It’s Time To Take A Risk, Sweetheart.

So I’m now in my second year at uni, and already my mind is wandering to the possibilities that lie after graduation. Will I get a job? Will I like my job? Will it end up being anything to do with my degree?
All of these thoughts are starting to swarm, along with an overwhelming sense of pressure to “do” things.

One of my biggest fears is to die having not done any of the things I always say I’ll “one day” do.
Get a book published, have a job I enjoy, travel, see the world, live somewhere new… just to SEE things, and DO things with my life.

I was talking with my friend over a Starbucks yesterday, and we were talking about her great grandfather who had lived till he was 113. She told me about how she’d listened in awe when she was younger to his stories and the things he’d experienced. She said that she wants one day to be the one with a century worth of viewing the world and how it changes.
I mentioned how it was a shame that our species have such short life spans. The average life expectancy in the UK (as far as I’m aware) is 80. In the grand scheme of things, that is not very long at all.
As I mentioned this, I realised something; I’m 20 already. That leaves me with maybe 60 years left on average. That kind of terrified me.
I’m 20 and I feel I’ve experienced and achieved almost nothing. I always aspire to do so much more than I end up seeing through. And I want that to change.

Dom and I are thinking of moving when we graduate. Maybe to Canada.
When he mentioned this to me I was slightly stunned, and instantly thought of all the reasons I couldn’t do that.
Now I’m only thinking “why should those stop me?”

I want to see the world right? I want to experience new places and cultures right? I don’t want to miss opportunities or chances. I want to LIVE life, rather than just imagine it.

So why the hell not? Yeah, go on then. I’ll move to a foreign country. I’ll travel on a whim. I’ll try new things.
You know why? Because maybe if I’m very lucky, one day I’ll be the one inspiring my great grandchildren to have their own century of stories to tell.

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My Life in Letters: O.

For the letter ‘O’, I thought I would talk about my hometown, and the city of my birth, Oxford, England.
I’ve always been someone who’s lived all over the place, not due to my parents moving or anything, but just because I tended to move all around the place personally. However, out of all of the places I’ve lived, Oxford has been the most consistent.
20 years ago now, on the 16th of July, I was born at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford city center.
I lived in a small village outside of the boarders of the city after that, in and out of different areas of the outskirts.
I lived in the center of Oxford while working through my gap year, where I lived independently, before moving to Bolton for University.

Although I no longer live in Oxford, and I’ve spent time living elsewhere, such as Yorkshire and Manchester and Aylesbury, I will always consider it my original home. I doubt I will go back there to live permanently again after University, but it will always be another home to me.

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The Time We Accidentally Called The Police On Our Landlord…

So we moved into our house a week ago now, and since we moved in, we’ve caused our landlord a fair amount of grief, including calling him in over problems with sanitation and cleanliness in the house, issues with billing and various other issues… however I think we may have topped it all with accidentally calling the police on him within the first week of living here.

Now, I know you must be thinking “How the hell could you ‘accidentally’ call the police on someone?” and let me assure you, there is a genuine reason behind this mistake. And yes, it was a mistake.

As I’ve mentioned, we’ve had a few issues with the house. One of these is the way that most of the things in the house have not been fitted correctly; basically the owner of this house did a very cheap job on it despite being perfectly able to afford to fix things correctly. A brief summary of some of the things he has done a botch job on include;
– The carpets being stapled to the floor several inches away from the edge. Yes, really.
– The shelf in the shower cubicle being fixed into place with a rusty nail and a hole in the tiles for a wall plug. (This one particularly amused me.)
– The edge of the shower basin being covered up not with poly filer, which would have been a very simple, cheap and quick solution to a crack, but instead covered over with duct tape.
– The general state of the house when we moved in. Mould in every single bedroom being one of the more minor issues here.
– The landlord providing us with a miniature dryer, yet no washing machine… this one confuses me beyond belief.

There is more, but I’m sure you get the point. Now I should get to the botch job in question, and the culprit behind this mishap. The bedroom doors are not accurately fitted to the frames. While in two of the bedrooms, this is just a minor irritation more than a pressing problem, in my house mate Steph’s bedroom, it went one better and was so badly fitted to the frame (not to mention that the handles on either side of the door weren’t the same as each other… as tends to be the norm for handles on the same door) that is actually jammed her into her bedroom. 

So after a night of the four of us watching a few films with dinner, we headed for our bedrooms. Steph, after entering, pulled the door shut behind her, only to find that when she wanted to open it again, the handle wasn’t activating the mechanism inside the frame to open the door. 
Dom, Matt and myself then spent the next hour trying to open the door from the outside, while she pulled from the inside, to no avail. We took off the handle, we pushed it, kicked it… nothing. We were starting to think we had no choice but to kick the door down to get her out. 

Now, as you can imagine, a week after moving into a new house, we weren’t too keen on the concept of damaging a door of the rented property perhaps beyond repair, and then being forced to cover the costs of this damage that was the landlord’s responsibility in the first place. So we decided that before resorting to breaking down her door, we should call the non-emergency fire service number for advice on what would be the best course of action.

We got through to the police service, who after lecturing us on “this isn’t really a police matter” eventually listened to us stating that we wanted to speak to the fire service, no the police service (the reply to which was slightly sheepish), passed us through to the fire department, who said that they would contact our landlord, and if he did not respond, they would send someone down to break the door down. 
A few minutes after this, we got a call back from the operator, who sounded very embarrassed, and explained that for some unknown reason, the police, who evidently decided that this was a job for them, not for the people from whom we’d requested help, had taken over the case and had called the landlord on our behalf, rather than the fire service, as we had wanted.

So, cue a very nervous and irritated looking landlord arriving at our house at 12.30 am with a box of tools, because his tenants of just over a week, had called the police on him, because a door had gotten stuck.

 

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My Life in Letters: M.

I’ve kinda lagged a bit with the blogging recently. The last blog I wrote was weeks ago. I’ve had a bit of a writers block; in all respects. I’m gonna force myself out of it with another Life in Letters.

Right, the letter ‘M’.

The thing I will talk about today is Manchester.

A year ago I moved to Bolton, a town in Greater Manchester. I grew up in West Yorkshire, Hebden Bridge, and my sister and I spent a lot of our time in Manchester at Afflecks, the Arndale, The Northern Quarter, etc. I probably even met my now boyfriend when we were kids both hanging out in Manchester, and just never knew it. (:

I was so happy when I finally made the move up nearer my now favourite city. I truly feel at home in Manchester, and though my house in technically only on Greater Manchester, I still visit the city every week, and I’ve been primarily only living in the city for the entire of the summer.

It’s the most amazing place. And it’s so nice to finally have a place I can call ‘home’ and genuinely love to live.

I expect that once I’m done with University, I will move into the city centre. I doubt very much that I will return down south to Oxford.

I love Manchester!

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The Future’s Bright…

Today I was reflecting on the past year of this little adventure known as “my life”. I was thinking back to this same day, a year ago.
Where was I then? Or rather, who was I then? Well…

By the beginning of June 2011, I was at the start of the end of the worst relationship of my life. You’d have thought I’d have been ecstatic? No. The opposite. As far opposite as you can be from ecstatic, was me. As far as I was concerned, this was the end, not of the two year long hell worthy prison with the tag “boyfriend”, but of life itself.
This guy was everything to me. Poor, pitiful me. He had broken my heart countless times; hell he’d even blown his nose on it and stamped it into the ground for good measure, and yet I couldn’t help but love him.
So there I was, heart broken yet again, unable to see any way out of my self-pitying, endless torment, acting like I was the only person on the face of the entire Earth to experience such pain.

Of course, I wasn’t. Countless people have been through this- the break up you never wanted to happen, watching the other person move on without so much as a glance backward. While all you’re doing in the way of “coping” is looking through old photos, thinking nostalgically of “well… there were SOME good times?”, torturing yourself over social networking activity and trying desperately not to text/call/email. And drinking. A lot.

The self pity stopped after a few weeks and I eventually got on with my life.
This is the point where we start reflecting: If you had told me then, that in just a year’s time, I’d have a year of University under my belt, a tonne of new friends, a new relationship (and the best relationship I could ever ask for, I might add) and a life that actually feels like I’m living it, rather than just watching it pass by? I’d have never believed you. And yet here I am. Typing this. Reflecting on how much I’ve grown since then; grown up out of teenage-hood and into adulthood, and grown overall as a person.

Turns out, I could survive it. And I could even bring myself to trust someone else again, and love them even more than I’d loved previously. I could survive being a student and I could survive moving to the other end of the country, where I knew no one, completely independently.

With this growth, I’m safe with the knowledge of one certainty; if I can survive those things, how hard can the rest be?

A year ago I thought my life had come to an end. Now I know that my life is just beginning. The future’s bright, if you only open your eyes wide enough to see through the tears of the present.

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My Life in Letters: I.

I thought long and hard about what began with the letter “I” that I could use to talk about an aspect of myself with. I finally settled on “Indians”. More specifically Native American Indians. I have a lot of background in the culture and one side of my family tree is tied to a Native tribe. I’ve grown up studying their belief systems and I’ve been raised on their remedies.

Recently I wrote a poem about the obliteration of many of the tribes during the 1800’s for my degree. It’s one very close to my heart.

Their Last Standing Chief

When the land was still ours
Before greed overshadowed humanity
and slaughter became a game

We lived with our families
We held our heads high with pride
saturated with the knowledge of our ancient ways

Our wisdom was our power
nature was our magic
Robes of fur would warm our villages
and our remedies would cure all sickness

Our weapons were wood of the trees
and stone of the earth
Your weapons spouted fire
from metal that shone like the sun

And our strength, though mighty, was lost
and where we once stood tall, our bodies lay scattered
Our people may have fallen
but our Spirits can never be taken from us

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