things that made me happy today

  • having the freedom to get to the office for my first meeting (10am), and therefore
  • waking up and getting ready over a leisurely period of time, with a nice breakfast (coffee! yogurt! banana! egg! avocado! i like to eat.)
  • commuting in sunshine. makes me so happy!
  • snack with a small box full of strawberries and blueberries i prepped in the morning  (mmmm feeling responsible AND healthy AND delicious. triple win.)
  • making chicken stock last night and seeing how wonderfully it came out this morning
  • will inviting me to a lunch date in distillery spontaneously today.
  • visualizing how my place will look once its re-done (why yes i just finished it all and here are some pretty photos of it as it is now but apparently i have design ADD)
  • working in the office with exposed brick walls and beams and general coolness of the atmosphere
  • getting another airbnb booking for march bringing my total in march to a reasonable amount of days and money
  • looking forward to 2 nights back in my condo/downtown

there are days, about once every few weeks, where i consider how lucky i am to be living in the western world with an immense amount of personal and property safety.

i don’t fear recklessness on the roads. i don’t fear being robbed on the subway at night. i don’t fear walking on night streets of toronto, or running for 10km by myself through empty north york streets. i trust the water in my tap is drinkable – and i trust that it is effectively limitless. i can be warm when i want to be, and i can choose how to dress based on my own desires and not ones imposed onto me by a government. i’m not scared of public diseases on the subway.

all of these thoughts have actively went through my head in the last few months – appropo nothing, really. just a daily gratitude for .. being insanely lucky and privileged by the virtue of being born to the right people.

hell, i feel so safe that i’m cool with random people staying in my apartment for money.

and naturally a lot of these thoughts are raised when i read of any news in the world, and then i stumble onto sentences like this:

Russia is classified as a high-income economy by the World Bank (having a per capita GDP exceeding $14,000). 

14k per person, that’s … such a low bar. and i know it’s not income, but i mean, trinidad is doing better than russia.

clearly money isn’t a clear causation of safety, but inarguably there is a correlation there and … we’re all just really lucky, that’s all i guess i am thinking. forget lotteries, we already won compared to the other 6-7 billion.

sometimes i only feel what i should have felt years too late. i’m amazing. i picked myself up, decided that i’m done… and i just moved. everything. like, physically, everything.

photos from right before my last moments in the house.

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note the carefully packed cooler with snacks, gin and tonic and lime for the evening (i even took a knife and a cutting board). snacks. DSC_3893

pillow just in case. coffee and sugar for same just in case. you can see the cutting board peeking out.

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the 2 suitcases for 2 weeks of me day tripping all over UK and seeing my cousin

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