When shit talks and bullshit walks… SMILE!

Every now and then, when walking into a restaurant or a coffee shop you’ll find some girl crying and some idiot with a guilty face apologising. Little girls will whisper “Shame, I wonder what happened?” Older girls will look and say, “He looks really sorry, I hope she forgives him”. And women will loudly comment “Dump the bastard, he doesn’t deserve your forgiveness!”

If you sit across a scene such as the above, you’re most likely to make up a Mexican soap opera that can have any of the following cheesy lines:
“I’m so sorry honey, it was stronger than I am”
“You know you’re the only woman for me”
“I was too drunk to resist”
“I was thinking of you the whole time I was with her”
“I’ll just die if you don’t forgive me”
At this stage his best friend comes into the picture and his lines could be something like:
“He’s really sorry, he spent the whole night talking about you”
“We made him do it, he didn’t want to kiss her in the first place”
“I’ve never seen him care about another girl like he cares about you, you have to forgive him”

All right! I’ll admit that for all we know, she could’ve been crying about her cat that got run over! But that wouldn’t have made the soap opera that interesting now would it? And although this may seem like I’m once again having fun poking at the opposite sex, the real objective of this entry is to bring to light into something that both sexes are responsible for… bullshit (Guy are just better at it than girls).

Perhaps it’s a strong word for what the dictionary calls MANipulation, my boss likes to call it “cheap talk” but I’ve heard it often enough to call it bullshit.

Bullshit is when you are told what you want to hear but with no real feeling behind in. When your little brother falls and cries his heart out, making you believe that he dislocated his knee… he could be bullshitting you. How do you know? Give him a lollipop and watch how quickly he shuts up (PS. If he keeps crying, take him to the hospital!)

The problem with bullshit is that you mistaken it for the truth when you first hear it. A certain number of disappointments later, you smarted up and fine-tune your bullshit-o-meter so that you can recognise it better when someone dishes it out to you. There is no two ways about it. You either smarten up or sit with the shit.

Some bullshitters are easy to recognise. Like the beggars that come asking you for change but are wearing a €300 pair of Nike sneakers. Or the boss that suddenly begins to praise your work when he needs you to give the company some extra hours. After a while, you realise that even your parents are guilty each time that they begin the fight with “I’ll disinherit you…”

At one or another stage of our lives, we all resort to bullshit. Perhaps you were guilty of feigning exhaustion when your mother asked you to do dishes, or you invented a mysterious muscle ache to get your brother to give you a massage. Only your conscience can judge you and your intentions. Just beware not to resort to bullshit too often, or run the risk of making it a part of your identity.

How to deal with a bullshitter? That I leave to your personal criteria. You might want to face him with his manipulation, call him a liar and threaten to expose. Staying away is also an option; some people even set limits to how much bullshit they’re willing to take. Personally, I prefer not to dish out what I don’t like to be given me but I realise that I can’t always avoid. After a while, you learn not to get upset or loose sleep or saliva over it. So if you see me smiling and I don’t answer to whatever you just said, I suggest you change your tactics.