Sad Days Get Better

Yesterday was a sad day. Nothing bad happened. I was just sad. I think I'm coming down from the vulnerability overload of working on and then delivering my TEDxRegina talk.



I eventually put on my coat and left the apartment. I just couldn't take another moment with nothing to concentrate on but the discomfort of my own skin — you get that, right? — and so it was that I found myself out in the street several blocks from home before I realized that I had nowhere to go.



I walked into a Shoppers Drug Mart where I was hassled by Jillian Michaels. She's so damn finger-pointy that I just want to judge her right back and diagnose her with psychological disorders. If I was her manager, I'd work on showing the softer side of Jillian, the side with less fingers attacking my psyche when all I want to do is buy vitamins, for the love of god.



Oh, look. I took a sneaky picture of a stranger's badonka-donk on an escalator. I betcha this is what Jillian was getting all pointy about. Other people's butts are none of my business.



I stopped for a little while to wallow in the cold, heartless, militaristic, fear-based monstrosity which was levelled over a park, bricked in, and studded with inhumane metal structures over the last year just to feed this sort of feeling, it seems. Now the drug dealers are gone, and so is everyone else.

Are you sick of me going on about this feeling yet? Me, too. It was a very long day.



BAM! A statue of John A. MacDonald!



If this statue is to scale, that dude got all the ladies.



I decided it was high time to snap out of it and tucked myself into a small restaurant where I ate cake. I'm always eating cake lately. The heavier and thicker and stickier the cake the better. I ate a peanut butter and jam square that I could almost pretend was a sandwich, so I passed it off as lunch.



Yum.



DEAD BIRD!

I couldn't resist another dead bird photo. I wish I'd been able to stay and take more pictures of it, but there were people around, and a couple of them noticed me hovering over this carcass, and things just start to feel really awkward socially once your public carcass-hovering has been detected.

Don't look at me like that. I'll have you know that people send me pictures and news stories about dead birds. I'm not alone in this, you know. Geez.

Just to balance out the forces...



...ALIVE BIRD!

You're welcome. I know you were worried about the forces.

At any rate, I'm feeling much better now. I threw myself a kitchen dance party to the totally dirty and offensive and NSFW Azealia Banks and twirled around with one of the cats and made myself one of those rare perfect cups of coffee where I got the cream/coffee/brown sugar ratio just right.

My advice for curing a sad day? Walk it out. Throw a kitty dance party. Eat cake. Dead birds are optional.

Doing My Duty For Gold Doubloons (aka Generously Sharing My Neighbourhood's Dead Bird Population With You)

In my continuing chronicles of local dead fowl, I give you this unfortunate pigeon, which has been lying frozen beside the sidewalk for at least two weeks.



I would apologize for this, but I held out as long as I could, and when I saw that the body wasn't going anywhere, I knew that I must do my duty.

And BAM! Here I go doing my duty again:



There was also a three-week old sandwich that's been frozen to the ground in a nearby parking lot, but I'm not that into food photography.

You can thank me in gold doubloons. I hear they're making a comeback.