they’re someone who may not have a lot of references, the 3rd one may be a kind of fluffy one, a friend or something. I like to hear what those people have to say.

2-Make it believable. There’s something called the “infrequency heuristic” — basically, what are the chances of what you’re saying happened actually happening? This can be a measure of actual probability or probability in relation to you personally. For example, if I said I was late because I was stuck in traffic because a taxi exploded in front of me (this actually happened once in FL, crazy) it’s less believable because how often do cars “explode?” (Note the word choice!) If I said I didn’t get your call because I broke my phone, anyone who knows me knows that my breaking my cell phone is an incredibly likely occurrence.

3-Choose your words. The best liars know how to lie because they’re also incredibly perceptive of others’ emotions. This makes them incredibly manipulative. Certain words elicit certain emotions and if you’re aware of the emotions someone considers favorable, you can modify your word choice to bring those emotions to the surface, thereby giving them a warm and fuzzy feeling.

I’m not going to go into any more detail for now but I will end with this:

I am not condoning lying. If you want to sharpen your tools, that’s fine, but just know that two people can get hurt in a knife fight.

*For more details, ask.

I moved today into a new apartment, one I’d like to think I’m staying in for the next few years and nothing was sentimental (the furniture is all IKEA stuff, less than 2 years old) and I don’t have any of my “childhood” goods here — those are all at Dad’s in Florida.

But, when I was putting my textbooks/books back on my bookshelf, textbooks I’ve accumulated over the last 6+ years of education, I realised how many memories each of them held. Biology 101 book was freshman year with Josh Filina in the old 24-hour study lounge and my first college class I really enjoyed. Microbio book was given to me by Dr. Caruso because he thought I was “smart enough to have my own copy (after I’d sold back my old one). I have my teacher’s edition of the Biopsychology class I taught for Dr. Stackman and remember all the stupid drawings and diagrams and mnemonics I spent hours in the lab making up so students could learn that class better. Organic Chemistry reminds me of Lisa Plotkin and I sitting in our shared kitchen trying to learn how to name a chained alkane. My Biochemical Basis of Neuropsychology book that I used to read in the Lion and Eagle Pub in Boca and the bartender always made fun of me. Animal Phys reminds me of dissecting sharks and Jeff Guertin! College Physics is newer, reminds me of Chicago, studying with friends right before an exam, trying to cram that last equation in our heads and also the night that Brendan stayed until 5 am tutouring me before my exam (92%!) Molec and cell bio is also a Chicago memory — dragging that 10 pound monster on and off the El to Evanston so I could meet up with last year’s MAMSers to study in the “echo room” of the library.

Thing is, most of my books are in poor reselling condition. Dog-eared pages, highlighting, and in fact, now that I’ve seen them, most have coffee stains because I’ve spilled many a cup over them. I guess I never tried to “take care” of them because I never planned on reselling them, I knew which ones I’d be keeping.

I guess in retrospect, it’s funny that the only memories from the last few years are held in books. Nothing struck a sentimental note throughout this move except those!

You’re settling.