Glass Half Full.... Half Empty

I had a really great day today... followed by a really crappy afternoon. While only the first half of the day relates to photography I'm going to write about it anyway because it rattled me a little bit and i think i just need to put pen to paper (or pixel to screen in this case) to get it off my chest.

We had a glorious spring day here, blue skies, warm sunshine topped off with just the right amount of chill in the breeze. Hung over like there is no tomorrow from a wedding the night before i cruised into the city early for a pre production meeting for a film I'm currently working on, after that I took my boyfriend and my golden half camera to the Deus Surf Swap Meet to take some photos and oooh and ahh over the amazing retro surf and skate boards on offer - sounds like a great day huh! well I'm telling you it was, I ran into some old friends, some new friends and some good friends and left exhausted but happy.

It wasn't till I got home my day got kind of crappy... Crappy in that i lost all faith in human decency for a while there. Absolutely buggered from running around in the sunshine all day I took myself to the corner store around 5pm to get a nice cold beverage.... now the corner store is all but a 30 second walk from my house... little did i know i would spend the next 2 hours holding the hand of a 80 year old man named Maurice as i whipped blood from his face.

You see the store was packed, people buying ice-creams and newspapers, bred and milk. There was a old man about 8 people in front of me in the cue and somewhere between picking up his Saturday paper and paying at the register he began to have a stroke....

the 8 people between me and him looked on and smirked, ignored it or acted all kinds of inconvenienced by this old man taking so long to pay for his paper as he struggled to stand up right and remember what he was doing... less than 30 seconds have passed before he leaves his paper at the counter, picks up another one at the door and stumbles out the door.

Admittedly i couldn't quite figure out if he was drunk or not (he wasn't) but something was definitely not right. I ran after him, leaving my own bloody wallet at the corner store only to find he had dropped both his wallet and his paper on the ground, and was attempting to cross a busy road with cars rushing by... this whole time nobody, not a soul was doing a thing! I mean shit, that really pisses me off. This was someones grandpa and Id like to think if my grandpa was ever in trouble like that someone would help the guy out.... It just really irks me that people these days assume the worst, oh he must be a silly drunk old man, leave him be type thing.

Any who I finally caught up to him and he had fallen, cracked his head open and was showing all the signs of having a stroke, thanks to two more kind strangers a ambulance was called and Maurice (I found his name inside his wallet) was taken to the hospital... I hope he is doing OK and i hope he has family close by to look after him but i also hope that karma bites those horrible people that just looked on and laughed in the arse sometime soon.

The photo above is by Jen Gotch it seemed fitting for this post, both happy and sad - exactly like my day today...