As I've mentioned in my last 2 posts, Anemice and I flew to Canberra for a long weekend to visit Holly and Cara. Here is a few photos from everyday of what we did. I'd never really been to Canberra before (only stoping for one night when I drove to Hobart) so it was really nice to get to see the city, along with spending time with the girls! We visited some super cool buildings, did some shopping and went to a lot of nice restaurants!

Be prepared for quite a lot of photos, so maybe grab yourself a cup of tea before perusing :-)

My Let's Get Real for this week is what I take on a plane. As this gets uploaded I am on a weekend away to Canberra to visit my gorgeous gals, Holly and Cara. I decided just over a week ago that it had been far too long since I'd seen either of them and it was definitely time for me to fly down to Canberra and visit them as well as checking out the city! So be prepared for a post next week sometime of my time down there. Also, the night before I left, Anemice decided she would come down and join me!!! So collab posts are coming too :-)

I've done something similar to this before, where I've posted what I take in my carry on but I thought I'd do something a little different. Because I'm only going for 3 nights, I decided to take everything in carry on - I also hate having to wait for my luggage when I get off my flight... Here's everything I took on my weekend away!!

I hope you all have a splendid weekend!!

I'm the first one to admit that (up until a few months ago) I completely sucked at staying organised and being on top of things. Six months ago I was probably the last person to talk to when wanting organisational tips, but recently I've found a few things to organise a few of aspects of my life. Let's get straight into it :-)

Do it now; If possible, the easiest way to stay organised is to just do it at that very moment. Admit it, if you just do it when you think about something it's a lot more simple and you get a lot more done.
Write a list; maybe you're on the bus, walking home or just out somewhere where you can't do it at that moment. For me, the Notes app on my iPhone is a saviour!! I have lists upon lists of shit to get done and I try and do my best to do it as soon as I get home. If I am at home and am doing something else (like deciding that Netflix is more important than studying) I have a notebook in my bedside table that I write down my lists on.

Colour coordinate; all of my education things (notebook, folder, etc.) are pink, my history things are blue, communication is white and creative writing is black. That way, of a morning I know that if I have history at university that day I grab anything blue and go. It saves me time, and trust me that 2 minutes to get the right books is a lot of time when I always wake up late!!

Note cards; these come in handy for so many different things. Up until Grade 10 I was learning French and Italian at school and I would use one side for the French/Italian word and the other side for the English word. If I ever have way too much to do I will write one task on each card and stack them up in a prioritised scheme. This is where it will become how obvious of a nerd/dork I am (if this post hasn't done that enough already!), I have a cork board and sometimes I will arrange the cards (still in order of priority), annotate them, if it's for assignments I will also attach criteria, etc. Again, they are colour coordinated for each subject (yup, I had to order on eBay black note cards that I use a white pen on just because I had to have the colours match)...

Reward yourself; after I finish a section of reading, or a paragraph in an assignment I allow myself to have a couple of lollies or 10 minutes on my phone - sad, I know, but it works!

As mentioned last week, I knew I wasn't going to be wanting to document my week. It was a complete rollercoaster of emotions, mainly shitty ones! It's nothing I will ever document, in fact, and only my two best friends (and one other person) know what's happened/happening. It's hard to think about and I've spent my entire week trying to teach myself that things will get better and, although it may take a little while, everything will get better - it's just going to take some time. So, instead I'm going to talk to you about my Saturday (12th March) night.

Around November time (2015), I made a decision that I was going to stop going to parties/nightclubs/gatherings and/or drinking excessively. I found myself coming to the end of a very serious relationship, which during had caused me to look to alcohol as some kind of an escape and resolution... Looking back now, I should have realised that it wasn't. Drinking is a quick fix. A stupid fix, and something that I regret taking over so much of my life. I've never told anyone this [but I trust and love you guys - so, you'll keep my secret right?!] but there were points last year where I would drink so much that I would blackout. There are days of last year that I simply don't remember and that's a shitty thing to think about. When things got too serious or too complicated, I turned to my trusty bottle of Grey Goose Vodka hoping I could find my answers somewhere at the bottom of the bottle. I used to drink alone. That's even more sad. I would get really upset and feel like there was no one I could talk to, no one I could trust and no one that would listen - but hey, my vodka bottle would. And it did. Many nights...

What does this have to do with Saturday night?! Well, I went out in the first time in a few months and quickly realised that making the decision to go out to nightclubs and surround myself with my previous bad habits wasn't a good idea. I left home at around 6pm, meaning I was in Brisbane at 7pm. I had dinner with my (it's super complicated) friend, before we headed off for drinks for work (blogger stuff). It was a farewell to an awesome member of my team and I'm going to miss him dearly... Moving on. So we were in this nightclub called Prohibition - clever, nice pun. The entire night I couldn't stop thinking about what would happen if I just had one drink, just one small drink. Addict. Alcohol makes me lose all of my inhibitions, and that's never a good thing! There's no real story to this post, just that going out and not drinking makes me feel old. Like, it makes me realise that I'd much rather be asleep by 10pm, wake up at 6am and start my day fresh - not feeling hungover and wasting the entire day...

Since I was staying sober all night and Meg was at another club, I drove us home. Which means that we laughed the entire way home and had a good, little catch up :-) It's currently 1.45am very early, Sunday morning while I'm writing this and I've really only just got home... The quote I've recently seen on Pinterest "oh darling, let's be homebodies", is extremely applicable to my life.

When I was younger I couldn't wait to move out of home, turn 18 and be an adult. I thought that as soon as I moved out of home or turned 18 everything would be different and a switch would flick inside of me and I would just automatically be an adult, I thought I'd just become this person with a lot knowledge, insight, patience... I'm not. That doesn't happen. I thought that once I grew up I would get all the freedom in the world - no more nagging my parents to drive me somewhere or having to constantly ask permission to see my friends - and that's somewhat right, but now I just don't have the time to do a lot of things. I have a full time job (luckily that's blogging and I can do it pretty much anywhere in the world I want, I'm also a full time university student and have many other commitments). So, to me right now, freedom means living in my own home, paying my own bills, having a full time job and studying. I also can't just rely on my parents buying me things now. I took everything for granted! Did you know that there isn't some magic fairy that fills your fridge with food every week? You have to actually leave your house, go to a grocery store, put food into a shopping cart and then buy it? Why were we all in such a hurry to grow up? Being an adult is nothing like we're told it is. If I could go back and be a kid again, I totally would - I'd love to have no responsibilities and have my meals and laundry all taken care of! Being an adult sucks. It sucks to have bills. It sucks to actually have to think about where you're spending your money. It sucks to worry about your job. It sucks to have to pay taxes. It sucks to worry about your future. I'd love to be a kid, having carefree fun and little responsibility, having mum and dad take care of you and spoil you and being able to sleep for as long as I want. Another thing, as a kid you would eat whatever you want and because children have crazy metabolisms you wouldn't gain weight. You didn't have cellulite or worry about not being skinny. Time! How I wish I had more time. As a kid, all you have ahead of you is time; everything is still to come and your story is largely unwritten, your choices are still to be made. I'm only just in this thing we call adulthood and already there are a few aspects I'd like to rewrite. Goodbye's suck the older you get - because the older you get, the older the people around you get and you have to say your goodbye's to grandparents. One word: dishes. They suck too! Dinner doesn't cook itself and you've finally had to face the facts that unicorns and fairies were all just apart of your imagination.

Life's a journey. Enjoy the ride and if you can, stop and enjoy the sites along the way. I'm no where near ready to be an adult and I've recently been thrown some pretty giant curve balls that have forced me to slowly, but surely, grow up that little bit more.

It was International Women's Day on Tuesday (March 8th) and I'm all for equality!! This is going to be a little less serious of a feminist/equality type of post, but hopefully there's still some kind of message to take out of this! Weirdly enough - probably because of the time I've grown up in - whenever I think of equality and human rights, I think of Beyonce. Isn't she great? Queen B (Beyonce) uses the term hustler as well as diva to refer to women as Queen's and bosses. I just finished reading #GirlBoss by Sophia Amoruso - read it - she's also great! Speaking of Sophia Amoruso, she relates the term Girl Boss "to a female who strives for living a deliberate life." (I know this isn't an academic piece, but the nerdy side of me wants to correctly reference this, so if I reference something - just excuse it!) I spoke a week or so ago about the double standard between men and women when it comes to virginity, here is another double standard between the genders. If a man is driven to success, he can be direct,  use a cut throat mentality and be completely career orientated - no one bats an eyelid - and he is admired, he is a boss! Compare this to a female. If a woman is driven to success, strives to be her best she is too ambitious, bitchy (for being direct) and should be more worried about her family. As a girl, I've been told by society that it is important for me to procreate, that I need to get married and have children while also maintaining a career - not a high position in a career, because God forbid a woman is actually good at her job and gets praise for it - but a career nonetheless. What if we don't want to procreate? What if we want to strive to get as high up that job ladder as we can? Does that really matter? Don't we have the final say for our lives? Why the fuck does society play such a huge part in what we do? Speaking of which, why is it so frowned upon that women swear? Who the fuck made that rule? Why can't a woman be proud of her sexuality? Why does that make her a slut (side note: slut is my least favourite word ever)? Why does the genitals between her legs make an impact on her ambitions and careers goals/objectives? Fuck all of these stupid societal rules. I am proud to say that I'm a girl boss. I know what I want (for the most part) and I strive every single day to get it. I want my blog to be as successful as I can make it and I become more and more proud everyday of the direction it is going! I am striving toward my career goal, a secondary teacher. Once my Undergraduate, Honours Bachelor degree I'm striving toward doing my Masters of Education - and maybe even a PhD one day! I'm not letting anyone or anything get in my way and at this very moment, I'm choosing to stop caring about whether or not I get anyone else's approval. Similarly, I don't think anyone has the right to tell me what to do to or with my body. It's my body! Fuck people. We live in a society that is okay passing judgement and hatred on people who actually know what they want with their lives/bodies. The other day Kim Kardashian West posted a naked photo on Instagram and you know what, as much as everyone hates it, I'm totally okay with it! Yeah, she's a mother, she's known for her sex tape or countless other nude photos; but, who the fuck are we to judge? When I saw the photo, I honestly felt completely okay with it. It's her choice. Just like it's someone's choice to embrace their sexuality, raise their children a particular way, not have children, terminate a pregnancy, etc. It's not selfish, it's a choice and it's their choice not your own. If it's not your life, you have no place to pass judgment because we all know that you wouldn't want someone to judge you for your choices! People that I personally know are constantly questioning what I actual do on my blog. Why I don't have a real job, etc. You know what, this is a real job, I do a shit tonne of work each and every day to make sure this blog (and the people behind it) run as smoothly as possible. Don't get me wrong, I love when people have questions or queries and just want to know things about blogging - I get it, it's a fairly new concept and not something many people get - but, if you start criticising what I do I don't need you in my life. I'm a girl, a woman. I have a passion, I'm driven. I constantly want to strive to be better, know more, grow more, learn more. Sometimes I like my body, sometimes I don't and that's fine. I'm not usually one to publicly 'celebrate' International Women's Day but this year was different, I have some shit going on in my life that I need to reflect on. Some things in my life I'm thankful for, some I regret and some I'm still just trying to figure out. This International Women's Day, I embraced who I am, what I'm doing, where I want to go and who I want to be in the future. It's not all positives; I focused on the flaws, the negatives and the things I am striving to change. Slay girls! Slay!! Love yourself and love those around you! (FYI: this isn't intended to be man shaming at all!! Just building women up!)
I want to leave you with a few quotes to ponder...