“How are you this morning, ma’am?” my judge just asked me from the bench.
I gave him a flat-lipped smile. “All right, I guess.”
“You look…guardedly chipper,” he observed with a kind smile.

I guess “guardedly chipper” is what I look like when I realize on the drive to work this morning that I’d been lied to. There’s the “Aww, that was delicious, thank you” lie, and then there’s the type of lie that’s used to cover some negatively-motivated action that, when told, just doesn’t sit quite right with the person lied to in a “gut” sort of way. It’s like laying a plank over a marble. You can’t see the marble, but the plank just doesn’t lay flat the way it’s supposed to, congruent with its surroundings.

This is all too familiar. It’s dishearteningly parallel, despite the absolutely different variables. As my high school friend Nina used to say, “Same shit, different toilet.”