Dear April // Dear BirthMonth

Dear April,

It’s been a while since I went a while without blogging frequently. But the short explanation is that….well April… you’ve been pretty hectic.

20 years ago, I was born in this month and it always fills me with feelings of yellow and nostalgia. This time last year I had a college birthday that I wish I could forget about, but this year was different. This year was all things nice. I went for a pre birthday lunch with my parents the day before my birthday because they know how much I love my lead up. Honestly, it felt like I was at a meal with two of my best friends because we laughed our way through the fancy place we were at and people spotted for the rest of the time. My dad had brought me shopping and I met my mum during her work hours and I felt so content.

My actual birthday was anything but calm and quiet, but I loved every second. My godfather came to visit me in the morning, and my heart was overwhelmed with emotion. I was born on a date that means a lot to my aunt and her husband (my godfather), and every year they never fail to make me loved. This was quickly followed to my best friends house where we spent an hour genuinely laughing the whole time. Unfortunately I couldn’t stay too long, but her sister and her really made my birthday feel like my birthday and I appreciate them so much through my tears of laughter. When I returned home, I had a visit by my old childminder and her niece who I grew up with. I got the famous biscuit cake that I get every year and had such a lovely time with them. I napped for a bit, and then my dad cooked me one of my favourite dinners. My cousin, who I adore, came over and we went to see ‘Hairspray’ that one of my friends was Tracey in. I had such an amazing night with my cousin (who had NEVER seen Hairspray before!) and it was such an incredible way to end my celebrations.

I’m sorry I’m rambling April. So much more happened with you. I booked my whole Europe trip, I finished college, I went out with my class for the first time and had an amazing night, I started exams, I spent loads of time with my family and I started packing to move from my University forever.

Like always April, you never fail to impress me. As your golden rays turn into sweet pink May I count my blessings. I have so much planned for May and I’m so excited for it to finally be here. However, April, there is a catch. I’ve been thinking about my blog a lot lately, and my image online as it is growing. I don’t know how much I’ll update this blog from now on, but I will always try to do my monthly letters. (If you caught ‘this’ from that earlier sentence, it may be a hint at a new plan that I’ve been working on.)

April I enjoyed every moment of you. I can’t wait to see you next year. But I welcome May with open arms. I welcome the next chapter of my life.

All my love and affection and adoration,

Eimear x

P.S. This time next month I’ll be travelling from Amsterdam to Berlin!

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Maybe One Day

Maybe if I don’t go to sleep tonight
Tomorrow won’t come
I won’t have to think of what will happen
Despite willing what I want to happen

My fear will leave
The sun will shine
But I keep waiting
For the moments to pass

I’ll stay awake
Until I can
Staying safe
From all the things I’m thinking about

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(P.S. I accidentally published the wrong draft today lol soz email readers)

A New Beginning

I’ve always paid attention to my dreams. I’ve written a similar post to this just on my fascination with dreams.
For as long as I can remember, I have kept dream journals that soon turned into notes on my phone and always loved discussing dreams with anyone who would talk about their.

I look back on these journals and notes with fondness, remembering how each one felt and recalling it. However, my dreams have never been too serious. A few light ones have stuck with me that pushed my imagination or were just funny etc., but recently I had one that I can’t seem to forget. I can recall each moment like I’m still living in it because … well I can.

Brief summary – I’m in the middle of the road where cars are turning into a roundabout, but I’m not in the way at all. No one seems angry but everyone seems to be in a worried rush like they’re driving away from something. Someone calls to me “we need to do it now” and I call back “is there any other way?” and the other person quickly says back “we don’t have time for another way”…. and with a deep breath I command the world to stop.The cards slow to a halt, all phones and technology shut down and people stare in disbelief as the only world they know is shutting down just because I yelled it to. But after it does shut down, I have this huge sense of relief and a crushing weight is lifted.

A woman comes out of a ‘court house like church building’ to welcome me to “The New Beginning”, and I’m brought in to a bright light building to get a tour.

So maybe I’m the key to unlocking a new world.

Or maybe I’m just a bit stressed.

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Sailing away

This post is the last thing I’ll write in my home before I move for summer. Between yesterday and today, my three housemates have packed up their things and left and yes. . . .there was a lot of tears. I’m to follow tomorrow, after a whole day of strenuous packing. Who knew my whole college life “only” fitted into eight bin bags, two suitcases and three backpacks. It’s a sad goodbye this time, because we’ll never live together again, because of the structure of our courses. Erasumus, placement, project and final year all don’t really cross paths too much. But it’s more of a bitter sweet goodbye. I’m incredibly happy to see not only my housemates, but the majority of my friends follow their passions and increase their work drive. However, here I am. And here I’m going to be when September comes.

I’m not sad that I didn’t opt for another year, that was 100% my decision and I know it.
I’m not sad that my friends are leaving because I know I’ll keep in touch with every single one of them with group chats, Skype calls and journeys to each other.
I’m not sad that I’m leaving my home with so many good memories because I’ll always have them, and there’s no point sticking around on my own.
I’m not sad I’m moving back with my parents this summer as I have a really good relationship with them and don’t feel trapped because I have so many incredible friends and family to catch up with and keep me entertained.

No, I’m not sad.
I’m scared.
I’m scared because I have to do it all over again.

The friendships I’ve formed and solidified over the past two years are not going to be here when I return. I’m being dropped into a year group who have come back from abroad, along with some from my original year who I never knew. I have to make friends again, just like those terrifying few months at the beginning of first year. I had brilliant friends at home, but it was hard finding some who even slightly lived up to them. But I did it, and I have to do it all over again which is incredibly hard. I won’t have my comfort blanket of people whose habits I’ve gotten used to on nights out and days in. I’ll have all these relationships within typing distance, but I’m on my own again. I know I do have friends left here, but they’re on entirely different schedules to me so I don’t know exactly how much I’ll see of them. There’s only a handful in my subjects that I’d chat to, with an even lesser amount of people who I love to spend time with, or rather who would want to spend time with me.

But I know I’ve done it before. I have my incredible friends from first year. I have made friends from my first week in first year with people I still keep in touch with, but that was in an atmosphere where first years wanted to meet new friends and had the time to do it. I’m stepping into my final year with serious students who already have their friends.

Not to mention it takes a while for me to open up. That’s a huge flaw on my behalf, which I acknowledge. It doesn’t stop me from freezing up from embarrassing stories, or the terror I feel if anyone mentions this blog or why I do certain things or why I don’t like hugs or watching movies. My progress of this has ceased and I have to start that again. My one step forward took two steps back and now I don’t know where I even stand.

So yes. I’m happy for my friends moving away, I’m happy for my friends who are staying, I’m happy for my future and I’m happy for summer to begin and I know once September begins I’ll have the fresh excitement of the endless possibilities of meeting new friends and catching up with the beloved ones I already knew and stayed in my house and experienced me.
For now I’m sad and scared and I don’t feel like cheering myself up today. But I will leave these doors with happy tears instead of sad from memories of birthdays, not birthdays, craft sessions, pre drinks, pancakes, and absolutely everything and everyone who ever stepped foot in the house has given me good memories, even if they didn’t live here (all the time).
I’m okay being sad, because I know the incredible people I shared this year with are reading this, and to answer your message you’ll more than likely send me;
“Thank you for your concern, but of course this is just a blog post.”
Despite my real answer wanting to be;
“Thank you for always supporting me, and these words don’t do my heart justice for just how amazing this year has been with each and every one of you. I’m not scared of losing you, because of the simple reason that you’re even reading my blog post and I feel comfortable with that.”

Here is me and all my emotions,
Love from EimzPink of The High Seas.

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How Not To Study Week

As of the 17.12.15 at 18.30 I am half way through my degree.
Terrifying stuff.
As exams were approaching, we have a Study Week of no lectures the week before exams start to learn off the whole course. Of course, this week is meant to involve locking yourself into a room with only a desk and ensuring that your fees aren’t going to waste.
HOWEVER…. we all know that that never really works out….

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Cereal will be eaten at midnight with a dinner bowl due to awful sleeping hours, lack of clean dishes and not having proper meals. (No offense! Cheerios and Wheetabix isn’t the most nutritious snack!

 

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List of lovers will be made to keep track of your housemates love lives.
Oh dear. Lets move on!

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Buzzfeed quizzes and name quizzes will be shared in friend group chats for fun distractions. It works. This week I’ve found out I’m Monica from Friends, I’d save a plant in a house fire, the Taylor Swift song that describes me is “Shake it off” and that my personality type is INTJ. Which is 0.8% of the population.

 

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One of your housemates may bring down all the toilet rolls and suggest a craft session. After a few days of glueing, painting and glitter-ing.. well… long story short- we have a toilet paper Christmas Tree now.

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You may suggest to a housemate that wrapping a box would be cute for presents. Then spend almost an hour trying to wrap it properly.
…

It looked GREAT ok?????

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Okay
so a LOT of craft sessions happened
My house mates exam papers are now decorations in my home!
It was a huge hit 😀

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Emotional support will be needed from friends all around. Also, facebook is a pretty big distraction in itself. I mean… LOOK at those hearts… how exciting!

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It is important that when living in a house together that whoever makes the hot beverages alternates between people for equality. I enjoyed when it wasn’t my turn.

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Dressing up your housemates as a Christmas tree may be seen as “unproductive”

 

 

 

 

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So even if you plan a Christmas dinner with all your lovely housemates (and honourary housemates), get dressed up with candy cane socks and a christmas hat with matching nails… You may end up sleeping instead of everything you were looking forward to… *cough*

Buuuuut at the end of the day….

Even if you try to actually study this week…

your house is probably going to look like this:

So best of luck!
❤ Have a lovely Christmas ❤
And hopefully I’m not the biggest procrastinator out there!

Halloween in The High Seas

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Happy Halloween Everyone!
This year, I’m living in a house with three of my most favourite people ever. Our house is up stairs and along with a private joke, we called it The High Seas. Although we are a student house, there’s no reason why we can’t decorate the house… right?
Last week, two of my housemates were gone out. So being the cool college kids, us two left behind had the brilliant idea to go buy pumpkins!

Why?
Well, we’re not too sure why.
But we did it anyway!

Throwing all responsibilities and duties aside, we set out pumpkin hunting.

The first shop we went to had some very sad looking pumpkins, so we decided against them. (Even though I did feel bad for leaving them behind). Instead, we bought some window decorations and were SO excited to get them that everyone else in the purchase queue let us pass them by as they saw how excited we were.

I’m really not kidding.

The second shop we went to had a lot more variety in pumpkins, so naturally we were even more excited, and received many judge-y looks when we squealed. I fell in love with a perfectly orange but weirdly shaped small pumpkin. We also opted for a medium sized one too. After paying for our pumpkins in copper coins, we headed home.

We decided to not tell our other housemates, so here is a picture of us being mysterious outside the shop.

We got down to carving straight away. Using all the blunt student knifes and weird spoons we could find whilst wearing disney ears and listening to the halloween playlist on spotify, we spent almost two hours drawing, carving, removing pumpkin gunk and styling our masterpieces. 

Although my original plan of a cat design failed, I opted for a bat and it wasn’t the worst thing in the world! My roomie went for a pretty terrifying face and they both actually turned out quite well!

We played the Jaws theme song with the lights off when the other half of our housemates arrived home and we’re still not too sure if they were impressed or not!

However, after this experience, we learned quite a few things;

1. The two of us shouldn’t be left without supervision.

2. Candle flames burn the top of the pumpkin when the top is left on.

3. In ancient Ireland, pumpkins didn’t exist and they carved turnips, according to my mother. So we bought a turnip for 85 cent and carved him too. He fits in quite well and we named it Grainne.

  

4. Our other two housemates still haven’t realised we left the pumpkin guts in a bucket outside.

5. People in shops are really nice and supportive to two teenagers buying halloween decorations at ten o clock at night.

I hope everyone has had as much fun decorating as we did!

Girls just wanna have fun

I went out with my friends on both Friday and Saturday this week. They were both good nights, don’t get me wrong.

But the thing I hated most was that I felt like I was the only one who went out to have fun. I hate the fact that EVERY social media has to be constantly updated. I hate that people would rather spend time taking selfies together than catching up. I hate that people wear shoes they can’t walk in for the sake of being a few inches taller for a few hours. I hate how people go out like it’s a mission to get a partner, and spend the time obsessing over than rather than having fun.

When I go out, I just want to dance. I want to chat to my friends rather than proving I’m out in the first place. I don’t want people to  start drama and chaos by stopping talking to people and I most certainly don’t want to have to tip toe around people to stop drama from unfolding.

People are so judgemental and critical over little things, and hang onto grudges like it’s their life mission. Whilst in reality, if everyone was a bit more chill, we’d all get along so well.

Silver vs Gold

There was always a phrase, “Make new friends but keep the old, one is silver and the other’s gold”.

Since college started, I have made some awesomely fabulous new friends. They’re so brilliant and lovely and everything nice in the world!

But there was no way I was heading to to uni and leaving all my friends behind!
The girls in the video are the girls who I’ve personally grown up with. Hell, I’ve known one of them since even before I started primary school! We were literally in diapers together!

Having this Halloween to catch up with them was amazing. I got filled in with all the gossip whilst we attempted to bake. . . well. . . something. . .

Yeah about that video. . . don’t judge! None of us are “domestic goddesses”. However, we do like spending time together with hula hoops, sombreros and music on full volume.

Some people might be embarrassed to have a video up of themselves looking as silly as we are. But I’ve come to the conclusion that I most certainly am not. This is the person I am. Anyone who views this will be a friend, a family member, or you. Since my friends and family already know me, I guess I’m trying to make an impression on you, fellow blogger.

So get in touch with me! Tell me if your friends are just as crazy and cooky as mine!
Because gawd knows I love them ❤

And I don’t think any words can explain to you how much I miss them!

A perfectly peaceful evening

I was visiting my cousins down south last week, and the weather was strangely amazing. Like, over 20 degrees amazing. See that photo above? That’s obviously not 20 degrees. But that photo does have a story behind it!

It was a stunning day, and my cousin and I had just returned from a woodland walk. We decided to then go to the beach. And by we, I mean he decided and I didn’t want to say no to him. But when we got to the beach it was so crowded. Like, I felt like I couldn’t even breathe there were so many people on this tiny beach! I was also not expecting everyone to be practically half naked, so already I felt over dressed. I was wearing denim long shorts with a light shirt, so I was unintentionally covered up. Being at my cousins, I obviously didn’t know anyone else but him. However, it felt like he knew everybody. I felt awkward and honestly I did not want to be there. I was introduced to a few people, but they just seemed so. . . different from my own friends that I didn’t feel comfortable around any of them either. But being the good cousin that I am, I endured about an hour of this before my cousin finally got the hint.

That night, we went out for dinner. The restaurant was looking out over the beach, and it looked amazing. I asked my cousin did he want to go down after dinner and he, being the amazing cousin that he is, agreed. We walked down and sat on a wall. The only people on the beach were two couples, both with dogs. It was still quite warm out, so my cousin and I just sat on a wall looking out on the horizon. Just then, an elderly man appeared with a metal detecter. Yes, you read that right. He was our main source of entertainment. He was just the type of old man you’d want to hug. (And he told us he found a couple of euros). My cousin and I joked how we would throw our phones into the sand just so he could find them! (Obviously we didn’t! Hah). At one point, there were like 10 dogs on the beach. We talked to one dog owner (who let me play with her happy little puppy). Do you see that man standing in the photo? He came down with his dog and his cup of tea. Not takeaway tea or anything, like an actual mug with tea in it. He played fetch with his over hyper dog. We decided to name all the dogs. Our personal favourite was Bullet. Who ran after anything! We saw a car with a surfboard attached on the roof pull up. After they decided there were definitely no waves (clearly in the photo), they took out a couple of fishing rods and went fishing. A stray dog (named Daisy) came along, and we made friends with her.

It was like we visited a different place altogether, and I definitely liked the second one better. Although it wasn’t filled with girls in bikinis, my cousin quite enjoyed it too!
And that night we unintentionally matched outfits. #Twinning

The Leaving Cert Book Burning!

I had one of the most amazing nights last Saturday. I was invited to my friends house for a book burning, and I’ve never been happier. The group that was there wasn’t my usual friend group. I’ll spare you the long dramatic details, but this group accepted me with no questions asked, and I’ll always thank them for that.

So I arrived to her house, with a bunch of flowers and met the whole family. I was second there, with my friend (who’s always early). The other friend was in my other friend group, so I would be closest to her. This is getting fairly complicated. I’ll continue.
But you see, meeting her family was pretty cool, but I also MET HER KITTENS.
I made friends with this one. She’s called Moo.

After meeting the kittens and what not, we sat out at the pit waiting for the others to arrive. It was SO WARM and it was amazing just to finally relax! The rest of the group started to arrive and we chilled and talked for a bit. (That cat is called Vomit)

We then played garden games. And by games, I mean game. We basically played rounders/rugby/football all at the same time. . . very eventful. I regret wearing a dress. . .

We had food (curry woo) in the tent-like thing in the garden and listened to fairly funny 90’s pop music! One of the boys sister had made a cake for us! It was so cute! We were meant to put alcohol in it, and light it. . . but it didn’t exactly work. . . so we may or may not have used firelighters. . .

We finally got around to burning the books, and we burned until 2 o clock in the morning! It was a such a clear night, so the stars were amazing. We also called into a local radio station and got our names called out. We played more garden games, and had a lot of dmc’s (deep meaningful conversations) on the trampoline. It was perfection.

After that, we all went inside to watch a few movies, but at the end of the first hour, there was only 4 of us awake. That then dropped to myself and the hostess being the only ones awake. Instead of sleeping, we watched The Holy Grail, Kronks Movie, 21 and Over and Oliver and Co. Eventually everyone started to wake up and we had an Austin and Ally marathon!

But the night was perfection. I wouldn’t change one thing about it.