I was wrong; I'm sorry

Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, begins today at sundown. It’s the day when Jews prepare for the New Year by considering their actions over the past months and making efforts to acknowledge and amend the wrongs they’ve committed. Kind of like steps four through nine of the AA 12-step process.

Part of the amendment element is making an apology to the person or persons you have wronged. Marjorie Ingall has considered this issue for some time—she’s one partner in a blog that analyzes apologies, telling us why they’re good or bad. She summarizes those criteria in this story in Tablet Magazine.

Here are the elements: take ownership of the offense (use first person and name the incident(s) and acknowledge the impact of your actions); you can offer an explanation, but don’t make a Russian novel out of excuses. When you’ve done that, shut up and let the other person respond. And take it without whining or throwing up defenses. Finally—make reparations.

Fairly simple in theory, but not so easy in practice, as Ingall acknowledges; and as we’ve all experienced. She has a much longer list of how not to apologize, and I think you’ll all recognize them, as either the recipient or the perpetrator at various times in your life.

I’d like to add one more to that enumeration: the “are you open to an apology?” non-apology. I’ve written about this before, and it is an empty exhalation of breath. It’s vaguely proposing the theory of an apology without any of the substance of an actual, you know apology.

Plus, by thinking that counts, the only association with “sorry” is to your sad little life that you think you don’t have to own up to your actions, you pathetic excuse for a chordate.

Oh, here's another way not to apologize: posting "To all my friends: It's Yom Kippur and I'm sorry for anything I've done that might have hurt you" on Facebook, or tweeting it. There should be some kind of cosmic bitch-slap for anyone who tries that crap and thinks they've cleared the slate.

I personally believe that apologizing for something you’ve done is easier the less time you let pass between the offense and your atonement. The longer you let things go, the harder it is to swallow all that amassed crow. (At least it is in my experience.) Besides—getting into the habit of saying “I was wrong” and “I’m sorry” keeps you grounded.

But it’s also good to have a once-a-year date on your calendar to take a look back, maybe revisit some exchanges that you might have dismissed at the time but appear a little different after a few months, and then reach out to admit you were a dickhead, and say you’re very sorry about it.

Not “I might have seemed to be a dickhead…” or “I was only a dickhead because…” or “…if being a dickhead ruined [insert occasion here]”. No qualifiers, no weaseling, no drama queen.

I was wrong.

I’m sorry.

Let me do [this] to make it up to you.

There—feels much better already, doesn’t it?

Mild men

I don’t know why I didn’t know about this long before now, but there is an organization called The Dull Men’s Club. Yes there is, and it's real because they have a website.

And later this month they are publishing a 2015 calendar, “The Dull Men of Great Britain”.

This features blokes who collect lawnmowers, traffic cones, milk bottles, bricks and buses; spend five days per week moving rocks; and document drain covers, roundabouts, post boxes and hedges.

And, close to Ms. Language-Person’s heart, there’s the founder of the Apostrophe Protection Society, engaged in the never-ending struggle against the tsunami of misuse of that punctuation mark.

And no, I am not making up a single one of those pastimes.

There’s also a man who’s given his wife the same Valentine’s Day card for 35 years, but I’d categorize that more as sad than dull. She must encourage him, though. Or at least be inured to it.

You’re not going to see any naked torsos in this calendar; that might, after all, be outside the remit of dullness. Or public decency. Besides—the point is more the activity than the actor.

The DMC was founded in the 1980s, in New York City. They claim membership of 5000 around the world, but from their website, it looks as though the power base (if that be the correct term) has shifted to the UK.

Although—interestingly (again, if you can apply that modifier to an organization devoted to dullness)—they purport to have an “International Committee of Dull Men”, which meets in London and…wait for it…Washington, D.C. I would purely love to know the story about that.

And, uh, interesting (?!) again: their last nomination for “Dull Man of the Year” appears to have been in 2011. Is it possible that they’re actually living such fascinating lives that they don’t have time to keep this very important honor updated?

But the notion of making Keith Richards an honorary DM is totally, um, you know, inter…

Boom

Here’s something to get you going on this October morning—or any time, really:

And here’s what I always think about when I hear The Iguanas:

Homicide: Life on the Street, one of the best dramas ever produced on US TV. The particular episode closes at midnight ushering in 1997, the squad is called out to multiple murders, because: New Year’s Eve, America, like that. And “Boom, Boom, Boom” over the montage.

And  I also think of The Barns at Wolf Trap. One of my colleagues, whose romantic relationships never lasted more than a couple of months, had optimistically bought tickets for The Iguanas about three months out. The performance hit during that awkward period between breaking up with the one woman and finding another to ask out for that kind of date. So another colleague and I went to the show. Sweet.

So turn up the volume, step away from the device and move!

Space availble

As long as I’m on the subject of people who think they’re entitled to more than everyone else (at least in matters vehicular), here’s a new (to me) variant:

Leaving a bicycle in a parking spot. In a multi-office building’s parking lot. Which is full. (Note: the space next to the Subaru was blocked off from use because of some surveying work going on.)

When, by the way, there are bike racks next to the various building entrances.

The car that typically parks in that area is a vintage T-bird, and I noticed it (and its middle-aged male driver) leaving as I pulled carefully into the lot around noonish. I say carefully, because the lot has poor traffic flow design to begin with, and a seasonal pumpkin patch installation in the next lot has screwed things up even more than usual.

So I’m wondering if the bike was left there to save “his” spot. (And it’s all unassigned parking. That building houses startups when they’ve got too big for the garage but haven’t yet either been bought by Facebook or gone down in flames, so the tenant population ebbs and flows.)

If so, I hope someone in a BMW SUV pulled into the spot (which is pretty blind from one direction) and crushed the sucker.

Special delivery

The other day I was checking Staples in Cupertino for something. But before I got into the store, I was astounded to see a USPS truck just pull right into a Handicapped space smack in front of the store.

There were three cars in the entire lot, so it’s not like the letter carrier was strapped for open places to park. In fact, there was a vacant slot right next to him.

And he wasn’t carrying armfuls of packages, so he wasn’t burdened with weight.

No, he was just being a brass-plated, government-issue self-important, arrogant schmuck.

Gratitude Monday: Arts and techs

Today I’m grateful that a friend recommended I go to the Allied Arts Guild in Menlo Park, and to the Church of the Nativity, also in MP. She said, “They’re nice places to take pictures.

Well, she was right, of course. The Allied Arts Guild is this enclave about half a mile off the edge of the world, in a residential neighborhood, which you reach by going down a wooded road that you’re convinced is going to end up at a gingerbread cottage. Instead, you turn right, and there you are—houses on the right and artsy place on the left.

Turns out it’s a cluster of buildings housing studios and meeting places, interspersed with gardens and patios. A couple of studios were open when I was there, so I got to talk with the artists in a very relaxed setting. There was some kind of mom-and-me-singing play date in one of the rooms—a lot of high-end strollers parked outside, and “Up-up-up-up-up-down-down-down” wafting out the windows to the tune of “Greensleeves”. I expect there was appropriate movement attendant upon that.

Anyhow, it really was a great find, and right at the back door, so to speak, of Sand Hill Road, which is your basic Via de los Venture Capitalists.

Then off to the Church of the Nativity. I fired up my smartphone to find the address and for the very first time since I got it (in April), I noticed the little microphone jobber in the boot-up screen search box.

And when I tapped on it, ditto, for the first time, the little hint in the search box.

  

Well, “Okay, Google” and “Church of the Nativity” got me the one in Bethlehem, so I tried again: “Church of the Nativity Menlo Park”. And blow me if it didn’t come up!

This is a great thing—so great, I’m almost able to ignore the “Ok” instead of “Okay”, or even “OK”. Would it really have cost them so much to make it two capital letters? Do they not realize that “Ok” is essentially a single syllable sounding kind of like the tree?

No, no—I said I’d let it pass, and I will. But I’m going to have fun searching for just about everything now.

Oh—and the Church of the Nativity was very nice, too.

So I’m grateful for a recommendation that resulted in two new places and a whole new world.