Purple Rain #8

There is a lie and there is not telling the truth.

You see, a "lie" are always considered to be bad, while "not telling the truth" dosn't seem to have any emotional baggage on it. Sometimes when not telling the truth doesn't appear to be harmful, we call the statements "white lies". In the past when I've lied to friends, I never think I'm being a liar. It's always "little white lies." Yet these white laws weren't so "white" as they appear.

Back in middle school and most of high school, I hid a part of me away from them. Whenever I had been wronged or I was feeling down, I'd alway try to make sure my friends didn't find out about it. It's that I didn't want to be a burden upon them by making them worry, thus being a "good friend". Most of us have at least once said everything was okay when asked how things are going, even when things are quite the opposite. I took things to a new level though, and got quite creative in masking my pain. One time, a friend had walked into my room after I had cried, and he saw my moastened eyes. But I still lied to hide the pain; I claimed that I ad just finished practicing a bit of a play for a speech competition. You could say this fault of mine helped lead to the crazy, boxer-cald episode at the fire drill.

But I learned something after a while. I always saw it as my duty to comfort my friends who are in pain and feeling down, but saw it awful to talk about my problems. In the end, I was being a hypocrite toward myself. And when I started to open up, others had less qualms about opening up to me, allowing for truly rewarding friendships

Ultimatly, if a friendship is predicated upon a lie, then it really isn't a friendship. If I lie to get a friend, then that person isn't really friends with Purple Rain, but with who I'm pretending to be.

Okay, ignore the irony of me using my blog name.

But there are truly white lies also:

One time back when I was 13, before the era of military school, my family
decided to go to their monthly opera with our neighbors. I liked the idea because after all, I was friends with their two sons, aged 11 and 7. We saw a old, quicky German opera where the first act ended with the woman singing "To death!" as the curtain fell. Now, in old German, "death" was a term for sex, as I had learned from previous German operas. So really, the woman's final words were "To fucking!" as the music played trumpantly in the background. Strange, none of the girls I've been with ever seemed that excited about sex. And there certainly wasn't any triumphant music in the background and people clapping and cheering. What am I doing wrong?!

Now after the curtain fell, the 7 year old younger brother asked me what the woman was talking about when she cried "to death." There was no way I way I was going to corrupt this boy, especially since his parents were devout Christians that believed strongly in traditional values. So I lied. "'Death' is an old German term for 'marriage.' She loves him so much that she wants to marry him." , I replied.

It's actually currently an English, not old German, term for marriage. Especially common among young men.