Out into the rain

In an ideal world my bedside table would look like Erin Fetheron's.
Who doesn't need a healing crystal?

I like to clean. However unlike some people what I do is save up all the loose papers, old clothes, apple cores and empty tea cups that come my way so that eventually my room looks like a small, charmingly coloured rubbish tip (my room is duck-egg blue, and it is lucky for the walls that I haven't yet found a way to completely trash them.) Then, when it is only possible to get from my bed to my desk to my door by ploughing a path each time the need arises, and only then do I decide to clean my room. I suppose I properly clean my room about two times a year. But when I decide I want to do something, it generally gets to extremes. I had a violent urge to clean about two weeks ago, and was up until two in the morning matching up socks into pairs. But extreme cleaning has its pitfalls. Today, while filling in my university enrolment application it asked me for my Tax File Number. "Oh that's fine.." I thought to myself. "I always leave that in my- SHIT!" I had, in my sporadic fit of cleaning, thrown out all the old sheets and papers from 2011, as a symbolic gesture of my newfound adulthood or something like that, I can't quite remember. I spent half an hour sifting through the recycling, only to find that I had shifted my TFN some months earlier into a filing cabinet.

Does anyone else do this? Assume that they know themselves well enough that they would've thrown out important documents unintentionally, only to find they can actually be quite sensible? Havng your head stuck in a recycling bin isn't all bad though. While I was down there I found two of my old hardbacked diaries, one from when I was a shy fourteen year old who blushed a lot, the other authored by my fifteen year old self, a girl who decided the best course of action for happiness was to meticulously note everything she ate and everytime she exercised. I sat down to read what fifteen year old me thought about the world and a lot of sentences made me laugh. How I compared life to gossip girl, for example (substituting the names of people I knew with the characters. I was and always will be cool.) and wrote lovestruck words about an acne-stricken, skinny boy.
Then I read about the terrible time I had with two very bitchy girls, who shall be referred to as Blair and Serena. It's hard to read about, even now. But I think it's also good to read about how girls like that can make you feel, so that you can make sure you never treat anyone else in the same way. What struck me was how much this experience changed the way I wrote. Here are something I picked out that I still believe to this day:


"That shivery feeling that races through my body when I listen to beautiful music is what I want my whole life to be like; one that is filled with the otherwordly passion of art. I must never let go of this feeling."

Thank you Blair and Serena,
it's because of you girls that I realised this.

For a very long time I hid my actual interests to be friends with people I didn't particularly like, but it is only now that I am beginning to love who I actually am- I am drawing, writing and singing again! I'm sitting out in the rain just to feel it soak my skin and I know that no matter what I do or what happens to me I will always have the blue sky to look up at. That big, blue bowl.

Be this girl! Sorry, can't remember where I got this...

Hell, even be this one!

A not-very comprehensive list of people who inspire me:

• Beatrix Potter: Not only was she a gentle and creative soul but she was very practical too, and put a lot of effort into protecting the natural beauty of the English countryside.
• David Bowie: He's a brilliant musician who (aside from being just plain fucking awesome) broke boundaries in glam platform heels.
• Emma Morely from One Day: What? A woman who is intelligent and incredibly funny and pretty? In a relatively popular movie? Surely not!
• Marianne Faithfull: Because she told off an interviewer who brought up her "promiscuity" in controversial tones. She critcised the very obvious double standards he implied, and any woman who does that is my hero.
• Anne Shirley: I know I know, she's not real either. But oh boy, I wish she was!
• Florence Welch: She writes gorgeous songs and looks like a possessed english novelist. In other words, I love her.

Have a beautiful day and make sure to daydream!
Eliza