I used to think my ineptitude at deceit was due to the fact that the people around me were so brilliant — they could sniff out untruths and see through any attempts at mendacity. But then I realized what was really going on: I’m completely transparent, so much so that a 4-year-old can tell what I’m thinking. And a few weeks ago, one did: “Mommy, that lady in line behind us is mad that you’re paying for my sandwich in dimes and nickels.” (Ok she might not have been quite so exact, but she did discern that I was pissed).

Being so full-scale transparent can cause problems in daily life. As in situations like the following:

“So I invited Drew to dinner with us. He was hinting he wanted to see you.”

“Oh! Great! Sure! That’s great.”

“Liar. You don’t think he’s smart.”

“What are you talking about! Why would I not think he’s smart? He’s totally smart. I mean, in as much as someone can tell that someone is smart just from one dinner party–”

“Please. I saw your face when he was telling that story about how he puked on the waiter’s shoes at Jean Georges. You think he’s a total dumbass.”

Crap.

The thing is, I’m not sure I mind being an atrocious liar. Sure, it comes in handy sometimes — and let’s face it, on the average day, every living human tells at least one lie (”Did you get that email I sent?” “Absolutely — I’m reading it as we speak”). But I’m wary of building the skills it takes to be good at it — guile, flippancy, a narcissistic view that your lies won’t harm anyone else (or, worse, a callousness as to whether they do), a lack of respect for the truth, and most of all, the ability to “bend” the truth around what you want it to be.

Since, when it comes down to it, the key to being a wonderful liar is being able to lie convincingly to yourself.

So for now, I’ll stick with being a shitty liar. Plus, not having the option takes the pressure off: I’m not gonna get away with lying, so I may as well just tell the truth.

Isn’t it great when a friend writes a novel, and you think it’s amazing? Check out Rakesh Satyal’s amazing debut, Blue Boy. It’s the perfect book for anyone who has ever spent a day feeling bullied, suppressed, misunderstood, downtrodden, or tyrannized. In other words, everyone on earth.

Also, I’m always one for New York-escapist fiction, when it’s done right. Paula Froelich’s Mercury in Retrograde feels like a vacation in my own city–not an easy feat for an author to pull off.

And Sam Raimi has finally stopped making cheesy superhero crap and gone back to his roots–cheesy, gushy, viscera-filled horror. If it’s not playing in your town, rent the Swedish vampire flick Let the Right One In. Yes, I said Swedish vampire flick.

And if you haven’t read this, and you a) live in the U.S. and b) plan to ever get sick/injured/pregnant sometime in your life, I suggest you do so. Special bonus feature: I have it on good authority that Obama’s already read it.

See, the thing is, very few people are actually crazy, by the formal definition. According to psychiatric stats, only around 4% of the population actually has some diagnosable mental disorder. “Yeah” some men are saying, “the other 96% aren’t in my dating pool.” Well, given that there are 155 million women in the U.S., if you do the math (and you know I’m serious about this shit if I’m doing math) it means your chances of actually meeting a certifiable nutcase is like 1 in 100,000. Or something.

Arguably, every human being is his/her unique brand of crazy — but that pretty much robs the adjective of all its meaning. So when a man calls a woman “crazy,” usually there’s something else operating. Like this:

What he says: Christ, she’s all pissed off about nothing again. All I did was disappear for a couple days and not return a few calls, and she goes totally nuts. That chick is crazy.

What he means: Rather than deal with the fact that I behaved like a 6-year-old on PCP, avoided all responsibility for a situation I’d created, failed to consider someone else’s feelings, literally pretended that what happened never happened, and thus caused this reaction, I’m gonna go with “she clearly has a mental disorder.” Since that’s the only way someone could think my behavior was less than perfect.

There are a few other variations as well:

What he says: She’s crazy.
What he means: She “inexplicably” yelled at me for leaving the half-full milk carton on the counter overnight. And the ice cream. And the leftover brisket.

or:

What he says: She’s crazy.
What he means: She didn’t think my story about exhuming a sunflower from my nose was the funniest thing since Richard Pryor’s “pigs are pigs” routine.

And my personal favorite (also the most ubiquitous):

What he says: She’s crazy.
What he means: She won’t sleep with me.

Of course, there’s a big juicy paradox in the middle of all this (I call it the Gender Catch-22): The surest sign that you’re crazy is you think everyone of the opposite sex is crazy, while never questioning your own sanity. So chew on that.

Now, after a little more experience–and a delve into the science of it all–I’m willing to admit that when it comes to genders, there are a few minor (in a relative sense) differences that wind up slaughtering any attempt at rational communication or understanding (especially since one of those differences is the definition of “rational”).

If I had to encapsulate it (which I don’t but will anyway) I’d say it comes down to a limitation in imagination/empathy. For both sexes. For instance, I can imagine, at least somewhat, how the parents of a murder victim feel, or how an abused child feels, or a laid-off employee or a harassed waitress or a pregnant woman on the C train. But there’s no way in hell I’ll ever really know, or care to know, what it’s like for some dude who hasn’t been laid in 4 months to be standing in a church receiving line and see the girls’ varsity track team go bouncing by. Apparently, it’s horrible and embarrassing. Cry me a f&*$% river.

See? No empathy.

Of course, there’s another side to all this: If you are in possession of a working penis, then women are women–not people, made of the same matter as you, but alien creatures put on earth to taunt (and sometimes slake) a libido that has evolved to make damn sure you impregnate at least one of us before you get chomped by a tiger or hit by a bus.

Women, it turns out, don’t really feel like being screwed or pregnant (or both) for 85% of their waking (and sleeping) lives. Plus this whole feminism thing came along, so we don’t have to rely on men for food and shelter. So here we have an impasse: You’re biologically programmed to think of us as objects, and socially condemned for doing so. Ha–sucks to be you! Oh wait, except we’re the objects. Shit.

The only way to cure men of this view, apparently, is to hand them a female infant, and tell them she’s the product of their sperm.

All this I discovered at a bar one Saturday night. I’m on the town with my father–hey, parents are people too–and we head to a packed whiskey joint in Brooklyn. We squeeze into a spot beside two thirty-ish men slugging Coors Light spiked with liquid testosterone, and violating every woman in the room with their eyes. The dark haired one, handsome in a “I know I’m hot because I’ve been getting away with shit my entire life” way, yanks his lecherous stare away from the bartender’s exposed belly button and glances at me. Then he eyes the jovial white-haired man standing next to me, and smirks.

Sigh. No, you androstenedione-snorting pervert, I am not his mistress. Jesus.

“Hi there. You, uh, want my chair?” he asks me with a hand flourish and an indelicate grin.

“No thanks. We’re fine.” (Note to men: Don’t hit on a woman in front of her father. It opens up a world of Freudian shit that you’re neither able to nor want to understand.)

“How about for your friend, here?”

“He’s my dad.”

Interested, the testosterone addict turns to my father. “You’re her dad? Really?” He slugs the rest of his drink. “That’s cool. The dad who comes out on Saturday night. That’s cool.”

My dad smiles a “We’re both dudes, and you’re fooling no one by talking to me” kind of smile.

“I’ve got a daughter too,” the would-be impregnator goes on. “She’s the love of my life, easy. Eight years old, already beautiful.”

He glaces at my face to gauge my reaction. Congrats! You procreated! And now you’re a father, who hangs out at bars ogling women. No doubt your child is assured a healthy and balanced view of men in her adult life.

I look to my dad, hoping to share an eye-roll, but he’s grinning like a fiend. “It’s amazing! When you have a daughter, your whole outlook changes,” he gushes. “There’s no getting around it. All of a sudden there’s this little person in your life You look at her, and realize, ‘Wait, women are people!’”

The men jerk their eyes from any exposed breasts in the room and bury guilty gazes in their glasses. The mood has flipped, a proverbial cold shower poured over the bar. Even the women in the room notice, standing up a little taller, not hunching to hide mammaries and shoulder blades and other exposed flesh that, a moment ago, made them targets on a firing line. Now who’s grinning like a fiend.

“I guess you’re right,” Cassanova mumbles, groping in his pocket for his phone.

So there we have it, tried and tested–an anthem for the “new new wave” of the feminist movement (cause let’s face it - the old new wave wasn’t going all that well). The motto we can all shout from the rafters:

Women are people too. Duh.

The bottom line with all this new networking and communications technology is that it’s simply a vessel. Human beings can’t communicate something that isn’t there. We can’t be anything other than ourselves–it’s one of our cutest limitations. And one thing we want is to be heard–to feel that what we think/feel/say matters. Give us a shiny new Web site that allows us to broadcast our thoughts in 140-character chunks from any location in the world, and we will happily do so. Even if it means we get fired/sued/dumped/vilified. That’s the beauty of self-expression–you can’t stop it once it’s started.

So while movements are rising among “anti-Tweeters” (you have to love people who define themselves based on what they’re against–it’s a uniquely hilarious form of inauthenticity), I say go forth and tweet if you’re so inclined. If you have something pithy to say, transmit it to the world. Announce that you just fed your cat, or spent the night in jail for public urination, or decided that Memphis is the fourth circle of Hell. Embrace the ability to see a bit further into the lives and minds of others. Ignore arguments that there’s “something wrong” with all this micro-information–since when is more information ever a bad thing in this technology-crazed era?

If you want to see the best and worst of Twitter behavior thus far, check out my latest piece in Discover.

And if you want to follow me on Twitter, click here. I promise, at the very least, that I update it far more often than this blog.

But one thing I’ve realized is that all the angst that accompanied the birthday wasn’t because I was losing anything — it’s that I was gaining entrance into a game where there’s nothing to win. I spent my twenties thrashing and writhing around until I congealed into the “Me” that I’m stuck with for good. So here I am! Welcome to life’s next stages! And what’s on the menu for the next 30 years?

Well, there’s always marriage — not typically a recipe for insta-bliss. Or I could go all alternative and try polyamory. No thanks — keeping one relationship together is maddening enough. Or this era’s blueplate special, served only in certain locations: Singlehood, the classic “life alone with Cat and her endless successors” scenario. Again, no thanks.

And career! Don’t forget career! That life-affirming occupation that fills 80% of your waking hours and gives you purpose and meaning in the universe. Except it doesn’t — not really. Which is a good thing, or else we’d have had massive rounds of Wall Street seppuku in the past six months.

Then there’s motherhood. Another nice thing about 30 is losing the ability to bullshit one’s self. Sure, I want to see the golden temple in Amritsar and climb the steps at Macchu Picchu and write a meaningful book that changes lives and stays on shelves longer than a week and a half–but all my body really wants to do is get knocked up and churn out some offspring. Millions of years of evolution versus my 5-year itinerary. Who’s gonna win that one?

In the meantime, I have plenty of tomes to read about how having children gives you “short-term purpose, but not meaning.” As an alternative, I could ignore every biological desire and dive entirely into my career, thinking of nothing but that professional apex — only to regret it when I reach the end and find there’s nothing there. Or I can proclaim that I’ll have both the career and the nuclear family– and inevitably wind up sacrificing on both ends.

Hmmm. So what they’re saying is I can have angst, regret and doubt, or angst, regret and doubt. Or I could say Fuck it and move to New Zealand to herd ewes. And likely wind up with a generous serving of angst, regret and doubt.

Or I could stop listening to others and absorbing the self-pity of people unhappy with their choices, and start making my own. Starting now:

Screw it all, I’m choosing to be happy.

Unfortunately, just about everything else is not quite so infallible — meaning that we can (and do) mangle, maul, and distort it all til it’s near-unrecognizable. Be it the solution to the AIDS crisis or the importance of monitoring volcanoes, we can knead it, beat it, douse it in flour, and wring out anything resembling actual truth. All by saying so. It would be remarkable, if it wasn’t leading to so many people getting royally screwed.

The main problem is language. Math doesn’t care about lexicon or context or syntax. Call it nine in the shower, or seven at gunpoint — it’s still four, asshole. The same cannot be said for just about every other concept. “Love,” “insanity,” “crisis” — these things all have completely relative meanings. We let the “smart” people make up meanings for them, and then go along with whatever the crowd says.

Take “experts.” It’s a funny word, with a strangely-placed “x” slapped on before the “pert.” But that makes no difference in actual practice. Call someone an “expert,” and suddenly we believe everything they say. We look at them in a new light, superior beings that have tapped into some existentially pure well of knowledge, despite the fact that they’re really just shmucks like us who may or may not have read a few books.

Experiment with it — watch what happens. “This is my friend Ty, he’s a Japanese fetish porn expert.” Ohhh, ahhh, how impressive! He must be so smart! Sounds a lot better than “he spends his days watching YouTube videos of men wrapping their faces in schoolgirls’ dirty socks.”

The only problem, of course, is that because we’ve all agreed that experts are so vastly smarter and we should listen to them, we do. Which causes slight problems, because while many of them may be quicker than your average Cheetos-swilling couch jockey, they’re hardly omniscient. Or even all that quick, sometimes. (Or most of the time. Or all of the time.)

So here we are, in this raging shit tempest, sprinting away from the semi-apocryphal fall-of-modern-civilization. Who will we turn to as the voices of reason? Who will end the cycle of greed, corruption, inefficiency and more greed? Who will guide us out of this river of economic sewage into the gummy candyland of capitalistic progress?

Oh, right — the experts. Crap.