No Apologies

I wrote a Yom Kippur piece for the Sisterhood blog over at The Forward a few days ago--it's about women apologizing too much, and often for things about which they don't need to be sorry. Yesterday morning I found myself doing exactly what I warn against in this piece. I was paying for some candy at an amazing new candy store at The Grove in Los Angeles. I had already given my debit card to the cashier so I began to search for something else in my wallet, only to look up a few second later and realize that the cashier had been holding my card out to me. "Oh, I'm so sorry," I said. "You're not forgiven," she replied, with a look of feigned contempt, "because that is a totally egregious error." I laughed to myself,  thinking about my piece about refraining from squandering apologies, which had been posted earlier the same day. "You know," I said, "I'm really not sorry."