Stephen's Story

I never actually even thought of writing about this but I saw the newspaper at the train station after my exam and this has stuck with me since. Originally I thought I'd write about nails since this week is supposed to be a beauty post but that can wait.

RIP Stephen Sutton 16/12/1994 - 14/05/2014

If you live in the UK and have seen the newspaper headlines today or recently you should know what I'm talking about. This boy is 19 years old and died from his cancer yesterday morning. His name is Stephen Sutton and has been label as 'inspirational' and a 'legacy' by many. I'm inclined to agree. Below is the short film on his website explaining his story and his aims. Whilst watching this video I cried so have tissues at the ready!

His website is http://stephensstory.co.uk

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/StephensStory?fref=ts

Twitter: https://twitter.com/_StephensStory

I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's so amazing that even though he received heartbreaking news he carried on like nothing had changed. In fact, in his speeches, he often said his diagnosis was a 'kick up the butt' to take life more seriously and not take things for granted. Originally his Facebook page was set up to document his progress with his 46-item bucket list with the most important being to raise £10, 000 for Teenage Cancer Trust (a charity). Now, 4 years after his diagnosis, 2 years after being told he was incurable and a year after he started his Facebook page, he has raised over £3.4 million for Teenage Cancer Trust. 

This is the last sentence in his introduction and I think it very adeptly describes his journey and reasons for publicising his story 'This is not a sob story, this is Stephen's Story!' If nothing else, let this show you that no matter how old you are, if you want to, you can make a difference, you just need to believe and work for it.

This is a paragraph from my personal statement draft explaining why I want to study law:

'I want to study law to help people. There’s a saying that knowledge is power and this is how I live my life. The more I learn and understand about the law, the better I can help people. I would like to become a barrister and ultimately, a judge. For me, this career path is not about the earning power, but how I can help those in need. I want to give a voice to the people who don't think they have one and help them in a situation when they feel wronged and unable to fight back. Child advocacy in particular interests me. Children’s opinions are not given enough weight in cases that involve them making them feel isolated and alone. Although the law is supposed to help them, they often feel as if the adults are making all the decisions not taking into account their thoughts and feelings.'

There's also a personal reason which has inspired this. But the point I'm trying to make is that whenever I've told people, both my age and adults, they scoff. Adults look at me and you can see that they are thinking 'oh how cute, a 16 year old with big dreams to change the world, the real world will shock you'. I disagree though, I think that if you want to make it happen and you try, there's nothing to stop you from doing your part. I'm not saying I think I can single handedly bring about world peace or even make a significant difference, but even if I can help one person for the better I will have completed my goal. Plus, as I always say, you could help that one child that could grow up to cure cancer. So you never know what the knock on effect of one good act could be.

Feel free to comment about your views on this subject. Or what do you think about Stephen's Story?

Quick note/update

I've just been editing this blog since something about it was annoying me. I still haven't really figured it out. But, I just wanted to write this quick note to say that:

1) I know, I need to add a few more pictures and probably less waffle - I'm working on it;

2) The pictures aren't the best of quality right now - again, I know, it's just that it's a lot easier to take pictures and upload them onto my mac from my iPhone since they automatically since over wifi and I do have a little digital camera and a pretty dSLR that takes gorgeous pictures, it's just with exams and everything I don't have the time to fiddle around with that yet, plus, the pictures I've been uploading aren't really anything special to require nice photography - if you bear/bare (I don't know, they both look wrong) with me, in the summer I'll probably take some nice pictures and make the current posts less dry

3) Even with exams, I'll try to keep up with my current schedule of posting (once a week, with interchanging beauty then lifestyle posts) since I sat down and figured out the topics of the next 10 or so posts and have notes or drafts for most of them

Bye for now!

How to: PROCRASTINATE PRODUCTIVELY

If you are still a student it is probably 'exam season' for you now. Which inevitably means a lot a lot a lot of procrastination. I'm pretty sure everyone does it even if they don't admit to it. The definition of procrastination, for those of you who may not know it, is: 'to put off doing something, especially out of habitual carelessness or laziness' (according to thefreedictionary.com). If you're supposed to be revising or preparing for your exams but are reading this instead, then you are procrastinating.

So the productive part is relatively subjective. I say this because not all of these tasks are that productive nor are they likely to be necessary to be completed at the exact time you are supposed to be working, so technically, not productive. But on the other hand, they kind of are productive because you'll have accomplished something meaningful/worthwhile - er, if you consider these tasks to meet that criteria.

In my own little world, being about to argue that roundabout and somewhat twisted logic means that I'll make a good barrister (lawyer) someday. Feel free to disagree. Most people often do.

So, the key to procrastinating productively is to choose tasks that need completing at some point in time and bring forward the point in time in which you choose to complete them. Here is my list:

 - Tidying my room - this is a big one for me, my room is perpetually messy and every time my mum sees my room she gets angry and starts yelling, so it's very hard for her to tell me off for not working if I'm tidying my room instead so double win;

I bought and built this chest of drawers from
IKEA in the Easter holidays. It was originally
£75 but the day we went there was a promotion
and it was £55. It has two shallow drawers at the
top with 4 more deeper drawers below. I added
some functional decoration on top so it'd look
pretty next to the boring wardrobes.

- Organising small parts of my room - this kind of comes under tidying but sometimes I just shove all my books haphazardly onto my bookshelf or clutter my desk with desk-related items (i.e. spare stationary, random bits of paper, textbooks etc.) so this needs organising at some point and when I get bored or don't feel like tidying I'll sit and make one small part of my room very neat and tidy - as a side note, my mum isn't usually too impressed since collateral damage is that clutter is created in other parts of my room and it's only a small section of my room;

- Washing my hair/hair mask/face mask/painting my nails/tweezing eyebrows/shaving legs - I would classify myself as a girly-girl but I am also very lazy so all of these things can be a bit of a chore to me (my hair is naturally on the drier side so even if I don't wash my hair for a week it won't look greasy or unclean), so sometimes when I don't want to work, I'll take an early shower and spend forever on my hair and legs then come out and do the whole beauty pamper thing - again, my mum isn't very impressed when she walks in and sees me tweezing my eyebrows or painting my nails instead of working but on the plus side I feel so great after I've finished;

- Food/grocery shopping - in the UK supermarkets there are also home sections where you can buy bathroom stuff so that comes under this 'heading', my two brothers will eat pretty much anything except for 'healthy stuff' so I cook all of my own meals and go food shopping with my mum then come home and organise the fridge, I also got the second ensuite so I have to make sure I have shampoo/body wash/ hand soap etc. - my mum can't really say anything about this although I'm quite certain she knows sometimes I just go because I have a shopping problem and I don't feel like working, but on the other hand I think she likes that I'm quite independent so she knows she won't have to worry about me when I'm away at university and after that;

- Clearing out my wardrobe - again, similar theme to the first two except recently a few 'clothes for cash' places have sprung up where I live so that's nice (I'm told the clothes go to charity and from Googling that does seem to be the case but I'm not 100% sure) but I'm a bit of a hoarder and I buy way too many clothes so sometimes (a lot of the time) I'm made to keep half the stuff I wanted to get rid of because it's still so new, I know it's quite wasteful, but I'm a teenage girl who apparently has way too much money;

*on the theme of the 'clothes for cash' I'm sure you know about websites like 'musicMagpie' where you can sell CD's, DVD's, electronics and branded clothing; I've also found a site called 'WeBuyBooks.co.uk' that buys books (duh) CD's and DVD's; and Amazon have a trade-in store for books and games - I've found that for musicMagpie, downloading the app on my iPhone and scanning the barcodes is a lot easier than typing in the code then copying it and pasting it onto the WeBuyBooks search bar to compare the price is the best; it's worth comparing the prices on even a couple of sites since prices can vary by quite a bit so might as well get the highest amount;

- Eating - again, I think most young people do this, and why not? I'm trying to break this habit since I'm trying to tone up and get a nice summer body, I find that in the holidays I measure my day by the time before my next meal because cooking also takes up a significant amount of time, especially when there are a billion vegetables to slice or dice or peel or do something to.

Hope you've found this post amusing and I wish anyone taking exams good luck! Comment below if you have any requests for my next post or just a random comment because you're bored of work :)