None too giddy

As I sit down to write my first blog, I'm thinking about tone, about how to keep a reader interested in my random ramblings, and how when I write I tend to lose much of the giddiness that fills my brain and my conversations on a daily basis. I know I've made people laugh (with me, and of course at me, or at my antics) from time to time, and I laugh at silly things like the movie Nacho Libre or Lego Indiana Jones or lolcats pictures; but when I write, serious old Alice creeps down my arms and seeps out the ends of my fingertips onto the keys. It's with irony that I chose the blog moniker Alice from one of the silliest books ever written to sign off on these blogs that will probably rarely read as silly. I don't want to force it, the giddiness, the silliness that have been filling my days with joy this 2010, and the last half of 2009, so I will just write, to get into the habit of writing, and hope that giddy Alice will peek out once in a while. Now, onto the blogging.
One of the best decisions I made about four years ago was to try a social experiment on myself, some CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy) if you will. I don't have children, so I had to run this psychosocial test on myself. I found that the Canadian behaviour of saying "I'm sorry," "Sorry!" "sorry about that," "Oh, I'm so sorry" was diluting the real meaning of that word to the point where the phrase was more a verbal tick than any true indication of regret. I decided to try to reserve saying "I'm sorry" when I really meant it, when I was regretful or wanted to express a sense of loss. I say "try" because I am not always successful, of course, since hearing that tick all the time from fellow Canadians certainly makes it harder to avoid saying it. What do I say instead? "Excuse me" or "pardon me" in physically awkward situations, and other polite expressions of cordial good nature in appropriate circumstances (there's serious-Alice again). The best (and scariest) part about avoiding "sorry" is that when I removed that phrase from a situation in which I made a mistake, I had to start taking responsibility of my mistakes. I had to own the error, ("my bad" as some of the hip kids say these days); that owning was a terrifying prospect at the beginning of this experiment, or lifestyle change as the case may be. And do you know what happened when I started saying, "I made that mistake"? Nothing. Nada. Zip. Bupkis. People opened up to this statement of my human nature of erring, identified with me as a fellow flawed, vulnerable being, and I followed the owning of the error with the spoken resolution to fix the mistake or to do better next time, and everything was just fine. A revelation.
A liberating phrase, that I am so glad I found at some point in my life: "I made a mistake." Say it out loud, say it proud; I do, and it changed my life.