Guilt is a horrible feeling.

Your tongue tastes like stale milk. Your stomach feels like an empty paint bucket. And the rest of you is just… Yuck.

Imagine for a moment that you have a paper to write. You have only three more days to begin and complete it because you've left it to the Last Minute.

The Last Minute is always the hardest. But it's also when you are most motivated by that part of your brain which evokes feelings of Ohmigosh I'm Dead If I Don't Finish This Today.

Now say you take out half of Sunday to write this paper. It is not entirely Last Minute, but it's cutting it damn close.

In any case, you feel good about it. You feel psyched. You hear the theme from Rocky playing in your head because, at this moment, you Kick Ass.

Then you go out to dinner. And when you return, you find the building that you were working in locked tighter than a United States Presidential election.

You try your entry code, you ring the doorbell, you bang on the door. But nada. Zip. Zilch. You're locked out.

Your unfinished paper is in there. And there's nothing you can do about it except wait until tomorrow morning.

Unless you want to venture a break in. But somehow you don't imagine a week in a jail cell with Bubba, Yo Momma would help you write your paper any faster. (Unless it's that kind of paper, in which case, damn you're sick.)

So you go home and sleep. You have to get up early the next morning because you need to grab your paper before heading to work.

So of course you oversleep. Of course. It was inevitable. Don't you realize by now that you only oversleep when you desperately need to wake up early the next morning? Duh.

You leap from your bed, run to the building, grab your paper, and rush to the office.

Okay, so you can just finish your paper during lunch or something. No problem.

But wait! You didn't think it would be that easy, did you? You fool!

You realize that your disk didn't save your paper. And the printer was going through a case of Mad Cow Disease, so you don't have a hardcopy back-up either.

All that is left is to start from scratch again.

How does this relate to guilt? Someone I know went through this because of me. I may not be directly responsible, but my tongue and stomach and the rest of me sure feels… guilty.

All that is left is to start from scratch again. Though perhaps you could let a nice guy like me bring you Diet Cokes and tea and spicy Thai food and anything else that will help you get through the crunch as you write your paper again?

. . .

Have you ever done anything you felt bad about?