Showing posts with label 2014. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2014. Show all posts
A little something different today. I saw Loreal's top ten Disney crushes from her childhood and could instantly relate. Fictional crushes are something you think are ridiculous... until they happen to you. This is just a funny and slightly embarrassing little trip down memory lane, recounting five of the top fictional gentlemen that have occupied my daydreams throughout my childhood... bleeding into my teens... and present day.... shh. So hopefully you enjoy and can let me know some of your childhood fictional crushes.
01. Prince Philip - Probably my very first childhood crush. Sleeping Beauty was my favourite film as a child, my Dad still knows all the words to 'Once Upon a Dream' because of how often he watched it with me. A lot of people aren't fans because of what a wet heroine Aurora was, (she did spend half the movie asleep.) But what I loved about it what the Gothic art style, the bad ass villain Maleficent and the dashing hero. All he had to do to win my heart was defy his father, fight his way through a cursed castle and defeat an evil magic dragon. Even at five years old I knew my standards.
02. Batman - No live action, Nolan-verse batman for me. My love affair with the masked vigilante started when I used to sneak down at about four in the morning to watch Justice League on Toonami when I was about ten-eleven. There was something about his stoic, brooding, bad ass nature that I just adored. Batman will always be my favourite male superhero and I always love the various reincarnations that people create.
03. Roronora Zoro - I'm well aware that most people reading this will have no idea who the hell this is, but know that if you do recognise this guy, I unconditionally love you. This guy is from an anime called One Piece. It's still going strong in Japan, but an English version was aired in about 2005 and I watched it devotedly until it stopped being shown. Zoro is the first mate in the pirate crew that makes up the main cast of characters. Like Batman he's the bad, brooding type and is a master swordsman.
04. Maximus Decimus Meridius - I think it reflects my growing maturity levels that at some point I moved from animated men to live action ones. I first saw Gladiator in about 2008 and it was the first really epic adult movie I had seen. I became instantly infatuated with the idea of a snarling, brooding Roman General turned Gladiator and began an unwavering crush on Russell Crowe that survives to this day. So far it seems that my 'type' is a solemn bad-boy type with a heart of gold... in a costume. Some form of fancy weaponry wouldn't go amiss either. Make of that what you will.
05. Jon Snow - Having said that here's my last and most recent fictional crush. Jon Snow from Game of Thrones is such a cutie pie. To be fair he is rather dark and brooding, wears a fancy costume and has a sword so he ticks all my boxes, but he's actually really quite sweet and innocent, particularly in the first three books in which he's completely naive to the political scheming of the rest of the characters and incredibly innocent when it comes to women and war. Though to be completely honest the real deal clincher for me is just how incredibly gorgeous Kit Harington who plays him in the HBO series. Just... NOM.
So that's my own slightly cringey list of fictional crushes I've had over the years, which I've realised I've put pretty much in perfect chronological order so that's nice! Let me know what your most intense (or most embarrassing) fictional crushes have been, the more hilarious the better, and we can all have a good laugh at how sad we are.
Thanks for reading!
I feel like we're just storming through this year already! I don't know about you but I'm actually having a lovely time. These past two months have bought with them some payoff for a lot of hard work (my autumn term essay results back: two 2:1s and a first so very happy with that.) I've been exercising discipline in terms of healthy eating and exercising and, as a result, have lost half a stone! A way to go before I'm in a healthy weight range but I'm very proud of my progress and am determined to keep being good to myself.
I've also been being a lot more social. Recently a group of people on my course, a few I was already friends with but most of whom I'd only vaguely known by sight/ name all went out for drinks together and we got on really well, we've since been out a few times and I'm having a really lovely time with them. I'd missed having a proper 'gang' of friends since being at university. I love the girls I live with but it's great to have other mates to go out and have fun with as well.
So since this year has started off so well, I'm really hoping to keep the momentum going through March and thought I'd set myself a few mini goals for the month to keep myself focused:
01. Work Hard and Ace my Assessed Essays.
I did pretty well with last term's essays so I want to keep the momentum going. I have three more essays and a creative writing piece (all of 1800 - 2000 words each. Eek!) in for the 21st of March so I need to get cracking with those. It's strange how it seems like I have ages and ages to get it all done, but when I think of the amount of research and reading needed for each essay I really don't have enough time at all!
02. Step up my Healthy Habits Routine.
My current routine amounts to one gym session a week, maybe two and sticking to sensible meals and snacking only on fruit. It's working well, but I'd like to take it up a notch. I want to make it to the gym twice a week regularly and maybe even get it to three times if I can. I know lots of people hate the gym but I love the feeling of having pushed myself in both body and mind and it really does make a difference in terms of seeing results. Food wise I just want to keep going, but maybe start to increase my vegetable portions and cut down a little bit on the carbohydrate front, particularly if I've got no evening plans and nowhere to use up the energy I'm taking in. Once I've reached my first stone goal I might do a post about enjoying the gym and sticking to a routine.
03. Sleep properly!
This made it to my New Years Resolutions post back in January. I'm a serious 'night person' to the point where my natural body rhythm would have me wake up at 11am and not sleep until 3am. I've actually been to see doctors who've told me that there's nothing actually wrong with me, I simply operate best at night. Unfortunately the rest of the world operates on a 9-5 schedule and I've found myself slipping and missing classes and doing things with friends simply because I've been asleep! It's ridiculous! So I'm trying to discipline myself to be in bed with the lights out at 12:30 every day that I don't go out for the whole of this month. (and with these essays due soon I won't be making going out a habit by any means.) Hopefully I'll be able to sort myself out and get back into a 'normal human being' sleeping pattern... rather than that of a cat!
So those are my mini goals for March 2014. They aren't very exciting or fancy but this month is about being productive and making the next 31 days ones to look back on and feel proud of myself.
Let me know what your plans are for March. What goals are you setting for yourself?
It's 2014! I hope you all had an absolutely lovely New Years and are ready for a fresh start. I certainly am. 2013's been okay, but I feel like I've found myself a little stagnant and am ready to move up to a new level in life. I know some people are against making resolutions but I personally love the feeling of goals to accomplish and the opportunity to reevaluate what I think is truly important in life. 2013 for me was a year of self discovery, very much an introspective year in which I re-considered a lot about my life and decided who I want to be and what I want to do with my life. 2014, I hope, is the year that I begin to put these things into practice...
Read 52 Books - I know averaging a book a week is going to be difficult but I really want to get ahead on my reading this year. I explained in this post how since starting University my reading-for-pleasure has taken a nose dive and shared a few books I plan to get through this year.
More 'Creative Time' - All I want to do for a living is to be a writer, preferably of novels and possibly screenplays. Ultimately I want to be able to support myself doing what I love, and I want to start doing that as soon as possible. I watched a great talk by John Cleese on YouTube about creativity and putting yourself in the best possible environment to let it flourish. Part of his talk was about regularly scheduling time for yourself to seclude yourself and just play around with ideas in your mind relating to whatever project you're working on, creativity breeds creativity, I find often once I start thinking of a few ideas the ball gets rolling and after half an hour I have pages of scribbled notes and doodles ready to be turned into something useful, which leads me onto my next point.
Finish A First Draft - One of my worst problems is my tendency to get easily distracted. I'll be merrily working away on a fantasy novel draft and then one day my mind will wander and I'll decide I want to try out writing a sitcom script instead. Que aforementioned novel slung to the side and a whole new notebook being filled up with new ideas. The issue is that this happens all the time, so I have a pile of notebooks and folders on my computer full of a few chapters/scenes/outline points from at least ten different ideas. I love having the ideas, and the excitement of working on a new project but I am far too easily distracted. I have decided I will put all other projects aside (only allowing myself to scribble down any sudden inspiration by hand to be put aside for another day) and work solely on finishing one thing. I've never finished anything longer than a short story, and they were for creative writing deadlines! This will be the year folks!
Keep up with Regular Gym Visits - For the last few months of 2013 I actually signed up for a gym membership and was doing really well, going at least twice a week. It fell by the wayside for the last two weeks of term when I was forgoing sleep to write essays and I'm only enrolled at my local gym at Uni so having come home I haven't been able to pick it back up but I'm still proud of the effort I put in during those months and I definitely want to keep up the good work into the new year.
Develop a Better Sleeping Pattern - 3am to 11pm is not a good habit to be in. Enough said really.
Stick to a Cleaning Schedule - Instead of having to physically and mentally force myself to do any type of cleaning and tidying at all, and only when it direly needs doing, I want to start sticking to a routine, that will hopefully turn into a habit. If regular household maintenance is just part of an everyday routine I can just do it on autopilot, allowing me to focus my brainpower on other things! Also noone calls me messy - Win Win!
Be More Grateful - I take a lot of things for granted and I find that not noticing the little things in life is leading me to become quite negative and I don't want a life of unpleasant thoughts. Therefore I'm going to make the effort to realise what a lucky person I am. To have such amazing opportunities, a loving family, good friends, to live in the area I do, to have access to fresh water, food, shelter... the internet. Just to be alive at all, and to stop feeling upset about things that don't actually matter.
Do More for Others - Similar to the last one. I resolve, this year, to do more to make other people happy, whether it's giving my spare change to a charity collector, offering to lend a hand to someone with a heavy case or just telling my friend when I think they look particularly fine-as-hell one day. I'm very introverted and often don't do nice things, simply because I'm too shy to reach out to others. But I shall be brave, and in doing so hopefully make the world a better place.
Keep on Top of Work - I promised myself I wasn't going to let myself fall behind last term, and to be fair I did okay, I my research reading well in advance and stuck (mostly) to a good work schedule. I was still up at 2am finishing my last essay the day before they were all due in however. I'm hoping this year I can do better and actually have all my work finished the day before they have to be handed in. That would be nice.
Ace my 2nd Year of University - I am aiming for a first. This will be a challenge. I am cursed in that I am pretty clever and perfectly capable, but also appallingly lazy. With my resolve to keep on top of my work however I'm pretty confident I can do well this year. Wish me luck!
Blog more Regularly and be a More Active Part of the Community - With all my above resolutions to take time to be creative, take time to go to the gym, take time to read and of course work hard at University, one thing I am probably going to be short on is time. However I am really really going to make an effort to keep up blogging when I go back to university in a week or so. I miss being part of the community and I feel like whenever I take a break I get left behind a little and have to play catch up again. I can't make any major commitments, but I want to try and average once a week during term time and to take a few hours maybe twice a week to read, comment and find new blogs, just to keep me in the loop, more when I'm on holiday and have free time.
So that's it, those are my resolutions for 2014. I know there are a lot but I honestly feel ready to meet this challenge and am actually quite excited for it! I feel like it'd be fun to keep maybe a monthly log just to see how I'm doing with all of these. Things like cleaning may get a little mundane, but I reckon my artistic struggle for the elusive first draft could make for fun reading.
Anyway I have rambled away at you for long enough, if you made it this far well done you trooper!
Thankyou for reading!
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I bought books! Since having started my English Literature course at university last year I've really found my reading slowing down. I know that might sound counter-intuitive, but the downside of a literature course for book lovers is that instead of reading books for enjoyment at your own pace, you have to read them in a limited time frame and read them with a critical eye which often takes from the enjoyment. In addition you begin to associate reading and books with deadlines and essays which is just the worst.
But in 2014 I want to begin to take up reading as a past time again, and get through some really good works of literature. No YA or 'holiday reads' for me at the moment, I'm going to keep it all high brow for the time being until I get burned out and have to delve into something a bit more relaxed. All but one of these was picked up in my local charity shop so I've made quite the saving as well.
The Books I Bought -
Slaughterhouse 5 ~ Kurt Vonnegut
Metamorphosis and Other Stories ~ Franz Kafka
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius ~ Dave Eggers
The Hobbit ~ JRR Tolkein
The Monk: A Romance ~ Matthew Gregory Lewis
Oryx and Crake ~ Margaret Atwood
So quite the selection. I'll definitely be doing reviews of these and some other books I've accumulated recently, maybe in threes as I get through them. I'm really looking forward to punctuating the masses of renaissance literature (that, don't get me wrong, I really love) by dipping into the fantasy lands created by Tolkein, revelling in the bleak lucid writing style of Kafka and navigating the twisted, unhinged creations of Lewis and Atwood.
Let me know if you've read any of these books and what you thought! I'm really excited to get some personal reading under my belt this year. What are you looking forward to reading in 2014?
Hello all! It's been a little while since I've shown myself round these parts but part of my routine, compulsory News Year's resolutions is to be a little more regular with blogging. I've really missed being part of this community and I hate leaving my little blog neglected. So to make some time for blogging I'll need to start keeping myself organised, and what better way to do it than in style with the coveted Frankie Diary 2014 edition! I wanted one of these last year but they had sold out by the time I got round to it. I wasn't having any of that this year, I bought it myself at the beginning of December and had Mama pay me back for it and put it in my Christmas box for when I came home from Uni.
It is absolutely gorgeous, all floral prints and soft watercolour palettes and it's really well put together. It begins with a 'calendar' style layout page for each month and then a few pages giving a little space dedicated to every day, with each month getting an individual design. Then there are pages for birthdays, budgeting, extra notes and a few pages of stickers and lists and other fun bits and pieces so I'm really really happy with it. It retails at about £20 including shipping from it's native Australia.
I've already started to fill mine in, too impatient to wait for the New Year to kick in! I'm hoping to use it as a planner and organiser, as opposed to filling it in retrospectively, diary style. I could use my phone, but there's something so satisfying about having plans and deadlines written down by hand, I'm far more likely to remember them too! So if part of your New Years resolutions include being more organised definitely consider nabbing one of these for yourself.
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You can buy them here at the Frankie Press website. They were still in stock but selling fast when I last checked so get yourself one if you don't want to miss out!
I'm hopefully going to be much more organised with my time in 2014 which will mean better blogging! Though of course a return for me means a return for Cat photo-bombing my pictures while she whines meows for food/cuddles/food. The joys of pet ownership eh?
Thankyou for reading and I will hopefully talk to you again soon.
Thankyou for reading and I will hopefully talk to you again soon.
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