Following my dreams

  

Feeling pretty in debt to my parents right now who have pretty much let me take a “year out” of college to let me decide what I want to do, get better grades and keep writing. I know it was a huge step for them but I’m so happy right now, I feel like I’m following what I want to do and I’m somehow closer to getting what I want out of life, or even figuring out what I want!

       This is inspired by my fabulous friend, she’s achieving her dreams at a faster rate than I could have thought possible.

Some people want it to happen, some wish it would happen, others make it happen.

 Micheal Jordan.

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined.

                                           Henry David Thoreau

You can chase a dream that seems so out of reach, and you know it might not ever come your way. Dream it anyway." 

- Martina McBride, "anyway"

  

It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.

 - Leonardo deVinci

"Don't ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive."

Howard Thurman

The first step to getting the things you want out of life is this: Decide what you want.    

 - Ben Stein.

You've got to find what you love. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it.

“Dream what you want to dream; go where you want to go; be what you want to be, because you have only one life and one chance to do all the things you want to do.”

 And when all is said and done,

“We live in an age where we all act like we’re together, do things like we’re together but never commit to each other fully enough to actually be together.”

A friend of mine recently had that as a Facebook Status and it got me thinking. After productively spending my study week trawling through Facebook, Pinterest and various websites it seems this is a common gripe with girls from our generation.

In my group of friends there is a definite divide between the girls that notice this and lament it and the girls who would rather it stay that way. There are the girls who talk about the romantic endeavours of people on tv, and cry over beautiful love songs and the girls who laugh at them and gag when they see happy couples in the street. While I’m aware of this divide I don’t think it exists as prominently as my friends would like to think. A lot of it is forced. My best friend gags and laughs at us every time we talk about the opposite sex or our other halves but I also know that deep down, after going through a nasty break up, it’s just that she’s afraid of being hurt again.

So why is it like this? Why have we become a generation that won’t commit to each other? Why won’t the majority of girls I know admit it when they feel flutterings toward a certain someone and why don’t guys treat girls like royalty or even with a level of human respect?

Have things really changed so much from a time when boys were gentlemen and girls were ladies?

They haven’t. Girls are afraid, afraid of being hurt, afraid of commitment, rejection and looking silly. But then again, guys are too. The problem is, from a girls perspective, guys are still expected to make all the right moves and act like gentlemen but girls, in, what I believe is a misguided attempt to assert their feminism, are acting like boys, and so why should boys bother if the girls they’re trying to win over are out getting drunk and moving from boy to boy every night?

We need to go back to the start, back to a time when you were married before you slept with someone, well maybe not that far, but certainly, we need to go back to the days when you dated someone before you kissed them, you didn’t just meet them in a drunken stupor outside a club somewhere. Maybe this is a problem merely associated with my friends and the town we live in but there is certainly, a deep rooted desire out there from girls for men to act like men and for that to happen girls must act like ladies.

Think back to when your Grandmother was a 20 something year old woman and reflect on how she might act and maybe then, we’ll have a slight change in societies way of thinking!

Well, as you can see I started a long, long time ago, thinking I'd be writing on this very regular, I got distracted, I got distracted by my friends, going out and most of all college work. I have though, been writing for the student newspaper in my University. So I will be posting them up here pretty soon, bear with me!

Summer is upon us, finally, and it is one of my "summer aims" to continue with this blog, I have also been in contact with many local paper so fingers crossed they'll get back to me and I'll be able to inflict some of my "learner" writing on them! I am writing for an online newspaper this summer, focused mostly on students so I will also be posting them here, I will also be inflicting my own musings on anyone who stumbles across this!

I hope this will be more successful this time round... Happy Reading :)

Pet Peeves: Library

Along with most of the student population I have spent the last two weeks, confined in the library, surrounded by people, and somehow managed not to kill anyone, if you have also achieved this feat, pat yourself on the back, it’s not easy!

Going to the library everyday has convinced me that some people should have signs around them saying “don’t sit here!!” This irritableness may have been caused by exam stress but as I am nearing the end of my exam season and I know I’m getting out pretty soon, I can laugh at these people and things that bother me but, just in case, you’re one of these people, I have put together a list of annoying things, these will hopefully assist you in being slightly less irritating next semester!!

·        The snifflers: If you have a cold, or a sniffle or, even a tickle in the very back of your throat that you don’t think is going to be a problem, STAY OUT OF THE LIBRARY!!! It is more than annoying for the people sitting around you that have to listen to you sniffle, snort or cough and makes me shiver in disgust every time. Also, the persistent running out to the toilet to get a tissue to wipe your snotty nose. Is not ok either!

·        The Mouth Breather: It is an inevitable fact of life; some of us breathe through our nose, some of us through our mouth. Bu the time you’re in college you’re probably aware of which one you are, so please, if you insist on studying in the library choose a seat where either no one else can hear you or you’re surrounded by similar breathers. The number of times I have avoided the intense desire to hit a mouth breather is uncountable. On the off chance you might be the next mouth breather sitting beside me, please, don’t.

·        The friends: When most of us go the library we go to study, we go to learn, to ensure that we’ll pass out exams. When you go to the library and surround yourself with a gaggle of friends and spend the whole time talking to them, you’re not learning anything! I have also noticed that when there’s always one friend that ends up on a table alone and therefore her other friends find it essential to come over to her every twenty minutes to “see how she’s getting on.” She would be “getting on” a lot better if you just left her alone!  They then proceed to have a twenty minute conversation, that everyone can hear and show each other things on the internet. Which brings me nicely into my next point:

·        YouTube Videos: We all enjoy a bit of procrastination, heck, I’ve gone full days in the library sitting on Facebook refreshing the homepage every ten minutes and that’s fine. Except for when you’re disturbing your neighbours or people around you. The chief offender of this is YouTube videos. I don’t care if you’re looking at “funny cat videos” or the latest comedian to do the circuit when we’re all confined to our desks, if you’re not going to be able to hold in your laughter, please, please don’t do it, the final year trying to figure our his psychics across from you will not appreciate it, even the first year learning Porter’s will get irritated with you. It’s just not acceptable behaviour in the middle of study week.

·        PDA’S: My final point is probably one of the most irritating things people can do. We are in a library, some of us haven’t slept in weeks, most of us haven’t been eating very well out of necessity for speed and all of us are looking pretty rough. The last thing in the world any of us needs is to be sitting across from “that couple”, you know who they are, they whisper sweet nothings in each other’s ears between questions, they hold hands when they’re typing and they kiss all the time, all the time!!! This can only result in the sleep deprived, unhealthy students suffering from low self esteem as a result of their exam induced skin breakout to get the urge to puke, hit the couple or cry. None of these are good and will only serve to disrupt the study process further.

Now that you have a list, look at it as a guideline, if you do any of the following things on a regular basis, leave the library, at least leave your study spot cause I can promise you whoever is around you wants to hit you.

 With all these distractions I’m not quite sure how we ever pass any exams!

 Thank God I'm nearly out and I will be starting on this blog seriously then :)