Won't get fooled again.

Well maybe once more...
I the wake of my friend Barbara's death, it appears that she had quite a few of us fooled. She did not own an AIDS clinic, she was not even a doctor, she was about twenty years older than she claimed, she never got anthrax, nor dated Warren Zevon, the Barbara that I thought I knew, was the construction of a very creative, and eccentric 60+ year old retired school teacher.
I have mixed feelings about this discovery. A reader revealed the truth to me, and I confirmed it with her animal keeper.... she did keep animals. That much is true.

So I feel a little hurt to be lied to and manipulated... I feel a little foolish for believing the stories, but she seemed quite reasonable otherwise, so I had little reason to doubt her.

But, she was still very nice to me. We did work hard together to get the game working, and we did talk a lot. The thing is, I don't think she would have been less a friend had she admitted to being a teacher, and older, and simply who she was. I can only surmise that she thought no one would like her for who she really was. Or maybe she just hoped to recapture her youth a bit be pretending to be younger. I don't know.
It is hard to hold something against the dead. It isn't like anything I did depended on her being a doctor, or anything like that.. though I do recall her giving medical advice to one of our mutual friends...maybe he wasn't really sick... I don't know.

The other day I was thinking of some reflection paper topics for my summer introduction to philosophy class. One, on the self, started off, imagine you discover something about your past which you have always believed, turns out to be false....how would that change your conception of yourself?

It also works to a lesser degree when talking about a friend.
I guess I will need to think about this myself.