This week I had a job recruiter call me up. That in itself is a nerve racking experience. A job… recruiter… As a graduate who lives in this British financial climate, the people who have the power to get you hired and earning money are like Jesus. Except better, because they won’t bugger off and get crucified #selfish.

In among this recruiter’s casual chatter and trying to persuade me to be put forward for a certain job (hello, you had me when you told me the position was paid), she did ask me one thing – how do you feel about being a graduate?

It’s a harmless question and one that’s been on many people’s lips. But it made me feel conflicted. I don’t know how to feel about it.

It’s been over a week since I had my last exam and ever since then I’ve been feeling lost. Before, what I like to call, the-end-of-all-things-day I had an idea that I would have certain emotions after I stepped out of that exam hall.

I thought I would feel immense relief.

Joy.

Sadness.

The urge to take off my clothes and dive into the university’s fountains.

But truth be told, I felt none of these things. For a while, because the exam was particularly tough, I felt anxiety that I had just failed my degree. But after doing the grade averages, I knew that wasn’t the case. So without this worry about failing to graduating, I started to feel… nothing, nothing at all about graduating.

This is one of the few times that I get to compare myself to a Skins character.

This isn’t the first time a major life event has failed to inspire Hollywood worthy emotions. I felt very little about leaving high school, failed to have an epiphany when I first went abroad and so far I have yet to have any kind of religious experience.

A while ago I wrote a blog post about wanting the crippling and cool apathy that MTV’s Daria has. Now that I’m experiencing this apathy, I’m starting to believe it’s more a curse than a gift. Like being Spiderman, but without the lyrca.

Maybe the real problem is my current living situation. I’m still in a student house. I’m still in my student city. I still don’t have a job. I am in adult limbo.

My student days are over in one sense, in that I don’t have to actually study anymore, but in another sense I’m still living the student lifestyle. I rarely get up before 9am. Most of my day is spent on the internet. And I’m still getting texts asking me to go out to a club on a Wednesday life.

With the exception of Carrie Bradshaw, this is not how real adults live.

Real adults have homes for ‘young professionals’. They pay a lot of rent. They go to work and on that note, they have a job.

I need a job.

I need to leave this comfy, yet slightly dusty, house.

I need to emerge from my student cocoon and become the beautiful butterfly that has a 9 to 5.

I mean, look at Rita Ora, she’s only 22 and she’s already accomplished so much. Same goes for Taylor Swift. Also, I’m currently readying Tina Fey’s book Bossypants and she was doing so much shit at this age. And Caitlin Moran had a paid column at the age of 18.

What am I doing with my life?

I have a blog that gets a majority of its views from people searching for dick pictures – my life needs to be more than this!

You know, now that I think about it, I am starting to feel some things about being a graduate. My chest is feeling a little tighter. I think my heart is going to explode and I’ve suddenly started sweating profusely.

My apathy had been cured and has been replaced with a crushing sense of fear.

I think I’m starting to grow up. Fuck.

I did not create any of these images and neither do I owned them. Obviously. 

You know a lot of time has passed when you sign into your wordpress account and the site has had a format change without you realising it. It makes you feel like the internet has moved on, found a new co-dependent relationship and left you alone with all your tangible reality. That alone can make you shiver.

To avoid this internet death of sorts, I’m writing you this quick message to show you all that I haven’t died/ forgotten you/ grown-up and learnt to separate myself from my online dependency. I am alive and as dependent as ever on online validation, I’ve just been very busy lately and haven’t had anytime to press my face against my computer screen and whisper ‘traffic… sweet, sweet traffic…’

Why have I been busy? asks no one in the crowd. Well, I’ll tell you imagined voice. I have been under going some LIFE CHANGES!

This here, this is you.

You may have guessed from the last article I wrote (yes, I do call them articles, it makes me feel fancy) that I have recently graduated from university. Anyone who has undergone this milestone will know how ball-shit scary this time is. For one thing, without my university accommodation, I have become a little bit… homeless. Homeless and jobless, to be more precise, which is a little bit of a concern.

I recently went down to London to try and find a house to live in (because, you know, when you’re at your poorest is the perfect time to move to the most expensive location in Britain) and things down there got a little messy. Here’s what I learnt from my first house-hunting trip:

1. Never sign over your bank details first.
2. Never trust Estate Agents.
3. Never trust Estate Agents especially when you’re a young 20-something woman because THEY WILL TAKE ADVANTAGE!
4. Never agree to move in with someone you have never met.
5. Always move in with someone who has parents who can scare Estate Agents.

This here, this is an Estate Agent

Despite being unable to find a place to live, I still find myself being forced to leave my student abode. So on top of looking for a job and finding a house, I now have to pack, which is what I’m doing today. Until, you know, I stopped and started writing this blog. As of now, I have packed away all my clothes and, more importantly, my books.

In the time before my impending street wandering, I was able to spend some time on holiday… abroad. When I told everyone I was heading to Fuerteventura, I made the amateur mistake of telling everyone that this was in Spain. It is not in Spain. The island actually lies within the Canary Islands, but it is owned by Spain so I guess I was close enough. In an effort to show you that I’m putting on a brave face (and to fill this page up), here are a few holiday snaps. Remember me always as a woman who has a large smile and a slightly unphotogenic  face – even when I’m sleeping on the streets.

To protect the identities of my friends from internet trolls, I have performed some subtle photoshop. Honestly, you’ll hardly notice a thing.

As you all know, I have been a little M.I.A lately when it comes to the internet. Getting behind on your internet-ing can be a daunting experience; for one thing the internet is always changing. You miss one day on Reddit and a new meme has already been created, adored and finally abandoned, all without you experiencing it.  Likewise, by having access to every news site on the planet, big stories hit the web with another just a few hours behind. Even now I have no idea what has really been happening in the world, are we at war again? What’s North Korea up to? Is there a new drinks based diet I should be consuming? What’s this I hear about a man with ten stone testicles?

In an effort to play catch up with the World Wide Web, I have been surfing around for some of the best treats I missed during my absence. This little laptop journey of mine eventually led me to this amazing story:

Woman dressed as vagina stops street fight between penis and man in Glastonbury

Just let that article fester in your minds for a moment. A woman dressed in a VAGINA COSTUME has to stop a man from beating up a man dressed in a PENIS COSTUME. It almost reads like a scene out of a Wes Anderson film.

Aside from the obviously comic value of this story, there is something else that caught my eye in this piece. The two genitalia dressed people were out advertising a piece of theatre and the whole debacle with the aggressor started over the perceived idea that their outfits were inappropriate for children to see.

Now there is a multitude of things that are inappropriate for children to see. Sex is right at the top and what’s in Hugh Grant’s recycle bin is a close second, but a lady wearing some styrofoam with some fake fur on it so that when you stand at a distance and squint your eyes she almost looks like a vagina (providing, of course, someone is holding a picture of a vagina next to her and you have another person walk up to you and say ‘she’s dressed as a vagina’) is not one of them.

People seem to have this idea in their heads that children are ignorant little balls of sunshine and innocence. But let me tell you something, children know what’s up. Now granted, they don’t know everything that’s up. They don’t know what a tax bracket is or the implications of a missile strike in the Middle East, but they know what’s between their legs.

However, what children don’t know is how to sexualise things, that stuff they learn in their teens when they ‘accidentally’ open their older brother’s porn folder. What we understand as the ‘sex’ function in certain behaviour and objects is like a mystery box to a child. They know it’s there, but they don’t know what’s inside or fully understand the ramifications.

Sex is a feeling but it is not knowledge to a child. If a child were to see something sexual they might experience a feeling of discomfort or (heaven forbid) curiosity. They might instinctively feel that it is something out of the norm, something forbidden that they shouldn’t be watching and maybe that’s scary or maybe it isn’t.

Of course, I should point out that I’m no child physiologist and these opinions are all based on my experiences as a youngling. I don’t remember everything from when I was a kid, but I think I was aware of sex in these terms. I knew it was out there, I knew I wasn’t meant to know what exactly it was at that age and things related it made me feel uncomfortable when they popped up suddenly.

The things that made me feel weird as a child to see were things like sex scenes in films or those smutty magazines in shops. Those things, now that I look back made me feel uneasy because they were inappropriate. They were sexual because they cognitive of sexual acts; the act of doing sex.

Here is Jon Hamm, doing the sex.

However, if my eight year old self had stumbled onto a man dressed as a penis or a woman dressed as a vagina I would have thought nothing of it. I would have laughed, but I wouldn’t have got that squirmy ‘this is not for your eyes’ feeling. Those are just body parts, why should anyone feel ashamed of something they themselves have at any age?

Children get naked all the time and they don’t do it to be sexual deviants, they do it because it’s their body and they know more than adults do that you make your body means what you want it to mean.

It’s my belief, that knowing the difference between what’s sexual and what just happens to be part of sex is something that our society lacks. A naked body posed in Nuts magazine is sexual; a naked body shown in sex ed class is not sexual.

Kids might not know what’s up all of the time, but we as adults should.

Good news Internet, I have found myself a job. Well, a paid internship, which is close enough! As this is my first job outside of university, I want to make a good impression in the office. Obviously, as a woman, the only way to do this is through my work wear. Clothes are the equivalent to a Rorschach test in girl world.

Now I have some office wear saved up in my closet, but clothes have a sell by date. Once they’re out of season it’s like they grow a mould that only women can see and smell. No one wants to be the mouldy new intern.

With this in mind, I have been trying to find some of the best office wear the internet has to offer. And by best I mean the cheapest.

Asos has some very classy and cheap clothing available in their sale section, and if I had money, I might be tempted to shop over at Topshop. Yet Boohoo, who has always been known for cheap clothing, and who also dedicates a section of their website to telling you what is office hot and what is office not, seemed to be the treasure cove of my quest.

That was until I learned that cleavage has become the new office accessory. As a woman with a, erm, chest on the smaller side of things, you can understand why I felt disheartened by this revelation. Don’t believe me about this new fashion trend? Just take a look at some of these outfits.

Now while I’m for a woman being able to wear whatever outfit she wishes without facing disrespect, I can’t help but feel baffled by these outfits being classed as work wear. I thought offices required black trousers, pencil skirts and cardigans. In fact, I was planning on taking a ‘what would Liz Lemon from 30 Rock wear?’ kind of stance on the whole thing.

You see why I idolize her?

Now of course, my bemusement at these outfits might stem from the fact that if I were to wear such things, the hole with boobs in would just be a window to my gaping boob gap. A gap that is so large I sometimes find Grand Canyon tourists taking pictures down there.

Still I have to ask, is this what men deal with? Have you ever seen a man squeezing himself into a tight shirt that has a cut out for his six pack to be viewed from? Or have they ever wiggled their butts into scuba material trousers?

Or maybe men wish they could wear some boob-a-licious outfits. Maybe they get bored of wearing nothing but shirts, blazers and sensible trousers. Has anyone ever asked David Brent if he would like to do his tax returns in sequined leggings? Or questioned Donald Trump about giving a scallop cut blouse a go for his next meeting?

I remember going to one job interview and one boy sighing because he was jealous that all us women had to do was ‘put on something decent and shove a blazer over the top’ – which isn’t that incorrect.

So what do you think internet? Are women blessed in the work wear area? Or cursed by being asked to grow fun bags big enough to fill a Billie V Neck Cap Sleeve Bodycon Dress?

I think, for the time being, I might give Boohoo a miss this season and stick to the tried and tested blouse and blazer combo that I’ve been wearing to job interviews for the last month. And maybe in the future, when I have some money, I can get my classy act together and dress like the working Goddess that is Tina Fey herself.

You sure are Liz, you sure are…

If you’re stuck for ideas on what to wear to the office, I suggest giving this pinterest board a look. You can also give BooHoo a go yourself, despite what this blog might have led you to believe, most of the stuff on there doesn’t look like outfits for strippers trying out for the apprentice. 

The cardinal rule of the internet is that you will never understand it. The moment you think you have it understood, the second you feel comfortable, something will happen that will make you do a double take. Take this blog for instance. Now I am the first to admit that I have been a bit… negligent. That’s the only word that can sum up my act of leaving it desolate and abandoned for nearly, what, three months? Four? I feel like I’ve treated it like I do my house plants, and my house plants have never fared well.

But unlike my house plants, this blog hasn’t withered, which is what I mean when I say the internet is a strange place. This month, on Oct 11^th my blog received nearly 6000 hits in one day – ONE DAY! Why did this happen? Where did you people appear from? Why do you all love that one post I did about Ewan Mcgregor’s penis? Jesus, get your act together internet.

Of course, stranger things have happened on the internet than just my blog getting a self-esteem boost (yes, the reason I am writing on here again is down to flattery, I’m weak like that). Take for instance http://fortydaysofdating.com/ – I know you’ve all heard about this viral sensation.

Meet Jessica and Tim from FortyDaysofDating

If you haven’t (jesus, have you lived under a rock?) then let me sum up the project for you. Two attractive friends spent fourty days forcing themselves to be in a relationship to see if real emotions, or as tumblr likes to call them, ‘feelz’, could develop. If you want to know the results of this social experiment, I highly recommend that you give their blog a read through as it is a fantastic read, but this particular blog post isn’t about the love affair between two hipsters but the idea of our lives and the internet. Or rather, our emotional lives and the internet.

I can’t help but wonder, as I look at two people write openly and honestly about love, sex and friendship, whether or not the boundary between our online lives and our virtual lives is slowly disappearing.

I will be the first to admit that my virtual persona is very much a calculated construct. When I update my Facebook, I careful present to the world a version of myself that I would consider cool – whatever that means. I post pictures of myself in bars, I show myself smiling and I only ever reveal the things I’ve succeed in. I never show myself as a failure. I don’t want people to see my emotional break downs.

My need to present myself in a certain light is another part of my blogging absence. Around the time of my departure from ladybitsandbobs, I suffered a pretty nasty break-up. Not nasty in the sense that there was yelling, but nasty in the sense that it hit me pretty hard. For a long time it was all that I could think about, so naturally it was all I wanted to write about. But how do you write about your feelings regarding another person, when said other person can just go a quick google search and have it before their very eyes?

When I look at the fourty days of dating blog, I wonder if what those two people revealed was true to themselves. Are they telling the whole truth? Because when it comes to relationships and the fall-out of a relationship, people can discover sides to themselves that can be pretty ugly.

We all leap at the chance to show people that we’re eating in fancy places, but would need the threat of death to reveal to the world how we get ourselves through our emotional hiccups. But maybe this is changing.

Maybe in the future facebook will be replaced by something that isn’t reliant of taking people’s lives on face-value. Could you see yourself using the new social media called FEELZbook?

‘Today Heather has watched two seasons of Sex and the City in one sitting because she is trying to convince herself that singlehood is amazing and not an indication of her failed love life.’

‘This evening Heather joined an online dating site because she is lonely.’

‘This morning Heather deleted her online dating profile because all the men scared her and made cats a very viable option.’

While these statuses would by no means gather me cool point, and are nowhere near as transferable to the likes of instagram, I wonder if this is where our internet lives are heading. And if this is what the internet of the future is made up of, what would your future profile say about you?

Now that I am a successful grown-up person, I am often plagued by under privileged none grown-up people with questions on how they can emulate my maturity. After all, I have left university with a degree, set up home in London and landed myself on the career ladder of my choice. In the words of the M People, I am movin’ on up.

So what pearls of wisdom can I depart to the masses? I tell you it was hard to narrow it down to just this list but I’ve given it my best shot. Think of this not so much as a blog post/ Buzzfeed list rip off, but as a digital bible into twenty-something survival.

Come children; let me guide you through the joys of becoming a grown-up.

1. You are an office foetus

When you enter your first job out of university, no doubt you will be filled with oodles of self-confidence about your abilities. I mean, you did all those internships, didn’t you? And you practically ran that student radio station. Oh, how those freshers marvelled at your authority. You can’t wait to step into your Don Draper style suit and reinvigorate your new office with your youth.

However, I am here to tell you that you are not a person. You are a foetus. For the first few months every conversation you have with your new co-workers will involve them marvelling at the fact that you, someone born in the 90s, is allowed to drink. You’ll also be hit with weird abbreviations, like AOB… Since when did everyone start using AOB?

2. Money Disappears

Oh wow, look at that salary you’ve been offered. Doesn’t it seem huge? Imagine all that money a month. You’ll be loaded, nothing but parties, booze and Marks and Spenser’s shopping for you. Of course you’ll first have to pay national insurance. Then income tax. Oh, and have I mentioned you’re also part of the company’s pension?

And then there’s rent…

That zone 2 travel card…

Bills…

Holy shit, how much is council tax?

3. Relationships are… different

Something strange happens to you out of uni – you’re expected to date. If you’re like me, you’ll find this very disconcerting. Isn’t dating something only the Sex and the City girls do? Whatever happened to awkwardly standing next to your crush at a party and drunkenly shagging later after a game of (ironic) spin-the-bottle gets out of hand? Sure the food in the restaurant is nice, and you feel very sexy ordering that glass of red wine, but it’s just not the same as a Lord of the Rings marathon in bed, basking in the sexual chemistry that is Frodo and Sam.

4. People get on with their lives

Many of us have a nice illusion that our friendship circle acts like a solar system. You, of course, are the sun and the rest of the group happily orbits your little sphere of being. This egotistical and safe belief is bit by bit dismantled by real life. The people in our lives have lives of their own to lead. They have jobs to take up, places to move to, and partners to romance with. A good friendship will weather this and even grow, but not all relationships can last through the storm. It’s a natural part of life but that’s not to say it doesn’t suck.

5.  So where do I go from here?

Growing up I found that life had set itself out very neatly in front of me. I would go to primary school, then high school, college, university and then finally I would get a job. From the ages of 6 till 21, this plan sat very nicely with me. That was until I reached the ‘end’. Because all that bullshit about school being the greatest time of your life is just that…. bullshit. Once you step out into the real world you realise how little of your life you’ve really lived and that in front of you is this great expanse of possibilities just waiting for you to dive in. It’s fantastical and scary all at the same time. There are places to go, things to do, new people to meet – I don’t even think Buzzfeed could list all the things ahead of you.

So my final piece advice is this – never wait to feel grown-up. Stop waiting for that end point. Don’t grow up, get up and live it. Quickly before you start reading another listicle.

I get all my images by typing random words into Google, followed by the word ‘.gif’. Therefore I own nothing and if you want things taken down or credited you can just ask, silly sausage. 

We all have initiation rituals when it comes to female friends. Perhaps you like to welcome a new member to your friendship group by taking them to your favourite bar. Maybe you test the waters with a shopping trip. It may even be that you don’t consider yourself truly friends with someone until one of you has held the others hair as they puke into a toilet at Walkabout.

While all of these rituals hold a certain level of charm, my favourite way to test the friendship waters is by talking about my vagina – in detail.

Now some of you may be recoiling at the idea about hearing about my vagina (which, FYI, is very hurtful to her), but hear me out. By talking about my vagina, I am giving a gift to the other person, a free pass if you will. It is my personal belief that every woman on the planet, who isn’t already doing so, is desperate to discuss their fun-fun parts.

It seems to me that there are a lot of things conspiring to keep the vagina hidden. Tampon adverts never discus where the tampon is going, thrush creams like to discuss the ‘internal’ and ‘external’ rather than saying ‘slather it on your vag’, and even the vagina itself lends itself to this agenda. Unlike a penis the vagina leaves no bulge, there’s no hint from a clothed woman that anything exists between her legs. And so, as things go, the vagina ends up un-discussed with no one inquiring about what exactly vaginas do.

Because vaginas do a lot of things that don’t fall under the categories of: give birth, pee and bleed once a month.

Sometimes a vagina will become very sore, or itch, or go very dry. Sometimes they will leak or make a fart noise during sex (that’s called queefing children). And sure you can go to your GP with these problems (and you should), but you’ll never get that personal touch that goes beyond health statistics and a friendly nurse smile.

What a woman really needs when she’s having a bad vagina day is for another woman to turn to her and say: “ME TOO!”

This is why I like to offer this glorious avenue of conversation to the women in my life. Of course, you have to judge correctly whether or not your confession of feeling ‘yeasty’ today is going to go down well. This is not a conversation that you can just throw to the new supervisor at work after only meeting her 10 minutes ago. However, most of the time you’ll find that your vaginal confession will be met with a look of relief, like you’re finally unloading a secret that you’ve both been burdened by carrying.

“Sandra,” you could say. “I feel like my vagina is doing something funny today.”

“Oh mine gets like that all the time. That’s why I drink so much cranberry juice.”

Women experience pressure on a daily basis to be perfect, no more so than when it comes to sex. For a woman experiencing thrush or cystitis for the first time, it can feel like you’re abnormal, like you’ve let the side down. Vaginas aren’t supposed to be itchy; they’re supposed to be little fun holes of perfect joy, right? Wrong.

It’s only by opening up these avenues of conversation that we can relieve some of the pressure women face.

Because, ladies, you will get thrush. And cystitis. And a whole host of other problems (just wait until you get pregnant or menopause). But why hide this away like it’s some dirty little secret? I’m not saying that we should announce our lady-part woes at a board meeting, but let’s not perpetuate this sexual-goddess bullshit.

Talk about your vaginas, you can thank me later.

My flatmate and I are venturing into the realm of video documentation – that’s vlogging, for those of you not in the know. Here I am on her channel doing a ‘best friend tag’. The word vagina is said at length and I show too much of my side profile #insecuritiesarefun

Watch this space for the creation of my own channel.

It’s happened guys, I’ve started a Youtube channel. Friends at work have given my venture rave reviews such as ‘it is solid good chat’ and ‘I don’t get what you’re doing’.

If you’re interested in hearing to young women talking about bush, vagina, and getting pissed in-between.

SUBSCRIBE NOW!

It’s been over a year since I stepped into my first improv class. I remember how scared I was beforehand. The course had been an impulse buy that had occurred after a couple of glasses of wine and the finishing of Tina Fey’s book ‘Bossypants’. In between the click ‘buy’ and that moment outside the classroom doors, a month and half had gone by of a scared voice in my head saying ‘Don’t bother. You’ll embarrass yourself. What if you hate it?’

Looking back, I wonder how many times that voice has stopped me before. Was it the reason I didn’t perform at university? Is the voice why it took me years to try stand up? I’m sure we all have that voice inside of us – an awful human quirk that gets in the way of living life wholly.

In the case of improv, I decided to fight back. I stepped into that classroom full of fear but still full of hope.  That voice will always tell you that new situations will be hostile. That newness is unwelcoming and cruel. However, entering that room I found people who were probably just as scared as me. Probably telling their own inner voices to pipe down.

The quietness of the room wasn’t unwelcoming, it was smothered in fear. What had we let ourselves into? Were we all mad for doing this? Nervously, I met eyes with people, who all smiled while shuffling their feet.

Here’s another fact about the voice, it’s very easily drowned out from the outside. Inwardly we struggle for the strength to shout over it, but others seem to act like buckets of water to its insidious fire. In the case of improv, this new voice came in the form of our new teacher Maria Peters.

Maria is the reason I fell in love with improv. Her love for the art form (and it is an art form, Sir. Naysayer) shines out of her. She was the lighthouse that guided myself and others to joyful silliness.

“Improv isn’t about being funny,” she told us as we stood in a human circle. “Improv is about making others look and feel good. No matter what you do, the person next to you will always be there to make you look your best.”

And just like that the voice finally shut the hell up.

Here’s the thing with improv, the thing that I’ve gleamed from my year in its cuddly hug, there’s no right or wrong way to do it. Everything is up for grabs. Go anywhere on the map. Dive for any treasure. If you want to be holding a gun, you’re holding a gun. If you want to be sitting on a rainbow, you’re sat on a rainbow.

Everything is possible in improv and that’s because everyone is making that happen. There’s a collective voice that choruses ‘YES!’

Maria started that loud affirmative echo in our class. Within a few weeks we knew that when we stepped up on stage we could make anything happen. If I wanted to be a fireman I could be. I could be the queen, a llama, David Cameron – anything! I was first and foremost an improviser and that meant I could be it all.

There’s always going to be something telling us that we can’t do something. A voice –whether from others or ourselves. But the real skill is finding that something that drowns that noise out.

For me that’s improv. On and off the stage I have a new confidence. I’ve never regretted entering that classroom, because now I have a new voice that tells me anything is possible.

If you fancy trying improv, I highly recommend using Hoopla for advice and SUPER courses: http://www.hooplaimpro.com/

The other week I wrote about finding a voice, which feels very poignant now that the General Election is in full swing.

I’ve always been afraid of writing about politics. I’ll hold my hands up and admit that I’m not the most qualified person to discuss such matters. Politics is the internet game for smart, current affairs people who can make funny remarks about graphs and stuff. They should talk about the election, not some woman who recently waffled on about her love of dog videos.

However, this deprecating attitude of who should and who shouldn’t be discussing politics is a huge issue within this election. This is, after all, one of the most major conversations to be part of!

It seems that in the past political voice was defined by votes. The message was that if you voted someone was listening. We’re told that young people don’t vote and that this warrants a bad lot in life (a rise in tuition fees, the revoking of housing benefits, unfair renting, ect.)And it is true that young people have had a bad history of voting – in the last election, less than half of 18-24 year olds voted.

However, even if every single young person of today voted, according to a BBC Analysis, it would still take 30 years for us to become a electorally significant demographic.

So how can we be heard?

Well it really shouldn’t be that hard (note that I use ‘shouldn’t be’ instead of ‘isn’t’). Communication is the driving force of Generation Y. We tweet, we text, we snapchat, we blog… there’s so many platforms for our opinions out there, that it seems mad that most of us (myself included) are allowing our political views to go wasted in drunken rants in the pub.

I understand that David Cameron and the like aren’t going to watching my twitter feed or reading this blog, but at the very least we should be creating more awareness within the great potential-voter pool. So many communities are being marginalised by the current government and if we don’t all use the tools that we’ve been given, these people will slowly just disappear from view.

London especially is a great example of this. Just look at the Focus E15 Mothers, who are currently occupying abandoned council estates in protest of the housing crisis. If these women sat back and proclaimed: ‘well it isn’t my place to question the government!’ Then they wouldn’t even have a chance of remaining in their local area. They would have been quietly pushed out of London, like most working-class people have been in recent years.

Even I know that lucky circumstance is all that has kept me out of extreme poverty. I’ve been financially independent since the age of 18, supporting myself through either student loans or finding work. I don’t have a good relationship with my parents. Once I left university, there was no home to go back to. No safety net against the jobs crisis.

My final year of university was filled with a crushing fear that only those who have come out of dire circumstance know and will never forget. What if I failed to get a job? What if I couldn’t afford to shelter myself?

The Tories have pledged that anyone between 18-21 will not be able to claim housing benefit. Now I’m sure they’ll make exceptions for the obvious cases – such as those who have lost their parents. But I doubt that those in my special circumstances, ones that have no documented proof of why they can’t live in their family home, will be saved from finding themselves either on a friend’s couch or (very likely) the streets.

Judging from the Tories recent commitment to cut £12 bn from Welfare, this trend for demonizing and exploiting the most vulnerable in our society is only getting worse. And it’s no coincidence that this same group of people are the ones who feel they can’t speak out. That no one cares. That their voice doesn’t matter.

I refuse to believe that we are an indifferent generation and that we cannot shape the destiny of our own country. I have a voice, a vote, and a platform to say in which direction my country should be heading – and you do too.

And preferably, let’s have that direction moving as far away from the Conservatives as possible.

At the weekend I spent my morning watching The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness, a documentary about the final cinematic venture of Hayao Miyazaki and his history with Studio Ghibli. I don’t want to go into a massive raving review of the piece, so just trust me when I say every film fan needs to watch this documentary. The personal genius of Miyazaki is perfectly captured in his quiet reflections of life, and like all Studio Ghibli products, is filled with childlike sincerity.

A scene that particularly caught my notice was one in which we first enter Miyazaki’s house. In his rather modest home, we find hordes of creative projects that Miyazaki has been quietly working on. One project was a documentation of daily life after the recession hit Japan. He flicked through page after page of a enormous scrap book, each one filled with photographs.

“I tried to document the effects of the recession on the people in my area but what I ended up with was just pictures of everyday life.”

To me, a person of the internet, his scrap book seemed like such a foreign concept. The idea that he had put so much time and energy into a project that (if it wasn’t for the cameras) would have never been seen by another person. It was a project he had untaken for himself and for his eyes only.

Older readers of this blog (are you even there?) might be rolling their eyes at my confusion but to you 90s and millennial kids I have to ask – have personal projects died? Has the blog become the new diary? Tumblr the new scrap book? Facebook the new photo album?

When I think about my own creative projects – writing and improvisation – they’re all undertaken with the goal of anothers eyes. Yes, of course, I do them out of my own passion and pleasure, but would I feel so strongly about them if I didn’t have access to an instant audience?

Someone in my office remarked today that the new app Periscope was symptomatic of our culture. “It’s just another way for people to feel like everything they do is worth something.” This statement was made as we watched Nick Grimmshaw (Radio 1 DJ – don’t worry older readers, I’ll keep you current) go running through an airport because he was running late for his flight. I mean… I do wonder what Shakespeare would have to say if he could see what we were feasted our eyes on. DON’T WE HAVE THEATRE TO WATCH OR SOMETHING?

It seems to me that we are the generation that has crossed from having too small a platform, whereby it was significantly harder to show off your amazing projects, to having too big of one. A platform so big that we can literally just take a picture of a taco and dub it #BALLIN’.

Now I’m not going to stop posting a majority of my creative endeavors online but perhaps it would be nice to have a secret project… a whisper of creativity that only I can open up and was created with only my viewpoint in mind. The internet often clouds who and what we’re creating for. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that most beauty blogs look the same, or that my own tone of voice sounds like some of the blogs I read. In many ways, the internet comes with templates or we find ourselves joining communities that we merge our voice into.

Being a voice within a community isn’t a bad thing. In many ways, the collective element of the internet is one of its best features. However, maybe once in a while we might enter that kingdom of madness and speak to ourselves for a while…

I recently wrote an article for Femsplain (a bloody amazing feminist platform) about my relationship with my Mum. Its a pretty personal piece and I feel very lucky that its able to feature on a website that I have such respect for. For the full piece, just click the link below.

Having a bad childhood can be really annoying sometimes. Even in adulthood it likes to creep in and trip you up.

The worst time is Christmas, when you’re forced to make happy festive exchanges silent by answering their unassuming questions.

“What are your plans this year?”

“How does your family celebrate?”

“When are you heading home?”

etc…

It’s in situations like these when I like to detonate the old PHB. If you don’t know what this is, that’s because I invented it. It means Personal History Bomb. An explosive word vomit that gives the key details of my early years — abandonment, estrangement, mild-poverty — in one easy to swallow monologue.

For you, the reader, I’ll try and recreate my PHB digitally…

Read full story here

I wrote this for another site but in the end it wasn’t used so I thought I might as well stick it on here for you lovely people.

The idea goes that no one person is above the law. A simple concept, but with the evolution of the digital world (and I’m not just referencing Digimon here) the notion is getting less and less tangible. Just like our criminals.

Last month saw the release of The Random Darknet Shopper, a robot who went to robo-jail after purchasing of ecstasy from the darknet. This digital Pablo Escobar is the handiwork of Swiss artists Carmen Weisskopf and Domagoj Smolijo, who created the bot as part of their art show. Given $100 a week in bitcoin, the little robot was sent into the depths of Darknet (a place not really fit for human exploration) and allowed to make random dubious purchases. The fruits of this shopping spree included not only some ecstasy pills but a fake passport, Diesel jeans, 200 Chesterfield cigarettes, and a baseball cap fitted with a hidden camera.

The project was created in order to mirror the illegal activities that persist throughout the internet, questioning how our society should be dealing with spaces such as Darknet markets. However, art or no, a real crime was committed. In the words of the artists: “We are the legal owner of the drugs – we are responsible for everything the bot does, as we executed the code.”

Although Weisskopf and Smolijo admit responsibility for their bot, it seems that our laws as they are now may not be up to date in how to handle such misdemeanors. Criminal law usually upholds that there needs to be an “intending mind” present for a crime to be prosecuted. Therefore, if a bot was set to only buy items at random, could the creator reasonably be held responsible for the purchase of chance illegal items?

In the case of The Random Darknet Shopper, such a case was never presented as the robot was cleared of all charges. The artists’ site states that “the possession of Ecstasy was indeed a reasonable means for the purpose of sparking public debate about questions related to the exhibition. The public prosecution also asserts that the overweighing interest in the questions raised by the art work «Random Darknet Shopper» justify the exhibition of the drugs as artefacts”.

Hurray for art, but this still leaves a lot of open-ended questions on how UK and global laws will deal with the emergence of robotic and digital loopholes. Loopholes such as the ones Holograms for Freedom have been recently taking advantage of.

Last month, thousands of holograms appeared outside of Madrid’s parliament buildings in protest to new ‘gagging laws’. The rightwing agenda of the current government has recently been gaining global attention, as new laws were introduced to prohibit certain forms of protest. These restrictions apply to any protest that occurs outside of government buildings or key pieces of infrastructure (such as nuclear power plants or refineries). Those who ignore these new rules can be landed with fines of up to €600,000.

But can you punish someone who isn’t technically there?

Reportedly, nearly 18,000 people signed up to Holograms por la Liberdad’s protest, by recording themselves on webcam. From these around 2000 ghostly holograms were created to march against the Spanish government, in a space that those in charge declared out of bounds. If those involved are able to avoid prosecution, the protest goes to show the ability that the digital world still has to transcend our Earthly regulations. Kind of like a holographic middle-finger to the powers that be.

Both of these cases offer us viewpoints into the pros and cons of an under-regulated cyber sphere. The (partially) lawless realms of our computers can offer us the potential to escape restraints in the physical world. But, like most things, the potential for either good or evil still lies in the hands of those behind the power button.

How long such power exists for has yet to be calculated.

When I tell you my face is like Shakira’s hips, it’s not because it’s sexy and Colombian — it’s because it just can’t lie. Ask me a direct question, and no matter what comes out of my mouth, my face is guaranteed to give you an honest answer.

And to be honest, this is annoying as fuck.

Sure, when people realize that my face is controlled by a do-gooding Muppet, they do tend to feel relaxed in my presence. An honest face means a nice person, right? And it is lovely to be considered nice, but guys… sometimes you need to lie. Lying is, like, a basic need.

For example, last year I was single and dating one of those “badboy” types (badboy being code for a guy who is a total dick). In my bid to impress him, I wanted to come across as mysterious and cultured, which naturally requires a lot of lying. We would walk through bookstores and he would constantly point to every book in the classics section, telling me in a smug-as-balls way how many he had read.

“Heather, you MUST have read Bouvard et Pécuchet by Gustave Flaubert. It’s a CLASSIC!”

“Haha, of course I’ve read it,” I would say. But it would be too late. My face would be twitching into what can only be referred to as a “rabbit caught in headlights” expression. HE KNOWS, I would think, and then I’d blurt out, “Okay, kind of, not really — BUT I’VE READ ANNA KARENINA, WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT?!”

Needless to say, that relationship did not work out.

Read the full article @ Femsplain

So here we are England. We’ve always wished for that Greek sunshine that we love so much on holiday and now its here. Pouring into our homes and offices, melting us like the chocolate digestives that we are. What a fucking treat.

It has been claimed that the ideal heat for a Brit is 21C and that anything other 28C is TOO BLOODY HOT! So you can imagine the sheer panic of our little island as we’ve been forced to endure highs of up to THIRTY FIVE! We’ve been like sweaty ants floundering under God’s magnifying glass.

Just in case we’re forced to endure more of this sweltering hell, I’ve got some top tips to help:

1. Ice Tea

It goes without saying that British people love tea, more than children*. So it makes sense that tea should work in our favour during these tortuous days. America’s have a thing ‘iced tea’, I don’t know how to make this but the concept seems simple enough. For every sip of tea, suck on a cube of ice and repeat until tea is finished.

2. Be Naked

Like all the time. Less clothes, less sweat.

3. Dr. Who-icle

Another thing British people love – Doctor Who**. I don’t know why but our island just can’t get enough but everyone seems to be having a wet dream over Matt Smith’s weird brow. So I propose that we move all screenings of Dr. Who into large freezers. People would be into that, they can pretend they’re in the tardis when the heating breaks in space.

4. Become a Zombie

Seriously, rewatch The Walking Dead. Those guys never seem to be too hot. Or too cold. Maybe the dead have really mastered the whole body temperature thing.

5. Complain

There must be a reason why we like to talk about the weather. Maybe it’s some kind of basic animal instinct that will pay off… somehow. Either that or I’ve been writing this whole post for nothing.

*I don’t like tea.
** I don’t like Dr.Who. Am I even British?

A cool thing about my new job is that I get to write things. I like writing. Writing is really cool and gives my introverted self a chance to go – OH HEY! LOOK AT THIS! AREN’T I SUBTLY HILARIOUS!

That’s what you’re all thinking, right? That I’m hilarious? I’m going to assume yes because, and here’s the best thing of it all, I’m the writer and you’re the reader. Silly reader, you can’t reach into the screen and write a miss massive ‘NO, FUCK OFF’ into the middle of this. Not yet anyway.

*Gives a nervous side eye to Windows 10*

However, part of writing for a living is that you also get edited for a living. Which means wiser people come in and point out what could be done better. No surprise, my grammar usually comes up. My grammar is, by my own admission, pretty shit and most of my professional life involves me trying to hide this. But hey, it’s not my fault that up until college my teachers taught me that you only use a comma when you take a breath*.

*Note, this is not grammar, this is breathing.

Another useful thing about editors is that they tell you when you’re trying TOO DAMN HARD. Again, I’ll hold my hand up and admit to this. I’m often guilty of struggling how to convey my love of something, so therefore compensate by writing utter fangirl nonsense. Such as – Oh it’s the best, the best thing ever. Can you tell I like it CAUSE I JUST KEEP BLABBING ON ABOUT IT!

My editor recently told me that nothing makes people want to dislike something more than someone telling them to like it. People are bratty like that. We all like to make our own minds up and for that we need to REASON not just hear gushing praise.

At one point in my internet career, I tried to create a book reviewing blog. I think I managed two posts before I gave up – why? Because everything I was writing sounded so fake. Like I was being paid to get people to like it – and that I also sucked at this job. I couldn’t understand why my writing sounded so atrocious  but now I do. It’s cause I was trying too hard. I spent too much time saying that I liked it, rather than trying to pin point what about the book made me like it.

I think science calls this ‘cause and effect’. Or is that affect? Jesus, grammar is hard.

Anyway, I now believe that if you really love something it will show. Also, that editors are great. All hail those who check for comma errors!

I call this the scotch egg gate, but it could easily be referred to as just another conversation between my boyfriend and I.

I suppose this argument stands out in my mind because it’s made me question my own gluttony (which, up until this point, I’ve had nothing but respect for) and it also only happened 40 minutes ago and I’m now just killing time before bed. I could just go to sleep but, if I forget all boundaries of social decency, I can’t do that because I’m currently in that weird limbo of being very gassy and needing a poo but also not so much in need of a poo that I can actually have one. Ladies, if that phrase disgusts you, you really need to look in a mirror because the woman staring back has probably dealt with something similar.

Seriously, all women are constipated. That’s just a fact of life. It’s actually quite depressing when you sit down and think of all the ways a woman’s body hates her. Take myself for instance. It’s bad enough when my period arrives but when it does my body also takes it upon itself to shit non-stop. I’m talking like Mt. Snowdon size craps. Think fecal matter hemorrhaging out of one end while at the front I’M BLEEDING! I mean, really, what did I do to deserve such horror? All men have to go through is baldness (which actually, considering how awful my boyfriend would look bald, is pretty shitty). Oh, and they die younger, cause of heart problems and all that. But still – massive period shits! WTF?!

Anyway, where was I before I started talking about my bowels? (A phrase I say on a weekly basis BTW) Oh yes, the scotch egg. So basically we had just had a Thai curry before we entered the pub and I said to Him that I quite fancied a dessert of some kind. A perfectly reasonable statement. So we go the bar and they have these massive scotch eggs on offer.

Now a thing you need to know about me is that I bloody love scotch eggs. Mini versions (AKA party eggs) are my favourite but I do also enjoy a fancy GASTRO PUB version when the occasion is right. If it were up to me, I would hide mini scotch eggs all around my home and place of work so that I could pick them up throughout my daily travels as a ‘keep going’ snack. Of course, everyone would hate me if I did that because eggs (annoyingly) smell really bad. Let my current fart situation be testament to that.

So I’m famous for loving scotch eggs. That’s a thing of mine. Which means when I say ‘oh yeaaaah, a scotch egg’ at 7pm after I’ve been out for Thai, I’m CLEARLY making satire out of myself. I don’t actually want a scotch egg.

Now imagine my amazement when two drinks later He appears we a scotch egg and the excuse “oh I needed to meet the card limit”. Meet the card limit? Mate, I now have to eat a pound of sausage, breadcrumbs, and egg on a full stomach!

(Real time update: as I reach this sentence I’ve just come back from the toilet. The bowels have been evacuated, you can all breath a sigh of relief. My arse has.)

And it’s not like I could have just let that scotch egg just go to waste. That would be grossly out of character. People would think I was dying and go through a process of grief. Or call MI5 and report an impostor – costing taxpayers money! So I had to eat nearly the entire thing – barring some of the actual egg itself (but to be fair it’s the sausage casing where the real love and devotion have gone into the craft). I even dropped some of it on the floor in a food-drunk inebriation and then put the egg droppings in a pint glass.

Bar staff look at you very judgmentally when they find bits of egg in your empty glass. Sorry I’m not cool enough to not drop my gastro pub egg on the floor. Sorry my working-class roots are showing, sir!  

Anyway, my boyfriend is now home and he keeps telling me that writing this blog is pointless and that despite committing over 700 words to this piece that nothing has actually been said. Other than I ate a scotch egg and felt very full. This is indeed correct but who’s more easily judged – the writer of the nothing or the reader of the nothing? *puts on philosophical beard and strokes it while making ‘hmmm’ noise*

I’m totally joking, of course I’m to blame. Me and Jenny Lawson  – who is such a master of saying too much that she makes you feel like you can do the same in your blog. SPOILER: You totally can’t because your loved one will sit next to you in the bed making disapproving air noises through his nose.

Speaking of disapproving air… *insert final fart joke here*

Oh my blog, my sweet beautiful blog.

If our relationship had a physical form, you would be a well meaning girl and I would be the sexy bad boy who keeps jerking you around. I always SAY I’m going to call, I always SAY I can change, I always SAY I’ll keep a consistent blogging pattern. But what do I do? I let you down. Worst – I let myself down*.

*Okay, maybe not myself, because not writing a blog usually means I’m on Tumblr, obsessing over the Michonne and Rick Grimes ship, and I love shipping. I really do.

But now that’s it’s 2016, I’ve decided to be honest with you blog. No more Mr.Cool-Aloof-Guy. Because the truth is, I our whole relationship started on the wrong foot. I didn’t start you because I’m a word-smithing-genius who needed a creative outlet. I started you because it seemed like a smart career move. Like it was the right thing to do if I wanted to get into digital media/social media/THE media. In short – it seemed very on brand.

Starting you merely to say I’ve started you was wrong, blog. Sure, we had our good times and sometimes I actually wrote something to be genuinely proud of… but often I just wrote what I thought I should write. Often I tried to sound like other bloggers, such as GirlLostintheCity or SuperlativelyRude – who are great, by the way, but they’re not me.

However, blog, I’m here yet again with a declaration of change.

I’m different now. I don’t try to guess at what I should be doing, but instead know what I want to be doing. I have projects. Goals. BIG CREATIVE DREAMS! Things that now inspire me because I find them inspiring, not because I’m trying to jump onto a hashtag on Twitter. You and me, blog, we can do something special. Create a showcase of the real Heather Shaw, without any of this futile imagining of what my brand should be.

Of course, we’ll have our challenges. Some of what appears on here might be a little messy. It could be 1,000 words or 100. It could be a picture, a podcast, or even a dick pic – JOKE! Obviously, a dick pic comes under the picture heading. But it’ll all be a reflection of me. Hopefully a lot of me. Seriously, I’ll update you more.

And who knows… maybe one day, in a future where Boris Johnson rules us with an iron fist, we’ll be able to look at each other and say: “finally, all our web traffic doesn’t come from those man porn, dick pic blogs”.

Let’s dream big, blog. You and me.