Erasing Blame

I looked at somone’s Facebook posting the other day and saw myself being oh, so critical about an error she had made when she typed the comment.  Facebook certainly doesn’t qualify as Pulitzer Prize material and it didn’t really make any difference at all — although she was, I told myself, representing her business online when she wrote it. That seemed to throw her comment into an area that qualified as vastly more important and somehow justified the absurdity of my righteousness on behalf of language purists everywhere.  All that aside, the error didn’t affect me personally and I couldn’t quite figure out the intensity of the feeling I had about the foolish compositional mistake she had made — until I had one of those smack-myself-on-the-forehead moments and remembered a slight that I felt she had inflicted on me a while back. I realized that I was still feeling both hurt and annoyed about what I saw as her insensitivity at the time.  My criticism, deep down, had nothing to do with the typographical errors in the online promotional posting that I had seen — it had to do solely with how I thought she had mistreated me as her friend.  If she had hand-written the Gettysburg Address or a combo of The Iliad and The Oddysey and posted those, I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t have been right in my eyes either. It was definitely a case of placing blame that needed instead to be dismissed.  Time to get out my personal error-eraser and whisk away those silly vestiges of annoyance.  Bygones.