Righting.

At the desk, 10:07 a.m.

It's been a weird couple of days. All things seem a little wonky. Rather than focusing on the uncontrolled wonkiness, my mind tends to focus on the odd.

And, outside of all the undetermined wonkiness of the week, the oddest thing was finding this particular typo: "I was just righting you."

Now, finding a typo isn't all that unusual. I'm an author, not an editor, and even though I employ a bevy of editors, typos happen to the best of us. And if J.K. Rowling, Tolkien, and even the infamous POB have so many of them with all their editors and resources, who am I to stress it.

It's the word "righting" that caught me.

What if "righting" was a real word? What would it mean? I posted to my Facebook timeline.

Two lovely people found an actual meaning of the word - righting a wrong.

Two other lovely people rolled with it.

And still the word rolls over in my mind.

But let's be honest. It's not the WORD that I'm stuck on. It's this whole social phenomena of being right.

When I was a kid, we were told to never mention politics, religion, or sex in public. These subjects are fraught with conflict and to make a nice social outing, you just don't bring it up.

Now, that's all anyone wants to talk about. The grocery clerk disparages someone's religion. The doctor talks politics. The man who lives down the street launches into a diatribe about bike riders and how they are breaking the law. And everyone is right.

I don't mean "Everyone is entitled to their opinion." I mean that everyone in any conversation believes they are absolutely one hundred percent right. Period.

So these exchanges don't end up being conversations; they end up being sermons where one person speaks and the other person says "amen."

In my case, I usually shift uncomfortably and hope to escape the area quickly.

But I can't help wonder...

What happens if you're wrong? Personally, I don't mind it much. I know that as a human being, I'm often wrong or perceived at wrong. I must say that I'm annoyed by people who tell me I'm wrong when in fact I'm telling them something they don't know. (This or this are good examples of that.) That's harder to deal with face to face. But I usually smile, nod, and try to remove myself from the situation. But, like I said, I don't really mind being wrong.

So, I'm left wondering - what does one get by being right? Furthermore, what does anyone get by the inane pontification of rightness?

Righting?

And so you see, my mind comes full circle.

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