ERIN CONDREN 2015/2016 LIFE PLANNER | Organisation Chat

As of recent I've become pretty obsessed with planner videos.

Yes, that is exactly what it sounds like: YouTube videos of people sharing their planners and showing how they organise their weeks. 

It's actually really satisfying and fulfilling to watch (as a self-confessed organisation junkie who spends 90% of her life finding ways to organise and reorganise everything around her).

So i started by watching Elle Fowler's Planner 101 video which just hooked me in entirely and thus the obsession grew from there. On the 9th of July, Erin Condren released their new 18-month Life Planner so obviously I started counting down the days from April until it was finally time to get my hands on one of those beauties!

I paid a little extra for my planner and ordered the rose gold 18 month one as opposed to the plain silver/gold planner at just 12 months! As Erin Condren is an American company I did have to wait 2 weeks for the order to be put through and delivered but i didn't mind at all.

It's quite thick so i won't be taking this everywhere with me but it does have a prioritised space on my bed-side table....

Each month starts off with a month-at-a-glance page (shown above) which i'm going to colour co-ordinate major events such as university deadlines, work days, holidays, birthdays etc etc etc (my pens haven't arrived yet hence the sad-looking, blank page...)

Each weekly spread looks a little like this, it has all the days of the week (giving full recognition to Saturdays and Sundays, yes please and thank-you) and then three boxes underneath each day which used to read "morning" "day" and "night" but they've left them blank for the new releases so people can add their own customised headers. My spread isn't entirely full and I am working on my ability to plan ahead of time but i guess it's a process and this is where i'm starting off.

I find using a planner to write things down is super helpful because i'll more than likely complete a task i've set for myself if i write it down otherwise major guilt ensues. I guess the pages will start to fill up once i start adding uni deadlines in there. I'm also planning to add in goals, for example from certain Etsy stores you can buy hydration stickers that help you keep track of your water intake.

Sticker and washi wise, my collection is building. With the planner I got a bunch of header stickers and the EC sticker book, i've also placed a bunch of orders on Etsy, two of which are yet to arrive and are rather large so i'm obviously very excited for those! Apart from Etsy, most of my stickers are either just Erin Condren, Paperchase or from Hobbycraft. All my washi are from Hobbycraft which is just about the only store I can find anywhere near where I live that actually sells washi tape. 

I know this post probably will bore the pants off some people but i find stuff like this super interesting so tough. It was also super short but my pages will soon start to fill up and I'll have a lot more to chat and obsess about once i order more stickers and build it up into a proper hobby! It's such a super fun way to stay organised and kind of combines scrapbooking with staying on top of things!

xxrachelhelen

The Bell Jar

I just finished reading 'The Bell Jar' by Sylvia Plath which is in fact, quite sadly, her only novel. I thoroughly enjoyed it too as I found it easy to read and often relatable. I didn't find talk of suicide reletable but more the little things the character likes to point out, like that i thought maybe nobody else noticed them.

Or maybe that sounds a little pretentious.

Here are my favourite lines that I marked out anyway:

"I meditate in the bath. The water needs to be very hot, so hot you can barely stand putting your foot in it. Then you lower yourself, inch by inch, till the water's up to your neck"

-pg18

"Finally I decided that if it was so difficult to find a red-blooded intelligent man who was still pure by the time he was twenty-one I might as well forget about staying pure myself and marry somebody who wasn't pure either. Then when he started to make my life miserable I could make his miserable as well."

-pg77

"When I was nineteen, pureness was the great issue"

-77

"And I knew that in spite of all the roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a man showered on a woman before he married her, what he secretly wanted when the wedding service ended was for her to flatten out underneath his feet like Mrs Willard's kitchen mat."

-80

"If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days"

-90

"How could I write about life when I'd never had a love affair or a baby or seen anybody die? A girl I knew had just won a prize for a short story about her adventures among the pygmies in Africa. How could I compete with that sort of thing?"

-117

"I was afraid that at any moment my control would snap, and I would start babbling about how I couldn't read and couldn't write and how I must be just about the only person who had stayed awake for a solid month without dropping dead of exhaustion"

-pg151

"My mother said the cure for thinking too much about yourself was helping somebody who was worse off than you."

-pg155

"To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream"

-pg227

I am. I am. I am.

-xxrachelhelen

9 stupid questions I always ask while watching Pretty Little Liars

It's taken me three months to watch 5 seasons of PLL (I'm about to start the sixth..) and over that time I have accumulated a lot of questions about this dumb-ass yet so addictive show. 

If you are unaware of what Pretty Little Liars is, it's a t.v. show aired on ABC Family. In short, it's about 4 girls who are consistently threatened by this anonymous texter/emailer/weirdo who needs to find a serious hobby named 'A' who threatens to reveal all the lies they keep if they don't comply with whatever the hell he decides to threaten them with each episode. This follows the death of their ringleader Alison and the series follows them as they try to uncover who A is and who killed Alison.

A LOT happens and changes between the first and fifth series and if I were to explain absolutely everything that goes down I think I'd be here till Christmas. 

Of 2020.

"I am 100% sure I did not wear 6inch heels when I was in school?"

- And I'm also pretty sure my school had major rules regarding dress but apparently not in Rosewood. When I was 16 I don't think I could even walk in heels. I rang up my sister one night at like 1am whilst I was at uni and started to ask her why the hell this show is so flashy and dumb. Apparently ABC Family is flashy and dumb.

Also I would have gotten serious bunions by now.

"Do people in Rosewood survive only on coffee?"

- Yes, which probably explains why everybody is so high-wired and f*cking crazy. Since watching this t.v. show I have bought a coffee filter and various packets of different filter coffees and have been absolutely loving life. This leads to another question: "what kind of magic teeth whitener are these girls using?" because I'm pretty sure after all those coffee granules grinding up on ma grill, my teeth should be some dirty shade of brown by now.

"Why does that man have painted-on abs?"

- I can't remember what season this was but there is a scene at some point where Ezra opens his flat door to Aria and he's stood shirtless. A milestone in the viewers relationship with the couple, as it shows that their physical relationship is furthering and because Ezra is this kind of indie bookish type (so corny) I think they expected the viewers to get a bit hot under the school-collar. Except this was some kind of nasty RPatz-Twilight drawn-on-abs kinda thing. Minus the wonky nipple situation.

"Is this network allergic to bra's or something...?"

- because every time a character gets changed I swear the bra disappears but reappears once we see them fully clothed...ft a fully fledged cleavage that can't be achieved minus bra.

And this has nothing to do with women and liberating them or whatever, I just made an observation. A super annoying one that I now can't ignore.

"Why would you live in a town that possesses nothing more than a coffee shop and a mental institution?"

- Ok for real, people in this programme are constantly slipping away to bigger, nearby cities for errands they can't run in their tiny hometown, so how the hell is a mental institution placed there. That's literally on the same level as having a country village consisting of a pub, a corner shop and then just plonking a correctional facility right in the middle of it. It just wouldn't happen.

"Is that that woman from that creepy, old time television show about 3 witch sisters?"

- Oh, yes, it is.

(Charmed, is that old time t.v. programme by the way)

"Is that Rob Lowe's brother?"

- Again, much to everybody's satisfaction, yes it is.

"How am I expected to believe these girls are two years younger than I am?"

- I know when the programme started, the girls were 16. I think American television has this unwritten rule of employing actors to play roles of people approx. 40 years younger than they are. No but seriously, Troian Bellisario is 29 in real life. There is probably more of an age gap between her and myself than there is between her and the woman who is supposed to play her own mother.

"How has that teacher man not been arrested yet?"

- Teacher man being Ezra, of course. Lets not pretend that if this programme was real life, 1) none of this crazy shit would have gone down but more importantly 2) A whole town would not just be miraculously okay with a teacher having a relationship with one of his students. I JUST DON'T GET IT (apart from the fact it is absolute fiction). 

This entire post makes me sound a bit of a dud but I just sit and watch this show consistently with a huge cartoon question mark hanging above my head. Has anyone else had tehse actual thoughts whilst sitting watching the show??

The obsession has me in some kind of hold and I am SO excited to start on season 6 (mostly so i can feed this obsession onto other programmes, OITNB season 3 I'm looking at you)

Kisses

-A

(I mean, xxrachelhelen.....bitches)

ANXIETY CHAT // ♥♥ Dealing with travel anxiety, tips and tricks ♥♥

I was going to leave writing this post till I got back off my holiday or just before I left but I realised that summer is fast approaching, if it has not already arrived for some of you, and this is can be a pretty relevant topic. With summer comes a lot of excitement as people get ready for their travels, school is out and all everybody wants to do is get away and get in some well-earned chill time! However with summery vacations comes a lot of travel, often air travel, which can be a less-than-chill situation for a LOT of people. 

I know this summer I myself am doing a little bit of air travel, I haven't flown in a couple of years and so I'm not sure how my body is going to respond so I'm trying to be as prepared as possible. I'm throwing together a list of tips to help, I hope they help and that you can apply them to whichever awkward, stressy, horrible and anxious travelling sitch you find yourself in!

♥  WRITE LISTS (A LOT OF THEM!) ♥

You can never be too organised!! My close family members and a few work colleagues disagree with me on this as my obsessive need for organisation probably stresses them out more than it even stresses me out! There is no such thing as over preparedness unless over preparedness drives you absolutely crazy. I like to write lists for absolutely everything, making lists on my phone (putting different categories into different lists on my 'notes' app) and then transfer them to paper so I can take them with me and tick things off on the way there and on the way back. I find writing lists out super therapeutic and also takes away from packing stress. To go hand-in-hand with this, make sure you pack with plenty of time to spare. I love packing and gathering all my things together, leaving it till last minute or the day before would be an absolute nightmare situation for me, it would just amplify anxiety levels by about a million. Writing and condensing lists just helps you gather all the spare little things that you could potentially leave behind to then end up spending your whole holiday wishing you read and applied my number one blogpost tip! Write!! Lists!!

♥ LEAVE TIME TO CHILL OUT ♥

So travelling can be a busy and flustering ordeal, especially when you're an adult going it alone without any parentals there to take care of passports/paperwork/finding the way around the airport/money/food/so many things/so so many anxiety inducing things. It would be smart then to leave a great amount of space between various stressful events, such as checking in, duty free and finding your gate. I like to be at check-in before it even opens so I can check-in early and just hang around the airport ad have some quiet(ish) time that isn't spent queuing up at a desk. For example my flight to Greece this summer is at 2:50pm which means I have 2 hours before my flight to catch lunch, do a bit of shopping or just generally spend my time enjoying not being in a confined space with about 150 other people.

 ♥ COMFY CLOTHES ♥

Do NOT ever compromise comfort for style. Don't ever be THAT person. Being sat on a flight for four and a half hours or even longer can be an uncomfortable ordeal enough as it is without £20 of your high-waisted denim shorties riding up your arse. Comfy clothes make you feel way more at home and familiar with your surroundings which makes everything a bit easier to deal with and a lot less threatening or scary. I love to wear my old, stretched out Joni Jeans from Topshop to travel in as they are suuuuuper breathable. I just chuck on a baggy tee pair with my washed out sweat top and voilà, my bod can move and breathe so I can spend the the flight feeling a lot less anxious and NOT pulling a short-wedgie out of my butt. 

.♥ FUN THINGS! HOBBIES! DISTRACTIONS! ♥
I find flight time is opportunistic time where I can get a lot of stuff done! I get to sit and plan blogposts, read a book I've been meaning to get into for a while or catch up on a few episodes of a t.v. show. I think it's a great no-phone, no-distraction time and being submerged in things you enjoy doing or that require a lot of concentration can really distract from what's going on around you. At the minute I'm super obsessed with puzzle books which are great because you get to test your brain/knowledge all the while distracting yourself from a stressy situation! Even playlists and your favourite music may help. Not to plug too much but the playlist '4am Comedown' on spotify is what I'm loving at the moment, it's soothing, perfect for doing work or for just closing your eyes and chilling out to.
The last time I flew, back in Oct of 2013, I experienced a little turbulence which I of course exaggerated and told myself the plane was probably gonna go down (hint: don't do that). I looked around at all the people around me and was so confused as to why they weren't freaking out just as I was on the inside. I think it's important to remember in those little moments that there are literally thousands of flights that take-off and land every single day. Thousands of people get to their destinations safely without even a glitch and air travel is actually the safest way to travel, everything will be absolutely fine!

♥ PRE-PREPAREDNESS ♥
The last thing I want to come home to after a couple weeks away is a messy, grubby home with so much stuff everywhere that I don't know whether to unpack or sort out the mess I left behind first. Unpacking and laundry can be a right bummer as it is without having to arrive home to a whole load more chores to finish off. I like to make sure that before I leave, my entire room is spotless, everything is as organised as it can be and none of my belongings are hanging around the house in places that they shouldn't be. That way when i come home I feel motivated to unpack and to do my chores, like laundry!
I also apply pre-preparedness to the actual flying by reading the safet/emergency booklet found in the back of the chair in front of you. This way I am absolutely 100% prepared for any mishap (to put it lightly) that could possibly happen, which it most likely won't. It really is just for peace of mind and really does work on easing my anxiety!

So that's the end of my little list of top tips for travelling/flying with anxiety! It wasn't too focused on dealing with a fear of flying as much as the anxieties that just come from being confined in a small, compact space for a long period of time. It is pretty common I find so I hope that it helped a few of you (even though some of the tips I found very general and a bit obvious, personally).
Here are a couple disposables (the only decent ones actually) from my last holiday abroad.

Happy flying!
xxrachel

MAD MAX: FURY ROAD - movie thoughts

I've never been a great fan of action films in general and I think that's probably because of my upbringing and that I was brought up by my Mum who's love for film can be understood through the watching of any Lord of the Rings/Hobbit movie. The Lord of the Rings is probably the only set of films (although they aren't primarily "action") I like that contain any kind of action or violence. Come to think of it I don't have one preferred genre at all.

I've never seen the previous Mad Max films, though I'm thinking I probably should now, so I have no idea how this one pans out in relation to the previous three and I can't really write about that as much. I have seen Mad Max twice (ish) and the first time was when my Mums partner decided to sit and watch a ridiculously horrendous, pirated copy a couple of weeks back. I stuck my headphones in and tried to block it out because 1) I wanted to wait to see it in the cinema and 2) I could hear actual film makers half way across the world weeping at the disgusting quality of what I was (trying not to) watch. 

I was first intrigued by my friend Georgia telling me that men were actually getting upset by how deceived they were by the film. This was motivation enough to go and see it because I'm all up for upsetting men who get down over an almost all-female lead cast. Cause, I mean, if there's anything to get really upset over.....

Not that that is what they were getting specifically pissed about but I'll touch on that in a bit.

For those of you who are unaware of the storyline of this specific part of the franchise it is essentially set years into the future. The world has turned to a desert wasteland and this guy called Max (Tom Hardy) is captured by the "War Boys", the army of this weird guy called Immortal Joe who rules over some weird civilisation. Gasoline and water are very rare, Joe has built this civilisation on the fact that he possesses a shit load of water and people choose to stick with him because this slight access to water may give them a chance to survive. Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) heads out with her rig to Gas Town to fetch back some gasoline for the civilisation but heads off the trail, heading East, in search of the Green Place. Turns out she actually nicked off with Joe's 5 wives (who he uses for breeding), basically sex slaves, Joe notices this and heads out wit his army of War Boys and a series of battles ensue as he catches up with Furiosa and tries to take back the 5 women, hence "Fury Road".

So in short, it's about a woman who, with the help of Max and a War boy named Nux (Nicholas Hoult), tries to free a bunch of sex slaves. 

Half way through I had some weird epiphany and finally realised why it is I've never liked action films so much: there has never been such a large inclusion of women into the main cast. 

Something so refreshing about this film is how many women are given lead roles and how included in most of the action they are, it's far easier to relate and is definitely a lot less testosterone fuelled. 

The film touched on so many subjects without having to show them explicitly which was great as I didn't feel like the film makers were throwing subject matter in my face like "HEY LOOK AT THIS LOOK AT THIS TOUCHY AND SENSITIVE CONTENT I'M GONNA MAKE YOU WATCH".

Violence: It's not that I don't like violence it's just that with violence is probably some huge war scene and we've already established I'm not a keen duck on that one. There's a real lack of violence, in a good way, it was extremely tastefully done. The only gory scene lasted for about a second, right at the end of the film, it wasn't even disgusting and I'm pretty sure it was something everyone could see coming. 

The matter of Sex Slaves/Rape: again, another topic that was touched on in a tasteful way. At the beginning of the film (as pictured above) we see the 5 wives cutting off these disgusting, metal belts that highly resembled a load of chastity belts, which is really rather ironic. I think it was pretty obvious to everyone what had been going on there without there having to be some horrid rape scene (y'know, just in case the audience were a bunch of morons and just so we all got the gist). 

Sexualisation of the women: Even with a group of women, barely dressed in gauze, featured throughout the entire film, I spotted not one shot where they were presented in a sexual or dehumanising way. There was even a scene where a woman was stood plainly naked but they even treat that lightly aka not splaying a shot of her bare tits across the cinema screen for everyone to see. 

I think in general the audience weren't treat like idiots.

There were some unanswered aspects such as how and why Furiosa came about having an amputated limb but I think it's pretty obvious that the depth to this character is reflected through how she reacts to situations regarding her disability. The removal of her prosthetic metal arm is often used as a metaphor for showing her at her weakest. Close to the end of the film when all seems lost, we see her remove her metal arm, essentially exposing herself. It really shows Furiosa at her most fragile state and is really a personal moment we don't experience with any other character.

I liked that although the film is entitled "Mad MAX", Furiosa seemed the focal point and sometimes even the main protagonist of the movie. I kept my eyes open throughout for any inequalities between the genders but guess what, that also was treat as it should. Men and women were working together to achieve one goal and they did it without one of them overpowering the other and I felt bloody empowered whilst watching it. 

In general there was just great female representation regarding age, size and ethnicity. There was a slight hint at a love interest between Capable and Nux it appeared purely platonic and didn't overpower the central plot.

There is now FINALLY a film that puts women at the forefront without over-sexualising them or putting some weird love interest at the centre of the story and I'm bloody chuffed with it.

xxrachelhelen

KENDALL + KYLIE X TOPSHOP COLLECTION - thoughts

So I don't think there is a person in the world who doesn't recognise the names of Kendall or Kylie Jenner. Their faces are practically engraved into my memory for all eternity given how often they pop up on my Tumblr dashboard or I read some article discussing their wishes to trademark the "Kendall and Kylie" tagline (there will only ever be one Kylie, soz). 

Topshop is essentially the field commander of the high-street marching band with an aptly fitting title so it was no surprise to me that they collided with K+K to create their new exclusive clothing collection which will surely appeal to groups of impressionable young girls simply only purchasing for the Jenner trademark.

I can't say what I really expected from the pieces as I'm not a super serious, religious follower of the Jenner siblings so I just sort of headed over to the site early this morning to check it out. There are thirteen pieces in total with a variety of garments from palazzo pants to shorts and co-ord blouses. The collection is described as a "simple and vintage-inspired way to do LA style", it really is very simple featuring a basic vintagey looking floral print on most of the pieces alongside flowy materials and distressed denim, perfect for the upcoming summer months and surely inspired by their home state.

It isn't that I dislike the collection or that it doesn't contain some variety (because it certainly does, uh hello, palazzo pants and baseball tees) but it's just nothing that I haven't seen before. The pieces are extremely pretty and I'm super interested myself in the Embroidered Wrap Top (pictured) and the Floral Playsuit. I enjoy how the floral print is applied to multiple pieces so that people have the option to mix'n'match though I kind of would have expected a print that's a little more than something that's been plastered over every high-street store since time began. The items don't look like anything I couldn't find a dupe of somewhere else, essentially. That being said, perhaps I'm just a little cynical, the pieces are very pretty and maybe this basic style is what they were striving for in the hope that it would appeal to a wider demographic. 

The prices range from £28 for their "Golden State of Mind" tee to £80 for their White Duster Coat, so nothing too out of budget for regular, returning Topshop customers. Looking at the site now actually their Best Coast West Coast baseball  tee has been taken down so I'm pretty sure that's a sign that this collection is going to be flying from the site into the hands of hungry KK Jenner followers.

I guess I better stop being a little cynical piece of shit and get my hands on that floral playsuit asap....

Shop the collection on Topshop's site HERE

xxrachelhelen