Not Lying to my Yahoo

People who suffer from frequent memory lapses shouldn’t try to be funny or corky when they sign up for accounts OF ANY NATURE.

Months back, I got locked out of several email accounts I keep; yes, several, because I used to keep one for each of the personalities in my head. Google and Yahoo have this nifty password retrieval feature that has you answer a security question you devised yourself. There’s a reason you should give a straight answer to a straight question. There’s every possibility you will forget your password, so your question should be one you couldn’t possibly forget the answer to. In my case, however, the questions weren’t the problem; the answers are.
What term of endearment does your husband use on you?
I tried yab, uyab, mygirl, gwapa, gorgeous, wunderkind, goddess, cupcake, and all the self-serving nicknames I believed it reasonably possible I’d inspire any man - most of all the one I married - to say. All of them bounced.

What is your second name?
I have only one: Joy. My birth and baptismal certificates read ********. Yahoo doesn’t acknowledge this, however, so I can only surmise I gave myself a second name I couldn’t go ask my father for.

What are you most likely to mumble upon waking up?
I tried Leche Monday na pud, Kapuya uy, Alex, and Turn that alarm off. I channeled Maya Angelou and typed, But still I rise. Not surprisingly, none of them gained me inbox entry.

My goal of tightening security worked. There’s no way anyone could steal my password. Not only don’t I remember my password, I also don’t know the answer to my own security questions. I am effing brilliant, so being unable to read my emails shouldn’t bother me at all, should it? After all, there’s no way I could have won any lottery I didn’t buy tickets for, no way at all an aunt bought me a ticket to London and decided to spring the surprise on me via email, no way on earth the CEO would email me he’s doubling my salary and dispatching me to a conference in a sleepy little Italian village with real cobblestoned streets.

For months, it ate at me - ate at me like you wouldn’t believe - that I would never get to find out what was filling up my inbox. What hurt the most wasn’t so much reality but the possibility that while I was locked out of my accounts, something wonderful - perhaps even magical - was on its way to me by mail. I ached physically and mentally with unrealized surprise.

Then, one day, during one of those rare moments when I think eating free lunch is well worth the tedium of washing my plate, I remembered my passwords, remembered the answers to my security questions. I hurriedly checked all three mails in question and found them overflowing with promises of a larger penis and fantabulous riches in Rwanda.

Oh, and in the off-chance you’re curious about the questions, the answers are: beloved, nefertiti, and did gyre and wimble in the wabe - all in that order, and none of them true.