Sorry.

Today I was super ashamed when I was talking in class and was totally called out for it by the prof ("Hey, what's your name? Girl with the orange hair and purple shirt? You are talking a lot.") Oh man, I blushed so bad. I apologized, and then tonight send her a really sincere email apology, and it got me on my now-familiar rant about apologies, and I want to write it out.

I want to thank my Daddy so much for teaching me how to apologize. I am increasingly learning what a lost art it is in our culture, and I think you gave me a real advantage in life by teaching me this skill, Daddy <3 [His steps are (1) I'm sorry (2) It won't happen again (3) Is there something nice I can do for you?]

Seriously, I keep running into situations this year when someone (often me) just really needs to offer a sincere apology. Sometimes they are just really oblivious to this need. Other times they have just been trained to do a mediocre, dismissive "sorry", or to apologize, but with excuses or without actually taking responsibility ("I'm sorry, but..."). They should say "I am sorry I was offensive" - not "I am sorry if you were offended."

Sometimes a person should just humble themself and do it. You can ALWAYS apologize for how you made someone feel, even if you know you didn't have bad intentions.  Of course you didn't have bad intentions. It is a total fallacy in our society that you only need to apologize when you purposefully had ill intent. 

You didn't mean too, but you did cause harm, so my method is (1) take a deep breath, (2) identify what went wrong and take responsibility, (3) apologize sincerely and without excuses, and (4) make amends, communicating your respect for the other party.

picking up the pieces?

I have identified apologizing as something I definitely want to continue working on. I think I can improve a lot, and it will be so worth it, even if our culture kinda fails to recognize its value.

Sally Army

I love thrift stores!

If you are just starting out and trying to live well on a budget (e.g. college student :) ), you need to get yourself over to Salvation Army and buy just oodles of appliances. They'll cost you $5-$10 (woo!) and appliances are awesome.

 



Some of my favorite Sally Army purchases:

George Foreman Grill - a healthy, easy way to cook meat and it makes fantastic paninis! Someday Savannah will post about her MIT paninis ...mmmhm. (She put the recipe on her application to MIT, and she got in. True story.) $6.99

Bread maker. Fresh bread. Heck yeah. $6.99

And of course, our wok. $4.99

So yay for stuff! And by the way, I'm pretty happy that our blog just reached 100 page views. I know, that's really lame :) but in celebration I gave it a little makeover, and look at this:

Our QR code! I think that's kinda nifty.

Have a great day!