I feel like in the past few months I've become a little more comfortable with myself. Stopped showering as often, stopped wondering if my legs look okay in leggings.

I dunno, I thought these were pretty big steps.

I was thinking about what it means to be a good person. Maybe it means never working for a large corporate institution. Keeping a clean house. Recycling. Going for frequent bike-rides. Hosting tupperware parties. I've felt a lot of guilt throughout my life of not feeling like I'm riding the right wave. That I'm tripping on a skirt, kind of stumbling around on this whole 'doing-the-right-thing' thing. I still haven't completely committed.

At least if I die from picking up a murderous hitch-hiker I will be known as the girl who picked up hitch-hikers.

I was walking to school and this old man walked by me. My first instinct was to look down, but I thought to myself: Not every man is a closet pedophile/rapist/wife-beater. I'm such an idiot. I just wrote a blog on people judging others and not helping out. So I looked him in the eye and smiled. The guy probably has kids. Grandkids. And isn't the grandpa I read about who molested two grand-daughters who only just came out about it when they were in their thirties or something.

The world is ugly, and people are ugly, but you can't treat everyone like they're ugly.

I volunteered last year at a youth centre for inner-city kids. I made a connection with one of the girls, who wrote me a note (where, in brackets it said "this is not a poem"), gave me a necklace, two pictures of her, and two chocolate bars. I hugged her and gave her a chocolate bar back and told her through Snickers-covered teeth "of course I'll be back." It took me over five months. I spent an hour on a couch in between three nineth-grade boys talking about x-box before she showed.

It's just, people don't view other people as people. There's so many of us, maybe, that it's easy to tell yourself what matters is family. Friends. Church. Rider fans. Hispanic men. We forget that we're all just developed embryos. Encoded with DNA. Race and gender are social constructs we made up so we can give points to those who meet this generations criteria.

Anyway. I'm far from what I would like to someday be. But hey. Let's care about each other. I would like to say that I care about you.