Electromegnetic

There's a strange energy about me today. You know those days when you feel you're in someone else's skin or maybe that the world has shifted on its axis by a couple of degrees but someone forgot to tell you? Here are the list of oddities that have occurred between 8:30am and 3pm today (some you may find less or more odd than others):

• The cat pulled a caper. She has become used to hanging out on the fire escape with me during morning watering rounds. On the whole, I keep an eye on her, but she hasn't attempted any significant escape. Until this morning. She spotted a black cat slinking down the alley and immediately jumped up onto the railing of the fire escape, springing down onto the steep, shingled roof that hangs over a kitchen downstairs. It looked like she was debating either jumping off the roof to the downstairs patio (about 3 or 4 metres) or jumping to the next door neighbour's roof (1 metre jump but 4 metres up and over the heads of two large, protective dogs). I tried offering salmon crunchies, my undying love...I considered braving the roof myself to collect her (v. v. stupid idea)... Eventually, maybe because I maintained an outward calm, she tottered over close enough that I could grab her, and grab her I did! Her fire escape privileges have been revoked for the foreseeable future. I'm just not ready to deal with the little scrapper taking on the neighbourhood. She's so petite and cute but also a little wacko and unpredictable. Bah.

• Random strangers have been speaking to me all day, singling me out of line-ups and crowds to ask questions and strike up conversations. Seriously. In every situation since leaving the house this morning, someone has spoken to me with no encouragement on my part, usually even pulling me out of my book to engage with me. I was even asked, completely out of the blue and with very little accompanying context, if I am a nursing student, and whether or not I hold Canadian citizenship. The nursing question came from a stranger who shares my first name (how do I know this? That's a different story) and the citizenship question came from the hotdog vendor at the corner of Granville and Broadway. It was a terrible hotdog, by the way.

• On a desperate quest for a bagel with cream cheese, a breakfast option you think would be prolific, the two bagel places I did find have both closed in the last week and now have For Lease signs in the windows. That's why I settled for the less-than-settling veggie street dog. I've now had too much coffee that I felt compelled to buy in the coffee shops I entered to check (in vain, it turns out) if they sell bagels with cream cheese.

• My building on campus is strangely busy today. Mondays are usually quite quiet around here, and the summer months in particular have produced an echo-y shell of a building. Today, while my electroMegnetic shields are down, it's nuts around here with cellphones a-buzzing and colleagues a-twitter.

So, ok, these things don't seem SO strange now that I've written them down, but put them all together, on a Monday no less, and it feels like an oddly charged day indeed. My gut feeling at this moment is to find a quiet stairwell and hunker down in the foetal position for a while to see if things right themselves. That reaction alone makes me wonder about my mental balance today. I think perhaps I should have slept through Monday this week.