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Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday. My name is Michael Ahr, I have a shelf dedicated to time travel novels in my basement, and I believe that if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living. In today’s episode of Stuff I Learned Yesterday I share a lesson I learned from trying to trick my teachers.

I hope you guys are having a fabulous week so far, and I certainly hope Darrell and his family as well as others in the Golden Spiral Media community who went to the Lost meetup in Hawaii are having a good time down there. I’m sure they are.

Friday Forum
I want you to be a part of the Friday Forum! Friday Forum is your opportunity to Share what YOU’VE learned, so that other listeners and I can learn from YOU. It can be a message as short as 30 seconds or several minutes long. It really doesn’t matter just as long as it’s something that will benefit others. You can participate in Friday Forum by calling our voice feedback line at 304-837-2278 or by visiting goldenspiralmedia.com/feedback to send an audio file or use our SpeakPipe widget.

What I Learned Yesterday:
One of my favorite episodes of Stuff I Learned Yesterday that Darrell has done over the past few months was Episode number 23: The Halloween Candy Toilet Paper Mystery, and not just because it was a great story, although it was. If you haven’t heard that one, definitely dig into the archives and listen to it. You can search by the episode number in your podcast app or search “toilet paper” at goldenspiralmedia.com. Thankfully, that’s the only search result that pops up – I guess toilet paper doesn’t come up in TV show discussions very much.

Anyway, to summarize that episode, it was the one where Darrell, in his childhood, snuck into his house after school to steal some Halloween candy and ended up engaging in pyromaniacal activities in the bathroom, setting toilet paper on fire for absolutely no other reason than to see what would happen. Darrell then lied to his dad about starting the fire, stubbornly refusing to concede despite repeated punishment. Having had my fire fascination phase myself, as many young boys do, I really identified with this tale, but it’s not even the story itself that matters in this case. It’s the lesson Darrell chose to glean from this life event that made number 23 a favorite of mine.

Let me paraphrase from the transcript here – he says, “Here’s what I learned. I learned that I could lie to my parents and get away with it. Unfortunately, that wasn’t a lesson, that was a trap. Honestly, I don’t know what I learned from this story. Yes, my brother and I can look back on it now and laugh. In a way, I suppose it created a bonding moment for us, but I think that he and I would both agree that it would have been better if I’d never lit fire to toilet paper that day. My hope is that in sharing this story with you today, I’ve brought a smile to your face. We all need to laugh from time to time, and I feel like the stories I’ve shared have been heavy. I felt like this show needed a moment to exhale and laugh.”

Now, I really appreciated Darrell’s honesty, both with sharing the sordid secrets of his childhood and – more importantly in my view – with admitting that he didn’t learn the obvious lesson from this encounter: not to lie. Episode 23 was when I realized that Darrell wasn’t going to preach at me, and there wasn’t going to be any aloof, superior attitude where I was going to have to take a moral lesson or else be judged. In the name of lightening the mood, Darrell admitted he was pleased that he got away with it.

So when is it okay to lie? There are obvious examples which deal with issues of politeness and tact. If someone asks you if a certain outfit makes them look fat, or if someone gives you a gift that you really don’t like, chances are you will lie to those people to avoid being mean – as well you should. But are there situations where you would feel okay getting away with deception?

Let me tell you a story of something that happened to me and my brother, Casey, in our senior year of high school. As identical twins, we don’t look so much alike anymore these days, but we definitely did back then. Each fall and spring, he and I would always try out for the school theater production, but for some reason in the fall of our senior year, Casey forgot about auditions. Now I knew he wanted to be in the play, so I decided that I would try out on his behalf. After I tried out as myself, I enlisted the help of a few friends backstage to change my look just enough to audition a second time as Casey. The teachers running the tryouts knew about the Ahr twins, so presumably they were none the wiser and just thought that one was Mike and the other was Casey. However, because so many of the other drama kids knew what I had done, word got around to the drama teacher before results were posted, and – guess what – she got the last laugh. Both Casey and I were assigned the same role; I would play the character on Friday night, and Casey would play him on Saturday, and on our off-nights we’d run lights. Now in this case, my deception hurt no one and even those lied to had a laugh over it.

But compare this situation with the time I lied to my supervising teacher, Mrs. Jefferson, during my time as a student teacher in college. I was supposed to have given the guidance counselor a copy of that day’s school work for a student who was homebound due to health issues. When Mrs. Jefferson asked me if I had given the items to the counselor, I said yes, even though I hadn’t. In my mind I was thinking, “Oops, I forgot to do that, but I’ll get it done by the end of the day – I just don’t want Mrs. Jefferson to worry or think I dropped the ball.” That was my rationalization. In reality, this deception was unjustified and caused a conflict later when the guidance counselor told Mrs. Jefferson I hadn’t given her the work yet before I had the chance to deliver on my lie. No matter how logical I thought my reasons for lying were, I had no right to deceive my supervising teacher, especially given that she was responsible for me as her student teacher. Unlike the play audition deception, which was all in good fun, lying was not in this case a victimless crime.

Here’s what I learned.

The morality of lying is not black and white. I mean, let’s face it, who among us hasn’t experienced the joy of getting away with something? And plenty of instances of deception harm no one but ourselves, like sneaking a few spoonfuls of ice cream after the kids have gone to bed or calling in sick to work to go to Dragon Con (not that I’ve ever done that). Sure, sometimes we’re just kidding ourselves, and we have to be careful when we make that judgment call. But I’d like to urge everyone in the listening audience to live a little – play that April Fools’ joke by telling your husband you turned his favorite team jersey pink in the laundry. Pull out that surprise gift after pretending you forgot your friend’s birthday. Life is too short to aim for sainthood.

As Gregory House used to say on the TV show House, MD, “Everyone lies.” Admit to yourself that you’re not perfect, do your best to avoid purposeful and harmful deception, and remember the modern version of carpe diem – YOLO. You only live once.

I’m Michael Ahr, and this has been stuff I learned yesterday.

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