2014 - The Year in Review

Introduction

It is of course only in retrospect that we can decide what were the most important news stories of the year.  Isn’t it therefore somewhat uncanny how, if we look back now, we can see that albertnet covered all the most newsworthy happenings, even though I only blog four times a month?  How is it that my posts line up so perfectly with everybody’s “biggest news of 2014” lists?  Man.

Of course it’s not enough just to digest the news—we also need to learn some lesson from it, and take some action in our own lives.  Exactly what this lesson and these actions should be aren’t always easy to determine, so I’ve distilled them into handy slogans for you, one per month.  So, read on to distill all of 2014 into twelve easy steps to improving yourself and the world.

Note:  this will probably be my last-ever “year in review” post because this is a royal pain in the ass and I’ve finally had it.  Dang.  At least my youngest daughter supplied this groovy poster:

January:  Just lie

I know, “just lie” seems like an improbable slogan for how to be better in 2015.  But if you just take a moment to recall the big news from January—I’m talking of course about the Great Velveeta Shortage that was predicted (by Kraft) but that never actually came to pass.  In case you don’t remember this one, Kraft warned consumers that demand for Velveeta could exceed supply during the NFL playoffs.  And just in case consumers suspected this was just an attempt to drum up sales (e.g., “while supplies last!”), a Kraft spokeswoman explicitly said, “This is not a marketing/advertising campaign.”

No, albertnet didn’t report directly on the make-believe Velveeta shortage, preferring to tackle the larger issue of lying in general.  With my post Santa Denial, & How Lance Armstrong Taught Me to Lie, I described how my own ability to lie improved over the years as I watched one of dishonesty’s master craftsmen, Lance Armstrong, steadfastly deny his doping.  Kraft should really hire Lance as a consultant before their next big hoax.

Wait, you might be thinking.  Should I really take away the lesson “just lie” from these stories?  Well, yes, if you’re trying to sell food that isn’t really food, or victory that isn’t really victory.  Just make sure you come clean later, like Lance did, to teach everybody to be more skeptical.  Velveeta shortage, indeed!

February:   Learn from your mistakes!

In February, I posted a decidedly didactic essay, in which I urged my fellow cyclists not to ride in the rain and cold.  I decried the notion that riding in the rain makes you a badass, by contrasting the petty suffering  of cyclists to that of 19th-century sailors who manned the deck in all kinds of rain and snow, beating their hands against the frozen sails to ward off frostbite.

I was alluding, of course, to another badass sailor, that being Jorge Salvador Alvarenga, the fisherman from El Salvador who spent over a year adrift in the ocean catching birds and drinking turtle blood.   Alvarenga has since vowed to stay away from the ocean, which makes all kinds of sense.  You, too, should learn a lesson.  Not to stay away from the sea, necessarily, but to learn from your mistakes, or—better yet—learn things the easy way.  (Hint:  you can do this by continuing to read about my hard-learned lessons via this blog.)

March:  Bitcoin – The Emperor’s New Money!

In March, I took a moment to explain bitcoin to the masses, which essentially meant explaining why it’s such an absurd, doomed financial instrument.  Not surprisingly, my perspective was immediately validated when, days later, it was reported that the bankrupt bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox found 200,000 bitcoins, which had previously gone missing, in an old wallet.  (“Old wallet” in this context means an old digital wallet that was thought to be empty.)  What does it mean to find an electronic representation of a made-up currency lying around in an electronic representation of a wallet?  It means you’re living in a fantasy world.

Incidentally, the value of those 200,000 bitcoins was reported as being worth $116 million at the time.  Well, that was back in March.  Those same 200,000 bitcoins are now worth only $63.6 million.  (And if you’re reading this long after December 31, 2014, I predict you’ll find it’s dropped even more.)

April:  Don’t fluff that aptitude test!

Normally, when I use the phrase “sample intelligence test” or “genius quiz,” I’m referring not to an actual written exam but to an opportunity life presents to test our mental mettle.  (And if I’m honest, I usually use these phrases to mock one of my children—for example, when one of them is struggling to operate a can opener and I say, “Don’t think of it as a can opener, but as a sample intelligence test”—just to keep the pressure on and take her down a notch.)

As you will recall, not one but two pressing news stories involved such life tests, and how a person dramatically failed.  First, of course, was the airline passenger who mistook the cockpit for the lavatory, terrifying the pilots and getting himself arrested.  And then there was the homeless guy who broke into a motel room to spend the night, not noticing that it was actually a museum exhibit:  the room where Martin Luther King was assassinated. 

Earlier that very month, I blogged about one of those rare non-life-initiated, written aptitude tests, which began with a questionnaire about my race that sent my mind reeling, and a Scantron form with unnumbered boxes snaking in every direction across the page, putting me almost into a panic even before I read the first question.  What does this have to do, exactly, with the airline passenger and the homeless guy?  I’ll let you figure that out.  Think of it as a little genius quiz.

May:  The umpire strikes back!

Microsoft Word’s imbecilic grammar checker has flagged “umpire” above and suggests I “correct” it to “empire.”  I guess they assume their software is a tool for merely regurgitating other people’s content.  Sweet.

I didn’t mean “empire.”  I meant “umpire,” dammit.  I’m talking about umpires striking back after being attacked.  I’m sure I don’t need to remind you of the big news in May, about the unruly baseball fan in South Korea climbing a fence and putting the umpire in a headlock.  Well, they sure showed him … dude got a lifetime ban from that stadium and narrowly avoided a $48 fine!

I got my own comeuppance in May after attacking a group of self-appointed arbiters of cycling culture, the so-called Velominati.  Of all my 283 posts to date, none has received so many negative comments.  The Velominati also trashed me in their own pages.  (Do I mind?  Actually, no.  In keeping with the old adage “there’s no such thing as bad publicity,” my blog has enjoyed increased traffic ever since that fracas.  And, I hasten to add, I stand by all my criticism of those silly Velominati rules.)

June:  Dads are people too!

June brought the earth-shattering news of a study finding men are actually more sensitive than women.  (I’m not, of course; I’m often called a “heartless, unfeeling iceberg,” though mostly by myself.) 

As if in response to the aforementioned article, a day later I posted an essay, What Are Fathers For?, that showcases the sensitivity of the modern man—not just to things like Father’s Day cards, but to touchy issues, like whether fathers serve any real purpose, and to what extent our helpfulness and solicitousness actually cause us to lose our children’s respect.  Colud it be, I wondered, that we should just get out of the way?  I guess I could handle that, and just hang out at the Hotsy-Totsy Club with my degenerate friends.

[Okay, we’re halfway home.  Yeah, I know this post is long, but chances are good that, like me, you neglected the 24-hour news cycle all year, so you’re really getting off easy.  (I hope you know I’m missing out on watching “Dr. Who” with my teenager right now.)]

July:   Spelling counts!

Once again, my blog and the greater news media converged this month.  Almost the same day I blogged about how nobody in Hawaii seems able to spell, back on the mainland a baseball team committed a serious spelling error itself, dishonoring its star player 15,000 times in one fell swoop.  I’m referring, of course, to the Colorado Rockies celebrating their shortstop, Troy Tulowitzki, and specifically his league-topping batting average, by making a whole slew of commemorative t-shirts with “Tulowizki” printed on them.  (In case you missed it, they spelled his name wrong.)

There’s nothing very funny about that, which makes it even worse than some of the Hawaiian spellings.  Our favorites were “Bubba’s Buger” and the salubrious “Acai Bowel” (both of which were items on menus). 

August:  Talk to the hand (not the handheld)

In August I decided to review a taqueria in Hawaii, but didn’t have a laptop on me.  No problem, since I had a smartphone … right?  Well, I never got very good at typing on the touch-screen (maybe my fingers are too stubby), so I used the voice recognition feature.  This yielded some amusing errors and a couple of new turns of phrase I rather liked (e.g., “when it folded in 2007 it was a great opera”).  Of course, this is all harmless fun when you’re just talking about burritos.  When the same technology is applied to a ton and a half of steel that can do 80 mph, that’s another matter, and here my blog prefigured the really big news in August, which was the scathing report J.D. Power gave of the current state of the art in automotive voice recognition.  For example, you might clearly ask your car to turn on the AC, only to have it search for nearby pizza places.

September:  Rats are people, too!

It’s funny how we think of rodents.  Mice are cute and all, but rats—with their big fat hairless tails—are almost universally reviled.  Birds, meanwhile, poop on us and get away scot-free.  (Who hasn’t been pooped on by a bird?  And who has been pooped on by a rat?)  In fact, many of us—such as my own daughter—make a special effort to feed birds in our own backyards.  I’m not aware of any castigation of birders, until their actions breed rats, as was famously described here in the sordid tale of a crazy bird lady attracting rats to a community garden.

Of course my finger was right on the pulse of this growing societal ill, as I demonstrated with my September post  I Don’t Smell a Rat which chronicled the shockingly bold rat who took up residence in my backyard, shamelessly stuffing himself on the expensive seeds we’d earmarked for local birds.  This rat caused family strife by seeming to ignore my cat, who in turn seemed to ignore the rat.  What was I to do, other than berate the cat?  Poison seemed too harsh (for either of the little mammals).  So I did nothing, which worked out fine because opportunity ushered in Misha’s finest hour—her apotheosis from old, lazy layabout to fierce, fearless, brilliant slayer of vermin!  Yeah, that’s right, she got medieval on that rat’s heinie, despite it being just about the hugest rat I’ve ever seen!  Go Misha!

October:  Subject sweets to serious science studies!

For decades I’ve subscribed to the “glycogen window” idea, that being that simple carbs consumed right after intense exercise will greatly enhance recovery.  I only ever had empirical evidence of this principle, until my daughter stepped up and tested it, rigorously, for her school science project.  If you somehow missed this post, click here and see if you don’t find her methodology, execution, and conclusion to be utterly compelling.

Ah, if only the professionals were so thorough!  This same month, a study by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) rebuffed the long-held and universally accepted premise (far more mainstream than the glycogen window theory) that consuming carbs is beneficial during endurance exercise.  That’s right, they denied the benefit of taking in calories during hours-long efforts.  Critics proposed that the EFSA’s finding was due to evidence not being presented properly or some such nonsense.  The more accurate conclusion, obviously, is that all the funding for that study should rightfully go to my daughter.  Sheesh.

November:   If you can understand it, it ain’t “Andrei Rublev”

I’ve long believed that the acid test for intellectual cred is being able to watch, and understand, the Russian movie “Andrei Rublev,” and until last month, I didn’t think I could actually do it.  After all, I’d tried before, but crashed and burned.  What a triumph, then, to actually prevail, and glean enough to blog about it (here).  It’s a good thing this viewing triumph bolstered my confidence, because as all educated people know, the biggest news worldwide in November somehow never got translated into English.  

If you’re one of those who missed out, don’t worry … it’s not your fault.  I’m referring of course to the business with the Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius, “Russia piece of evidence awakening spirituality,” which was covered only in Indonesian.  I wouldn’t have bothered painstakingly translating the article, except that it mentioned that the works of Andrei Rublev adorn the walls of this cathedral.  I guess once you’ve made it through the movie, your intellect is forever improved, to the point that an article in English hardly seems challenging enough to bother with.

December:  Just say “no” to shopping

I will confess that my blog lagged behind world news a bit in December.  I was so busy celebrating the lack of public interest in Black Friday, and the suggestion that Americans are actually finding better things to do than shop, that I missed the bigger story about retailers wanting to open on Thanksgiving Day itself, just to extend the consumer frenzy even further.  Fortunately, there’s a backlash to this development.  In a perfect world, we wouldn’t need a backlash, and wouldn’t need consumers to pledge not to shop on this holiday, but of course a perfect world wouldn’t give bloggers like me as much to make fun of.

In closing

At a loss for new year’s resolutions?  Well, you could do worse than to turn my 12 month-by-month slogans into action next year.  And if that seems like too much work, resolve to get all your news from albertnet next year.  That’ll save you a lot of effort, since world news and this blog are pretty much saying the same thing anyway…

Happy new year!

Santa Denial, and How Lance Armstrong Taught Me To Lie

Introduction

When Robin Williams, a longtime friend of Lance Armstrong, was asked how he took the news that Lance had been doping, and lying about it, all along, Williams replied, “It was like when I found out about Santa Claus.”  This makes sense.  The Lance myth is a lot like the Santa myth:  something that millions of people believed, in part because it’s such a sweet story, they wanted to believe it.

This past Christmas, when I was lying to my younger daughter about Santa, I was surprised how easy it was compared to past years.  Why should this be?  After much soul-searching, I realized that it’s because I paid such close attention this past year to the Lance saga, and how it was that he successfully lied for so long. 

In short, this post explains how Lance taught me to lie.

First, a disclaimer

I want to be very clear that I’m not in favor of lying, unless it’s to my kids about Santa or the Tooth Fairy.  That’s why, until I subconsciously absorbed some important lessons from Lance, I had so much trouble with these lies.  It just felt wrong trampling over my kids’ reasonable skepticism, which as a parent I normally like to instill.  So, even though my lying skills have improved, my moral compass has not strayed, and I’m not lulled into any “grey area” nonsense.  I offer up this essay to you not as a how-to guide, but as an intellectual investigation.  Who knows, perhaps a knowledge of lying technique can help us be more skeptical.  I sure wouldn’t want to be played like a sucker again, after defending Lance for years.

Interestingly, I’ve witnessed a similar evolution of the lying skills and techniques of Lance himself.  In the early days of his lying, he wasn’t so smooth.  In fact, it wasn’t until the accusations went from a trickle to a stream to a full inundation that he mastered his skills at deception.  For example, if you can find the video footage of his press conference regarding the Discovery sponsorship, you’ll see some awkward, inexpert evasion.  Nothing as clumsy as Floyd Landis’s first denial (i.e., when he was first asked point-blank if he doped, he said, “I’m gonna say no…”), but pretty clumsy.

Technique #1:  convince yourself first

It’s pretty clear from the Oprah interview and others that Lance doesn’t actually regret cheating at sport—he just regrets getting caught.  He doesn’t present his doping and his deception as particularly heinous or unique crimes; I think he found a way, very early on, to square all this internally.  He took moral comfort in having convinced himself (and his team) that everybody else was doping too; in having used his massive celebrity to give comfort to cancer survivors (whether or not he made any progress toward funding actual research); and in having generated a vast amount of wealth for the bicycle industry.  In light of all this good he was doing, he must have felt as though depriving some cheating European of those Tours de France was really no big deal. 

So it is with the Santa myth.  To witness the idealistic, innocent, and pure trust my child puts in me, and to take advantage of it with a bald-faced lie every year, requires similar rationalization.  So I remind myself that the truth would only hurt, and that my kid couldn’t be trusted to keep it to herself.  I think of all the kids on the playground whose holiday experience would be damaged by too early a revelation, and all those letters to Santa that wouldn’t be written, and so forth, and thus I rationalize my position.  This was easier this year after I read Lance’s (or was it Tyler Hamilton’s?) description of the vast number of team support people (mechanics, masseuses, coaches, doctors, PR folks, etc.) whose careers depended on his “discretion” (i.e., lies).

Technique #2:  make your lie big and bold

Remember all that mealy-mouthed stuff in “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus”?  The writer (i.e., liar) resorts to a sideways trick of turning Santa (the living, breathing man) into something abstract, with statements like “He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist” and by comparing him to fairies.  It’s easy to see why the writer would do this, but it’s amateurish.  When Lindsay asked me straight-out this year, “Daddy, are you and Mommy really Santa?” I knew this was no time for prevaricating.  So I snapped at her:  “Why do you love cancer so much?!”  No, of course I didn’t really say that.  That was Lance’s retort when the journalist Paul Kimmage accused him of doping.  It was big, bold, and (best of all) beside the point.  It’s the logical fallacy my older daughter once referred to as “red lobster.”

So what I really said to Lindsay was, “That’s crazy talk!  Of course we aren’t Santa!”  She looked so relieved.  This was the look of a kid who is all too happy to place her dad’s honesty and integrity above that of some stupid kid on the playground.  Once she had the answer that she wanted all along, her skepticism went right out the window.  Yes, I felt slightly bad about the power I had over her and how I was abusing it, but more than that I thought, “Wow, that was a way better response than I’d have made last year, which would have been the old answer-with-a-question dodge, like ‘What makes you ask that?’”

 Technique #3:  suspend disbelief by throwing a bone

Okay, so you’ve lied to yourself first, and then you’ve told the lie boldly and firmly, and your audience wants to believe you anyway.  That’s a good start.  But what about that niggling doubt that an intelligent person would naturally have?  If left alone, that doubt might start to fester, and end up being to Truth what a grain of sand is to a pearl.  Best to nip doubt in the bud, which can be accomplished easily with a few plausible explanations.

I was as amazed as anybody when Lance went from being a one-day classics racer to a Grand Tour stage racer (by way of cancer).  I’ve seen classics racers evolve into stage racers over time, like Sean Kelly, but even Kelly never won the Tour de France.  So from the very first doping accusations against Lance, I had the beginnings of doubt.  But Lance, in one of his novels, explained that the cancer stripped off the unnecessary upper body muscle he’d had from his swimming days, reconfiguring him as a stage racer.  It didn’t matter that he hadn’t actually lost any weight; I wanted to believe, and that explanation was good enough.  Lance also mentioned his higher cadence as a major asset to his stage racing; it didn’t bother me that I myself get more power out of a lower cadence.  I only cared that his transformation was explained in some way.  (So it is with Chris Froome’s believers, who accept his silly explanation—finally getting over parasitic worms—for suddenly going from mediocre cyclist to the world’s best stage racer.)

The ability of an explanation—whether it’s solid or not—to help suspend disbelief is something Malcolm Gladwell has called “the Photocopier Effect,” after an experiment by a Harvard social scientist, Ellen Langer.  Langer had just a 60% success rate cutting in line to use a photocopier when she merely asked nicely.  But if she gave a reason, like “I’m in a rush,” her success rate went to 94%.  The crazy thing is that when Langer gave a pointless reason, like “because I need to make some copies,” her success rate was still 94%.  The point is, if you throw someone a bone, you’ll get somewhere, whether it’s a good bone or not.

Not that all explanations are created equal.  I never bought Alberto Contador’s “tainted Spanish beef” explanation for his positive clenbuterol test, and I don’t believe Michael Rogers’ “tainted Chinese beef” explanation for the same, and I don’t believe Jonathan Breyne’s “tainted Chinese beef” explanation either.  Tyler Hamilton’s “chimera” (i.e., prenatal evil twin) explanation for his blood doping positive would be laughable if it weren’t so sad. 

So when Lindsay questioned the authenticity of Santa Claus, I threw her the best bone I could.  After denying that my wife and I were actually Santa, I said, “That’s not to say that there aren’t people who impersonate Santa Claus.  Have you ever seen Santa in a mall?  Definitely a fake.”  See?  Now she had an explanation for the fact that somebody had (evidently) questioned Santa’s existence to begin with.  I went on to describe a fake mall Santa who made me cry because when I asked for a “bow and arrow” it sounded like “bone arrow” and I couldn’t make the fake Santa understand what I wanted.  Another red herring, right up there with Lance’s higher pedaling cadence!

Technique #4:  Embroil others in your lie

One reason I believed in Lance for so long was that no disgruntled former teammate ratted him out (until one finally did and all the others followed).  As we now know, Lance didn’t achieve this cooperation by sitting everybody down and formally conspiring in the way that a James Bond villain might.  No, it was all subtle:  if you want to be in the inner circle, you better ride well and show your allegiance, and if you do, you may get a white paper bag, and if you use the substances therein and benefit appropriately, you’re going to the Tour!  But by the way, now you can’t say anything, ever, because you’d have to come clean yourself.  It’s kind of like when my big brother would steal two cookies from the jar, stuff one in my mouth, and say, “You tell, I’ll tell.”  Except the gag order on the Postal team was implicit.

So it was when I brought my older daughter Alexa in on the Santa deception.  I knew she wouldn’t believe in Santa forever, and I dreaded the day when I’d have to come clean and admit I’d been lying all along.  It was just my luck that when that moment finally came, I’d recently read Tyler Hamilton’s book and had learned of the power Lance had through speaking softly and wielding financial repercussions. 

Predictably enough, the first domino to fall was the Tooth Fairy.  (I think that myth is more fragile because teeth are lost one at a time, so you don’t have the momentum of mass belief that the Christmas season entails.)  Of course once your kids know you’re capable of routinely lying to their faces about the Tooth Fairy, they figure out the Santa deception almost instantly.

Alexa was blunt:  “Okay, Dad, I know there’s no Tooth Fairy.”  I was equally blunt in my reply:  “You’re right.  There’s no Tooth Fairy.  And now that you know that, you won’t be surprised when you no longer get any money for losing a tooth.”  That was the extent of it.  Alexa, of course, is no fool:  she instantly grasped that if she later decried Santa as a fake, she could kiss her Christmas stocking—and all that candy—goodbye.

So when Christmas rolled around, Alexa not only kept Mum about Santa, but—of her own volition—took an active role in perpetuating the myth.  Hours before Lindsay confronted me about Santa, Alexa (in Lindsay’s presence) threw me a perfect softball:  “Hey Dad, does Santa give lesser presents to kids in poor communities?”  I casually replied, “Well, yes, a really fancy gift in a poor community could cause a lot of envy and strife.  So Santa naturally scales it down.  Meanwhile, in very affluent communities he has to give fancier gifts because the kids are so jaded.”  For Lindsay to hear this intelligent discussion among older, more worldly people was a perfect ruse.  And when Lindsay later asked if my wife and I pretend to be Santa, Alexa said, with an exquisite facsimile of eye-rolling annoyance, “That’s what she keeps trying to get me to believe.”  I couldn’t ask for a better accomplice.

Should I be thanking Lance?

I suppose I could thank Lance for helping me learn how to lie.  But I’m not sure how much use I’ll have for this skill once Lindsay knows the truth about Santa.

That said, I suppose we could all thank Lance for all the stunning entertainment he’s given us over the years, from the seven Tour de France victories to the botched comeback and on to the thrilling scandal, which brought about a veritable orgy of self-righteous pontificating from so many journalists, bloggers, and Internet haters.  Meanwhile, Oakley and Trek could thank Lance for generating so many sales; after all, these companies get to keep all that money they made.

But before we start thanking the guy, we should remember that, unlike lying about Santa, Lance’s deception was not a victimless crime.  He robbed all the clean cyclists, and the clean would-be cyclists (who left the sport rather than doping), as well as the would-be clean cyclists (those lured into doping by the culture Lance so generously fueled).  Lance should get coal in his stocking.

From the Archives - When You Are Engulfed in Shame

Introduction

Last May, I took a writing class called “Memoir: Art of the Personal.” The instructor encouraged her students not to shy away from troubling material. Her advice was something like “go where the pain is.” This makes sense. Had Dostoyevsky written a novel called Obedience and Praise rather than Crime and Punishment, he might not be so famous.

More recently, I read a parenting book called Nurture Shock: New Thinking About Children. It has a chapter titled “Why Kids Lie” that offers some, well, shocking statistics. A four-year old, a cited study attests, “will lie about once every two hours, while a six-year-old will lie about once every hour.” The book goes on to describe how “kids who live in threat of consistent punishment don’t lie less. Instead, they become better liars.”

As a kid, I was no exception: I was not above lying. Plus, I stole. If this seems interesting to you, perhaps you will enjoy this story, which I wrote for my class.

When You Are Engulfed in Shame – May 27, 2010

When I was about ten, I stole money from my family. Not just on one occasion, but repeatedly—daily, in fact—for a couple of weeks. I felt no remorse (at least at first), and had no regard for consequences. I was pilfering change from the bus money jar.

Every day, as soon as we got home from school, my brother Max and I would to get a dime from the jar for our bus fare, and walk about half a mile to the bus stop to catch the slow, meandering #5 bus that would take us all the way across Boulder to the YMCA. It was a boring trip made all the more boring by our taking it five days a week for years. At the Y we had swim practice. I hated swimming—still do—and especially hated being bullied in the locker room afterward. Bigger kids would roll towels into a “rat’s tail,” get the end wet, and snap us with it, leaving red marks on our bare skin. Then, my eyes burning from the chlorine in the pool, I’d wait with my brothers for forty-five minutes for our mom to pick us up around 7. Given the time demands of swimming and school, I had no life.

The money I stole was for Zēmis. A Zēmi was a fancy soft drink, prepared to order by a high-tech vending machine in the Y’s lobby. You’d put in your 25 cents, select your flavor (cherry, lime, whatever), and then watch in awe as a tapered plastic cup— ornate as a crystal goblet —dropped onto a little grille and was half-filled with crushed ice. The Technicolor syrup came next, climbing the ice. Then carbonated water fizzed in, right to the top—such precision! I’d treat my friend John to one, too. (He was a year older and really weird—he used to fly his hand along ahead of him as we walked, making it dip and soar, making cool spaceship noises.) My generosity was half the fun of the Zēmis for me: I loved being Big Mr. Moneybucks.

I wasn’t so naïve as to think the stolen bus money wouldn’t be missed. My family had already gone through a bus money embezzlement scandal. That time, my brother Max—the troublesome middle child—had been blamed, and was harassed for days. It finally come out that our dad had needed change and raided the bus money cache, and hadn’t thought to mention it. Though Max was exonerated, the stigma never really went away. So now, when I was stealing bus money for real, I figured I’d have a readymade scapegoat when the theft was discovered.

When Mom noticed the embezzlement, an ad hoc tribunal was formed. Each of the four brothers was both a prosecutor and a defendant. Max was harassed all over again, even while I continued to steal to support my Zēmi habit. I repeatedly accused Max myself, both to make my innocence more realistic and for the sheer joy of it. My brothers and I thrilled to the intrigue of crime and punishment, basked in the righteous indignation of shaking down a suspected wrongdoer and bringing him to justice.

(That it wouldn’t be actual justice didn’t matter a bit: the satisfaction was the same. Once, years before when I was like five, sitting around the house bored, I decided to scrape my leg with a Lego until a large red welt appeared. Then I went crying to my oldest brother, Bryan, telling him Max did it to me. I watched with great satisfaction as Bryan went over and beat on Max, bawling him out the whole time out for hurting his little brother. It made no difference to me that Max was innocent; the spectacle of richly deserved punishment being meted out was really all I needed.)

Perhaps to prevent us from all getting spanked by our dad, my mom actually offered amnesty. “Okay, this is your chance,” she said. “Whoever stole the money, step forward now, and you won’t be punished. Just admit you did it, and all will be forgiven.” I wasn’t even tempted to do this. Maybe Mom wouldn’t punish me, but I’d have to listen to my brothers castigating me not only for my heinous theft, but for having accused Max the whole time. It would also be tough to witness Max himself attaining new heights in righteous indignation.

And, truth be told, I had finally become ashamed of my actions. Funny how that works: if nobody had noticed the missing money, I’d have blissfully gone right on stealing (just like a pro athlete who blithely dopes and will go on doping until he gets caught and then, sobbing, apologizes to his fans and vows to help clean up the sport). I cursed myself, my friend, and those damn Zēmis. I’d never felt so low. It became more important than ever to hide my guilt.

The truth came out soon enough. My brothers, who had long envied my fancy drinks, now questioned whether it was really my friend John paying for them. I insisted that it was. “Well, I’ll just give a call over there and find out,” Geoff announced. I was almost sure he was bluffing—after all, all four of us were deathly afraid of the phone. (Just calling a business to find out its hours, as our mom sometimes made us do, was almost impossible. Whichever kid made the call would be almost unable to talk—his throat would go dry, his vocal chords would contract, and his strangled voice would come out in a thin, reedy squeak. Naturally, his brothers would mock him for this.)

But I couldn’t bring myself to call Geoff’s bluff. There was just that small chance that he would actually go through with the call, and my friend would unknowingly sell me out, and that was just too much to face. So I spilled my guts before Geoff dialed the first digit. I confessed.

Right away my brothers lit into me, cackling like hyenas, thrilling to my shame like rabid journalists. Max was the most triumphant. Over and over he cried out, “I can understand a liar—but a fieth?” He brandished this indignant cry like a Gatling gun, making sure everybody heard and appreciated it. It became the slogan for my defeat. I felt so low I didn’t even have the heart to correct my brother (“It’s not ‘fieth,’ it’s ‘thief,’ you moron!” I’d have said). I let my brothers have their day in the sun, and felt completely deserving of my humiliation. After all, I’d stolen repeatedly, lied, and—worst of all—sold out my own brother, all for a fizzy drink.

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