Mea Culpa

I had a strange dream the other night:

My sister was hanging out at my house (which wasn't my actual house, but was supposed to be my house in the dream) and she called me over to the computer to discuss what she did and did not like about my blog. "All this stuff about politics -- ugh -- so boring!" she admonished. "So I just got rid of it," she announced happily. "What do you mean you got rid of it?" I asked with a hint of panic. "I just clicked those little boxes next to the posts I don't wanna read so they won't show up when I come here," she explained.

And then, as I began to freak out, my brother appeared out of nowhere and explained to my sister that clicking those little boxes deletes the posts for everyone, not just for the person doing the clicking. (For the record, I have no idea what "those little boxes" are -- I just made 'em up.)

The rest of the dream kind of happened in a jumble. I started interrogating my sister to determine which posts she'd deleted while she apologized repeatedly and my brother tried to calm us both down. But the more missing posts I discovered, the more upset I became, until I realized my sister had deleted one of my all-time favorite posts, at which point I began to cry, prompting my sister to apologize yet again. "Oh my god I'm so sorry!" she said, trying to hug me. And instead of doing what any normal person would do and accepting both her hug and her apology, I grabbed a nearby aerosol can (of what I don't know) and sprayed my sister IN THE FACE while I screamed at her, "How could you be so stupid?!"

So.

Obviously this raises a number of issues. First, that of the aerosol can. Doesn't my dream self know how bad that shit is for the planet? Second, the fact that I'm now dreaming about my friggin' BLOG indicates a certain level of blog obsession one might expect to find only among the clinically insane. But most importantly, my dream self is a BITCH!

Generally speaking, I do not A) scream at people, B) call them stupid, or C) spray them in the face with unknown substances. If I WERE to do any of those things, it certainly wouldn't be in response to an apology.

I have strict rules about apologies despite the fact that I come from a non-apologizing family. Oh, and we're Irish, which means we drink too much and we have bad tempers. But do we say we're sorry when we let our besotted tempers get the best of us? Hell no! Because that, my blogfriends, would mean we're not always right about everything. And being wrong is apparently something one should never admit. Sure, when we were kids, my parents TOLD us to apologize, but I don't think I ever saw them apologize to each other, and they rarely apologized to us.

In fact, my sister and I are the only members of our family who apologize, and that's a fairly recent (in the grand scheme of things) development. Apologies do not come easily to girls who were raised to believe that admitting you're wrong is a sign of weakness, but we're working on it. One thing we've got down is that when someone apologizes to you, you accept their apology. End of story.

Of course, if you're asleep and there's a spray can nearby, all bets are off.