1. People Aren't Inherently Kind.

This isn’t some kind of grand revelation. The world is full of insensitivity and hurt. People can be mean and unkind for a multitude of reasons. But anytime I witness it with my own eyes, I am taken aback. There’s something unnerving about watching people treat other people poorly. Even on a small scale. The stories of pregnant women riding transit alone paint a pretty grim picture of humanity. One anecdote I read on Facebook this week involved a dude telling a pregnant woman “Why should I give you my seat? I didn’t get you pregnant.” Ugh. Gross.

This brings me to my recent experience on crutches. After being told it could be months before my foot is back to normal, I realized that even though it is annoying and difficult to get around, I have to at least get to every voiceover audition I can. Lady’s gotta eat! I got to an audition the other day, hobbled into the room, and schlepped back down to street level. At this point, I was a sweaty mess. I had only been on crutches for a couple of days and my arms were getting a wicked workout. I stood on the sidewalk and made eye contact with a cabbie parked across the street. He turned on his engine and began to pull into a U turn to come get me. At this moment, a dude in his thirties stopped him, said something to him through his window, looked at me, then hopped in the cab and they drove off. “Did that really just happen?” I thought. That totally able-bodied man just saw me waiting for that cab and he took it anyway? “He couldn’t have seen me.” I reasoned with myself. But he had seen me. He saw the whole thing. He saw me hailing the cab, the cabbie turning on the engine, the cabbie pulling into the beginning of a U turn; for God’s sake the dude LOOKED ME IN THE EYE before getting into the cab.

I want to ask that guy, what if I was your sister? Or your mother? Or girlfriend? Would you want a woman in your life treated that way? Especially in a time of need? I guess you could argue that maybe he was in a real rush for an important reason but I just don’t buy that. He wasn’t running, he wasn’t panicked, he didn’t appear to be frazzled. He just calmly walked up, and calmly stole my cab.

I tweeted about this saying that “I hope karma is just” with this guy. What I actually wanted to say was “I hope this guy's balls fall off in some sort of painful gangrene-leprosy incident”. But that’s not really very “WWJD” of me, is it? (Though I think even Jesus would wish ill on this d-bag.)