What better way to start the beginning of the week (bleh) than with some pretties from the procrastination station that is the world of Pinterest, right? Right.
I've been busily emailing all and sundry in pursuit of employment for the past week and, lemme just say, it's rough outchea. For realsies. So to stay sane I'm making pretty things on pieces of paper (which will be featured soon) and Pinterest is a great place to find inspiration or ideas. If you ever feel like you need to see pretty things, sign up to Pinterest. You won't be disappointed but you might be sorry. Because addiction.
OK. Enough yapping. Here are the 10 prettiest things I found for you today. :)
Such a cool yet simple vector portrait. Found on iconosquare.com.
Having been a design student in my fourth year last year, I had to hand in a massive portfolio at the end of the year. That meant 4 weeks of straight work. From 9AM to 6PM and then from 8PM to the wee hours of the morning. I still shudder at the thought.
At the time I didn't really have the time to think about this year. And whenever I did it made me really anxious for some reason. This frustrated me to no end because I'm not generally an anxious person but change seems to bring that out in me. I went home after the year was done and still didn't really process the fact that I was done with university. I then went overseas for 3 weeks and didn't think about it and when I got back it all just hit me in the face.
I was done with university, I was still unemployed, I would be moving to another city in 3 days and I didn't even have my best friend (AKA my boyfriend) with me to help me take it on. And of course, panic set in. The thing that frustrates me the most about being panicky and anxious is that I know it is so silly and that everything will work out perfectly in the end. And if it doesn't, then I will make a plan. I always do.
Eventually I decided that I needed to let myself be miserable for a bit, let it out, get over it, splash some cold water over my head and get on with life. Because it sure as hell isn't going to stand still for some little hissy fit.
Most of the time our emotions are valid, for whatever reason. If you're feeling anxious about something, it's probably because you are anxious about something. Same goes for being sad or angry. However, we cannot let our lives be put on hold so that we can wallow in our feelings. Not doing anything about the situation you are anxious about is not going to make it go away. It's going to make you feel way worse. It may feel good for a day and half but trust me, if you have any drive at all, you will start feeling very frustrated with yourself.
Life is not fair and it will not stand still for us while we have an existential crisis (although that would be nice - I mean it's the least it could do). Being strong in the face of adversity (and I'm not saying I'm facing adversity right now) is a skill that I hope everyone is able to hone.
A thought I saw on a friend's Facebook wall earlier today: "The sun always rises and is always beautiful." And it is. You have to get up and do the thing everyday otherwise you will miss out on cool things and that will suck.
So I think that ending my posts with a song is fun because what better way to express my feelings (cue Mean Girls feelings quote) than some music?
This is the start of a new blog. I won't tell you how many I've started and left to die because then you won't read this one. But this one has had a lot of thought put into it before starting it. And I'm also not a teenager blogging about my "prahblems" anymore. So it might just work out.
I don't like first posts. They're always a little awkward and cheesy so instead I'm going to start this blog off with some thoughts I've been having recently about the concept of home.
I've only moved once in my life: I was 13 and my family and I moved from Johannesburg to a little town in the Eastern Cape (very traums!). This isn't counting the time in April last year when we moved to the farm that my parents now live on. That didn't feel like a move for me because I was living in Grahamstown where I went to university anyway.
I digress.
My family has never been uprooted many times in my life to move from place to place or anything like that but my loved ones are scattered all over the country and the world. Which brings me to my ideas about home.
I no longer visualise home as a place. It isn't the rough-plastered walls of the home I grew up in in Benoni, or the house with the high-ceilings in Somerset East and it isn't the small farmhouse from which I type this post.
I am "at home" whenever I'm with my parents or my brother. When I am with my boyfriend or his family I am "at home" and the same goes for when I'm with friends whether at university or elsewhere. For the past 3 weeks home has been a small flat in Hannover, Germany where my boyfriend has been staying for the past 4 months. As of Friday my home will be his family's house in Port Elizabeth.
Home is not a place and it is does not have one meaning. It will always have many meanings. I remember saying to someone, after leaving (one) home to go back to university for the semester, that it felt like my heart was broken in the nicest way. While I was sad to leave my parents and brother, I was so thrilled to go back to university, another home. I said then that my heart was scattered all over the country and it still is. I'd actually like to correct myself and say all over the world. Which is sad but really awesome at the same time because I have even more homes to be a part of! How great??
Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros sing that "home is wherever I'm with you" and it pretty much sums up everything I've blabbered on about above. So I'll just leave you with the song in case you scrolled straight past said blabber.
