Needed: A Catch Up.

Hello, internet acquaintances!

As I type it has been a number of months since I last made a post. I did have posts lined up that never got past the posting line, and I say this a lot and you all know what’s up, but soz. Today I’m gonna ramble about:

• exams and post-exams
• makeup
• The EU Referendum (sigh)
• writing and that writing blog

This unannounced-but-we-all-saw-it-coming hiatus was, of course, due to the doomsdays of A-Level Exams. I might have warned you all earlier in the year – that entire month or two of stress has just blurred together in my head. I think I managed to keep it together long enough to go into my exams prepared, and coffee has been my indispensable new bestie. I was so out of energy by the time I finished my last exam that I had none left to wander the shops that afternoon with my friends… and I really like wandering and I really like my friends. But I was just so exhausted! I did get my sleep back, though.

Although I have a list of things to do in the holidays, I have been waking up and living my days mostly spontaneously. That said, I have made it onto my fourth anime series of the last three weeks, painting, knitting, cross stitching… and I am really loving it. I think I’ve finally let go of the urge to be revising all the time.

So here we are in that inevitable bit-in-the-middle time of the summer between Doomdays and The Doomsday, although this being my third year of Results Days I am both really apprehensive about it as my uni place relies on this, and also fairly chill. I am trying not to dwell on where my life might go if I completely flunk everything.

As I type, my Y13 prom is in two days and I am doing my own makeup for it. I like my makeup these days (my past selves would be very very shocked) but I’m still very much an amateur and not to be trusted, therefore it has been a steep learning curve to get my face to look decent. Surely all this new makeup is an investment rather than a one-off, and I’m having a lot of fun experimenting with eyes and learning how to work with concealers. This coming from a girl with thirty (ish) lipsticks – the rest of my makeup stash is non existent, evidently.

I now have my first eye palette and a bunch of concealers, and I previously did get my hands on more lipsticks during exam period, so if the sun ever comes back here I’ll get some photos together for reviews. We had flooding a while back as well – that was interesting! I mean whole roads getting submerged and I still had to go into school for exams as a river formed in the middle of the school grounds.

In the last few months I have voted twice – one in the local elections and one for the EU Referendum. If you haven’t been aware, Britain has voted to leave the EU and its implications are far reaching for the future of my generation – many of them not good, as we are losing opportunities and freedoms previously available to other generations. What shocked me was the idea of people ‘protest’ voting. This means people voting to say ‘screw you’ to the government by voting against what the government are supporting. Like… why? That’s surely not how voting works. Petitioning, letters to your MP, that’s the regular route, no?

I think the entire referendum campaign was badly timed (Euros, anyone?) and executed. It was mostly scaremongering and there was a heavy emphasis on immigration which I think was not appropriate. It also seems that the consequences of Brexit are only being properly discussed now that the vote has gone through – a discussion that should have happened during the campaign.

My mom was expressing her shock at the result to me in an attempt to make herself seem informed of the topic but I am ashamed to admit that not only did she not vote, she was in the US spending dollars whilst the value of the pound plummeted against the dollar to reach a 31-year low. But anyway, here we are with a new prime minister about to take her place in No 10 and I am not feeling optimistic about what’s next. Here’s to the future – good luck to all of us, I guess.

This blog post is one of the first steps I’m taking now to get into the swing of writing regularly again. I realised after trying to write creatively after months of exam answers and essay writing that, whilst this blog is not going to be a novel, it just helped to get words out there regularly. So… I will keep doing that.

I really need to update the writing blog before its first-year anniversary! I maybe posted twice last September, and never got back to it… I’ll dig out the prompts and get something up there eventually. In the meantime, my NaNoWriMo writing group and I have written up prompts here that are all pretty awesome so do check us out!

Until next time, then!

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