"Cheater...."

           Yet again I have found myself comparing life to some of the thoughts and questions posed in the book 97 by Justin Lookadoo. This particular section of the book was more of a rhetorical question section. “Have you ever cheated at a game? Maybe you’ve played the game so many times that you know how to win it. Maybe it’s a game where you find a way to cheat so no one knows. At hide-and-seek, do you peek while you’re counting and everyone is finding a place to hide? Do you deal from the bottom when playing cards? Do you abuse the rules so they work best for you?”

He continued on. “How about school? Have you ever cheated at school? Maybe you spent all night watching TV and didn’t study. Maybe your best friend is a genius at math, and she happens to be really nice to you. Maybe she owes you a favor, so you ask if you can see her homework. Or maybe you don’t even ask. Maybe your eyes wander on quizzes. Maybe.”

“Have you ever cheated on a boyfriend? “Have you ever cheated on a girlfriend? What they don’t know can’t hurt them, right? Maybe it was your one shot to be with that guy. Maybe you’ve always liked that girl, and now that you’re dating someone, she’s interested. Maybe it didn’t mean anything because you didn’t love the fling. It was just a one-time thing. Maybe. All of these words can be found in the thesaurus for the words cheat or cheater: burn, con, crook, deceive, defraud, double-cross, dupe, mislead, rip off, scam, swindle, trick, victimize, false, two-faced, hustle, faithless, and treacherous.”

As I read over this page, I couldn’t help but find a situation for each one of these questions. I remember back when me and my oldest brother would play the game Battleship. If he ever guessed the right place for one of the missiles to hit my battleship, I would always tell him “miss” and then move my battleship to a different spot on the map. It was just the way I played. I won’t say that I “didn’t mean to” cheat, because cheating doesn’t happen on its own. Cheating takes an action. Someone has to go out of their way to review the rules, think of a way to bend them, and then they have to act on it. By saying that I didn’t mean to cheat, it’s a whole lie in itself. Cheating is intentional.

There were also several times back during my sophomore year in World History with T. Marshall that I would find a way to bend the rules. On our assignments instead of everybody doing their own individual assignment, we’d work in large groups in an attempt to get the work done faster so that we could use the extra minutes to talk at the end of the hour. The idea of working in groups on an assignment wasn’t the problem. The problem was that every time we did it this way one person would get all the sheets together and write down all the answers on his/her sheet then the group would pass it around and copy down all the answers. There was absolutely no learning or remembering involved. This caused me to get several bad grades on quizzes. Finally I started actually reviewing over the sheets that we got and my grades improved as well.

Relationships are always a prime example of cheating now days. I don’t think the media could go a single day without gossiping about this person accusing that person of cheating on them. That’s all we hear about. Well until today I thought that it was ok to date someone and still have feelings for another person. In short, have feelings for two different people. After reading this page in 97 I understand now that the entire time I was dating that person, and having the same feelings for another I was cheating in my heart and in my mind. I had never looked at it that way, I’m sure glad I realized that now instead of further down the road, perhaps when I am married.