I'm currently trying to revise my CV to make it look like I'm actually quaified to do something. Very hard to do without actually lying the air blue. Strangely, dispite my innate ability to bullshit wildly on pretty much any subject that I have even the slightest knowledge of, I have a great deal of trouble even exaggerating things mildly on these sort of documents. In a bollocks-fest like a UCAS (University and College Admissions Service) application or a CV this puts me at a pretty major disadvantage.
I don't usually have that much of a problem lying about myself or exaggerating my achievements, thats how I get most of my friends these days. However when it comes to bullshitting about myself in written form I get really nervous, when I'm spinning a yarn about something that never happened or that didn't actually happen to me I'm ok. Generally when I'm held to account by someone when I say something too implausible or contradictory to something I'd said before I can just deny or charm my way out of things. There are no written records of drunken anecdotes or minor character padding. It's the idea of things coming back to haunt me that bothers me when I'm writing these things; the lies I say here, the aspects of myself that I exaggerate, I will have to continue to propagate until I start to believe them myself (I can do that, I've done it before; told someone else's story so many times that I honestly believed that it had happened to me. Scared the crap out of me when I remembered it didn't). I don't like to make myself into more of a fiction than I already am; sometimes I have to stop mid sentance when I realise that I'm saying something so staggeringly far from the truth that it makes baby jesus cry.
That said I don't think that, at the moment, there is a fictional me and a 'real' me. I tell stories that never happened to me from my perspective because they are stories that only work in the first person. If I prefixed them with a preface about who it was this happened to it wouldn't work. I can't conjure an image in their minds with the exploits of some guy they've never met, with myself they picture the scene and laugh at my imagined reactions. I don't lie about anything important apart from the usual airbrushing of dark moments and shameful episodes that I keep in a box in the corner of my head. Like the fact that once, long ago, I bought a Will Smith album - that's one that even in the midst of a drunken 'worst CD you've ever bought' competition I never bring out - I'm only writing it here because I don't think anyone actually reads this bullshit and if they do they'd have certainly got bored and stopped by now.
I wrote about another 500 words of this navel gazing bollocks. But I've stuck it somewhere safe until I've read the author who expresses what I'm trying to say more coherently than I could ever manage myself. When he or she does I'll probably end up passing it off as my own to the credulous and quote it to look intelligent to those you'd smell a rat.
Such is life.
I think I've drifted past whatever point I may have once had now so I'll stop. I'm sorry about this - its late, I'm waiting for Kristen to come online and avoiding working on my CV. I think I'm going to give up on waiting for her before I fall asleep, she can read this and feel glad that she wasn't online to be on the recieving end of this badly written, angsty introversion binge.
-Ben
Or is it. Who knows
