Forgive Me, Father...

...for I have sinned. I wonder if Catholics actually feel absolved of their sins when they confess. As an atheist Jew, I've never had the privilege, so my sins just sit with me. Unless I apologize for them. Which I'm usually too chicken-shit to do. So I thought I'd put them on the blog as my own form of confession. I spend a lot of time thinking about the bad things I've done to people—they literally keep me up at night, sometimes—so I might as well get them out in the open. Without some sort of openness, I feel like a phony. I'm no less reprehensible for confessing them on my blog, but at least I'm not faking moral perfection, or even consistent pretty-good-ness.

This isn't about vices, although there are plenty of those. I don't really worry about my porn- or bad-TV-watching. That doesn't hurt anyone. And it's not even about my absurd sins of omission (I may have the single worst community service and charitable giving record of anyone I've ever met). This is about me actively doing things that hurt people. So, here it is, a working list of my sins. I'll update as things come to mind:

1. Probably the worst thing I've done: As you may know, in college, I photographed for a "beautiful people" issue of the campus tabloid. My senior year, I photographed a professor for the issue. After college, I created a personal website and put lots of the photographs of attractive guys up, along with the names of the guys and little blurbs about them. The one I put up about this professor was horrible. I called him unbelievably arrogant (he was glad to take the photographs, which was great, because that makes for much better pictures) and mentioned his facial hair and swaggery style in really obnoxious ways. I meant for the blurb to be light-hearted, but one critical perusal would have made it pretty obvious how hurtful the blurb could be. Critically, the professor's full name was in the blurb as well as in the title of the page. I periodically googled names on my website just to be sure they didn't turn up, and the names never did. Apparently google didn't search the title field. What I didn't realize was that google most certainly did search the blurb field, and not only was it picking up the professor's name, but it was returning my page on the first page of google hits for the professor.

I didn't know about any of this until a source who wished to remain nameless emailed me saying that the page was turning up on searches for this professor and not only had it hurt him personally, but it may have been hurting him professionally, too. It was also brought to my attention that the professor had been having an otherwise very tough year (illness, etc.) and this was just adding to his troubles. The source also emphasized that keeping the page up was fully within my rights...yeah, great. Needless to say, I took it down immediately. I still can't believe that I was so thoughtless and careless and in such a way that hurt someone so badly...that I said something rude, hurtful, and uncalled for in a forum that everyone could read and people would actually be led to. And I never apologized. And I don't think I'm going to...I'm just terrified. I am, in the truest sense, sorry, but that doesn't change anything. I hurt someone, and the best I can hope for is that the damage is done and won't continue.

2. In English class, in high school, I called a close friend's comment "stupid." I even led up to it with "I've wanted to have an occasion to say this for a long time," or something like that. I was jealous of his incredible breadth of knowledge, his intellectual confidence, and his insight, and that jealousy came out in this horrible way. He had the good form to tell me after class that he thought my "behavior today was disgusting." He was right. It was.

3. I had a rough time, socially, in elementary school. So I probably should have known better than to pick on this guy in middle school. For some reason, I thought our mockery of him was in good fun. He never seemed to take it too badly, and people do sometimes pick on their friends in light-hearted ways without problems. But he didn't take it that way. I didn't realize that until I asked him to sign my yearbook at the end of the year, and he said, "What should I say, 'thanks for making my life miserable?'" I was pretty stunned.

4. In a dining hall in college, there were these two grad students sitting around laughing. I imitated their laughter to my friends. They heard. They stared at me in disbelief.

There are more, I know. I'll add them as I think of them.