Excuse me (or did my frail human body get in the way of your *&%ing Hummer)?

I'm certainly no Miss Manners. I say fuck when I cut my finger cutting onions. I sniff when I can't find a tissue. I have been known to let my underwear dry on the towel rack and even let an absolutely raunchy belch through the gates given the proper circumstances (which usually include pajamas and beer).

In the last few months, however, it has been brought to my attention that there are some issues of chivalry, kindness, and plain common decency about which I am very serious, and appallingly the general populous seems not only lax but utterly at odds with.

Earlier this week, after a brief flurry of snow, which left barely a schmaltz on the roads, which the city chose to salt rather than plow, I had the daily privilege of my three mile walk to work. I set out with my winter coat, knee high boots, gloves, hat and umbrella. Not a third of a mile into this commute, I was passed by a car traveling at a fairly high speed. The speed limit for cabot street can't be more than thirty mph, and this vehicle must have been going at least forty, giving its wheels the perfect opportunity to cover me from head to foot in filthy, thick slush.

Now, I am not a newcomer to this walk. I have trodden this same three miles since last spring, and I like to think I am not only a considerate and proper pedestrian, but that I ask very little in return, first and foremost DON'T KILL ME and secondly please don't treat me like another car.

This second one may be a smidge less specific, but think about it for a second. While you, driver, are safe and secure inside your four walls of reinforced plastic, metal, rubber and airbags, with glorious things such as climate control, windshields, moon roofs, seatbelts and antilock brakes, I am a sorry little sack of flesh and bones with all the protection of sunblock, fabric, sunglasses and an ipod. If I'm super flash, I have on a pair of shoes that are waterproof.

All I meekly demand is that you think before you honk at me for being not as speedy as a vehicle when I do things like cross the street, or when I startle because you clearly didn't look one way while shooting out of a side street and I was almost a smear on your passenger door.

I realize that this is america and I have the ability and right to a vehicle of my own choosing, but for the moment that vehicle is me, and all I ask is the same amount of caution you would hope a driver would give you, if suddenly your ton of glass and steel and cushion was stripped from you, and you stood staring down a three mile plod along a poorly cleared road on a thirty degree january morning.

By the time I reached my job, on this particular day, I had been frosted like a cake. One or two or even three splashes are to be expected, but during this commute I had been drenched by EVERY OTHER CAR. I would like you to take a moment and think about that.

Every second car that passed me, either thought I was pathetic enough to deserve being soaked in salt and grit and ice cold water, or it never even crossed the driver's mind to consider what would happen if they traveled through a huge pile of precipitation at the same speed they travel on a highway.

I don't want anyone's pity. I got to work. I changed my clothes. I washed my face. i did my job. But I'd be lying if it didn't make me pay closer attention to how people are treating each other in general right now.

Sadly, the results are conclusive. Nobody gives a shit about anyone but themselves.

People don't hold doors anymore, not even for a person entering directly after them. People don't stop for crosswalks. Maybe one out of every ten people say please and thank you.

In my three years of grocery shopping in the state of massachusetts, I say excuse me, whenever I am in the way of anyone, and clear out as soon as possible. If I am obviously right in front of the product another person is reaching for, I excuse myself and move.

Not once, at all, have I ever seen this behavior in anyone else. I have never had someone say excuse me in a grocery store. Period.

In fact, I can't think of the last time someone said excuse me to me that wasn't a dear friend of mine because yes, my friends are polite, considerate human beings. I don't associate with cretins.

And yes, everybody else, I am talking about you.

It is common knowledge that a much more terrifying atrocity is committed by the person who thinks and feels nothing for his fellow man than the person who is filled to the brim with hatred for him.

I don't ask much. I just ask that everyone look around! We are all hurting right now. This economy is absolutely hammering us. Many of us are stuck clinging to jobs we can't stand or lost jobs we didn't like due to downsizing. Some of us are on the dole, or moving back in with our parents. Some of us have kids to feed or unemployed significant others. Some of us have all of the above!

What we do have is our commonality as humans, our decency and our ability to look around at those who suffer alongside us. Who cares if you drop your last ten dollar bill in the snow if you don't pick up the money the person beside you dropped and give it back to them? Who cares if you get cut in line at the store, or if someone breaks the drier at the laundromat right before you load your clothes into it if you don't do the same.

The more narrowly we carve our vision, the more people will turn blind eyes to our own hardships.

It took a couple of hours for me to dry out after that walk last week, but the apathy of so many people has been impossible to wash off.

Look around. Somebody always has it worse than you. Somebody always has it better. And at the exact moment that you are fucking someone over through pure bloody minded ignorance, someone higher up the ladder is unknowingly about to do it to you.

I'm not going to get preachy about karma or the threefold rule or anything, but I am going to say that I am not ready mourn humanity yet, but you are hanging on by a string.

Words Words Words

At the end of 2010, I crammed a book into five days. It felt really really good. In the last two days, I read another.

This means in the last week, I have read 12.5% of the number of books I read in the entirety of one year.

Things that make my brain squirm.

My two new years resolutions are to read more, and to be visible.

I want to be seen. I want to be noticed. Hold my head up and put myself out there and display my work and stop being so very very self conscious.

I remember when I was fourteen. It was my first year living in the U.S. after Canada. The school was very different from what i was used to and the cafeteria terrified me. In Canada everybody ate their lunch at their desk in the portables we had class in, or outside, when the weather was nice.

In this new school, there was this really terrifying set up called a Cafeteria. I had never seen one before, and I thought it was set up like a giant theatre, where everybody sitting down was watching all the people in line to buy their food. My Dad told me that when you're a teenager you think everybody's looking at you, but they're actually so worried about being looked at themselves, they couldn't be watching me.

Still, I was relieved I always brought a bag lunch, and I would never have to be up there in line being looked at.

It was the scariest part of my day, any time I had to walk up in front of the class and write on a board, or give a report, or even just find a table in the cafeteria to sit at and not get bothered.

I was a weirdo. I found a table of girls like me, who hid in the back and didn't want to be seen. They were the only people who asked me questions about where I'd lived and why my accent was different, who were interested in the answers and not just how strange and alien I seemed.

In high school, we were the girls at the table that got food thrown at it. I stopped eating in the cafeteria after a while and stayed by the lockers just outside the big room. I sat on the floor and ate my lunch with one or two close friends.

One day in a humanities class run by a teacher who thought his methods were the very fanciest, we were each given a sheet of paper with the names of everyone else in the class on it. The teacher told us to write down exactly what we thought, truly thought, about each person, and then hand the papers back. We did, and the next day he handed us all back a sheet of paper with what everyone else had written about ourselves. It was entirely anonymous, so we could be as mean or revealing as we wanted.

I recall that out of twenty or so responses, maybe thirteen of the lines written about me said, "she seems nice, but I don't know her."

Mission accomplished.

I set out to right some wrongs when I went to college.

I vowed to do very scary things.

I picked the scariest thing I could think of: improv.

Standing in front of a huge room of people with nothing to save you but your mind and a lack of stage fright.

Shockingly. I wasn't bad at it.

I had so much fun, I buried myself in it, and I used it as an excuse to hide my writing. Why expose myself in other ways, when I was doing it so thoroughly already?

After I graduated, I fled. I dropped off the map. I didn't send anyone forwarding addresses. I never reached out. I lost good friends. I squandered opportunities and connections in an effort to vanish again, to fall off the radar and disappear from everyone's sight again.

A few of you refused to let that happen. Thank you.

Now it is 2011.

I am going to turn twenty nine this year, and it will be ten years since I stepped on an improv stage for the first time, and fifteen since I shivered in that cafeteria.

I have written. I have written. I have written.

And I have been terrified to ever let anyone see.

It is time to be visible.