Categories
Lunchtime Poll

Lunchtime Poll: Truth or Dare

Ready for a little truth or dare to make these last two days until the weekend awesome? Let’s go!

Truth: What’s something you’ve lied about to seem more cool? I often pretend I know the lyrics to songs I don’t know when I’m around people who intimidate me. I want to be cool, donchaknow!

Dare: Try eating something today that you’ve always been sure you don’t like but have never really tried. Just a nibble or a sip will do. For me, this means trying a pickle.

Did any of you take up last week’s dare? It was about giving strangers odd compliments.

By [E] Sally Lawton

My food groups are cheese, bacon, and hot tea. I like studying cities and playing with my cat, Buffy.

50 replies on “Lunchtime Poll: Truth or Dare”

I can’t think of specific examples, but I have nodded wisely to avoid admitting that I don’t know what someone is talking about. I do this to my husband a lot when he starts talking about cars. I will try the dare instead. I’ve been trying new recipes lately, I’ll throw in some new foods while I’m at it :).

I pretend to know WAY more about politics than I really do. I have a MILLION things to do.  I don’t really care about the inner workings of politicians’ social lives.  Do Not Care.  But in law school, these are the conversations….

Also, while I was working at a hotel front desk, this redneck guy kept bothering me every night for two weeks.  Finally I pulled out a picture of my “girlfriend” who was coming to pick me up that night.  A picture of my best friend right after she had dyed her hair pink, given herself a short buzz cut and put on a spiked leather choker.  He never came back.  Didn’t really make me seem cooler, but it did make me feel safer!

When I was in graduate school, I worked at a coffee shop.  We had a regular customer who would come in and be a jerk, and one time, I spilled some milk and started to wipe it up, and he said, “you’ll make a good housewife some day.”  I said, “actually, I’m going to be a doctor in two months.”  It wasn’t really a lie.  But it was kind of a lie, because I’m not that kind of a doctor.  I was just so angry.

I sometimes pretend I know more about the current music than I do – which is not hard considering I don’t know anything about current music.  I listen to sports talk radio and occasionally classic country, 90s/00s country and XM 70s/80s stations.  Everything else is just noise to me.

 

Wear your badge of current music ignorance proudly! Rarely do I know who the music acts are on Saturday Night Live. The only “new” music that I listen to is from The Civil Wars, and it sounds like it has been out for 60+ years.

Give me a pedal steel and the languished sigh of a violin any day over a synthesizer and the evil that is the autotuner.

For years I didn’t want to own that I like a lot of pre 2000 country music, lest everyone think I was some right wing nut job. Lately though, I can’t be assed to care. I am listening to “Maybe It Was Memphis” by Pam Tillis right now. It’s a kick ass song and I like it.

I really can’t think of anything that I lie about to appear cool… I am not big on humblebrags or regular brags typically (it seems that when I want people to be happy for me they’re not anyways) and most of the stuff people think is cool is true… but I never really desire to be ‘cool,’ just accepted. I guess if anything I will sometimes go along with things that I really don’t agree with so people will like me. I don’t have an issue when someone has different opinions/feelings as me, but the second I deviate from their hive-mind script/agenda well then I am not cool enough to associate with.

I do that too. Also, musicologists totally do that with philosophy generally. Like, people just BANDY ABOUT names of philosophers or theorists and don’t explain their theories at all and there is totally this disciplinary code of silence where no one talks about how they don’t really get _______’s theory. It is the thing I hate about my discipline the most.

Hah! That’s both one of my pet peeves and one of the things that amuses me about appropriations of my discipline. It could probably be said that certain areas of philosophy are wont to do this as well. Philosophy of mind, for the most part, could be accused of being full of pseudoscience, and the accusations would probably be right. It likes to take random bits of scientific studies and then make grand philosophical claims about it.

Sometimes this is legit, but since not many of these philosophers are the same people doing the studies, there’s a definite gap there.

I have a ton of friends who are Serious Literature snobs so I’ve definitely edited my Goodreads account to leave out some of the more embarrassing stuff and have mocked authors/genres that I enjoy. I don’t do it so much anymore because we don’t work together so the potential for mocking is much lower.

I’ve avoided voicing my opinion of some classic literature that I strongly do not enjoy to avoid my taste being called into question. I don’t like A Doll’s House, ok. I know it’s supposed to be grand feminist lit, but Nora drives me right up the wall in the third act with the “You couldn’t possibly understand my problems!” bit. See also, The Portrait of a Lady and The Awakening. Lordy but I have gotten flack about those.

I loved A Doll’s House when I read it in college, but I haven’t reread it since. I suspect these days she’d probably bug me. I can’t remember if I ever read The Portrait of a Lady and I’m almost positive I missed The Awakening. Ah, well. I really need to catch up on my classics, especially since most are available for free as ebooks.

I liked it better when I had to read it in college than when I read it in high school, but I still don’t like it. It’s mostly the scene where Torvald asks Nora to explain why she’s upset and she refuses. This is probably a personal pet peeve though, as I have had to mediate quite a few fights between my parents were one party or the other was doing the “THEY KNOW WHAT THEY DID!” routine.

Leave a Reply