From this moment on, I apologize to you all in advance if you are stuck driving behind me in the city of Baltimore on weekday mornings. Feel free to lay a long and sonorous honking on me, shout at me from your window as you zip around me, or gesticulate wildly in your rear-view mirror, but I will be driving the posted speed limit of 30 miles per hour on side roads.

It's kind of embarrassing, but ever since I began working in downtown Baltimore, I have received weekly photo verifications of my speeding infractions on various city streets, adding an extra $40 per week to my commuting costs. Clearly, this habit — and I — must be reined in.

And the first step in my self-imposed 12-step Lead-Foot Recovery Program is for me to be completely honest and say: "Hey, everybody else around me is speeding, too!"

This, of course, is like telling your mother that Louise Barkerson smokes, and she's an honor student. Your mother is not going to buy this line of reasoning, because you are not Louise Barkerson, young lady.

The second step in my program is to try and deflect attention from my speeding transgressions by mentioning that at least once a day on my commute, I roll down my window and hand a dollar to a young boy who is selling water from a narrow median strip at a crowded, dangerous intersection along North Avenue. The child invariably tells me that God blesses me.

But this story backfires, because the fact is, God has already obviously blessed me with a job that does not involve working a median strip in the oppressive 100-degree heat.

Steps three through six in my recovery program involve the mature activity of looking up the four specific areas on Google Maps where I have been photographed exceeding the speed limit and making a mental note to slow down in those particular areas. I can also assuage my guilt by embracing the psychology of the group mentality, telling myself I should expect some honking, zipping and gesticulating from the speed-camera-uninitiated in those areas. I can reassure myself that I had, after all, simply been keeping up with the flow of traffic.

But wait — shouldn't I be driving the speed limit everywhere, not just in some places where I now happen to know there are cameras? I've never stolen merchandise from any retail stores, whether there are security cameras set up or not. So why would I think speeding is OK in places where there are no speed-trap cameras? Hmmm.

Steps seven and eight are, respectively, whining about and making light of the tickets I have received.

But when you have racked up four tickets, frankly, sympathy runs out, and it's not funny — it's a problem.

So here we are at step nine, which is to blame the government. Everyone knows that the City of Baltimore has budget problems — and what better way to solve them than to go fishing in the pockets of commuters, who more or less use the city services and wear down the roads and basically take the money and run? I would guess, though, that there are hundreds of city workers who, just like me, have received these tickets. The camera simply doesn't discriminate.

Steps 10 through 12 are to go on a rant about "Big Brother;" claim the proliferation of cameras is an affront to civil liberties; and decry this ticketing practice as an invasion of my privacy. From here, it's a short, easy segue into a discussion about phone tapping and the loss of basic freedoms and everything else that's wrong with America today.

But instead I wrote this essay. Because I am in the wrong.

And I am going to celebrate my recovery, and give $40 to the kid on North Avenue, the first week I can.

Janet Gilbert works in Baltimore and lives in Woodstock. Visit her at http://www.janetgilbert.net.