The Many Colours of Happiness

Hello all! I hope you all had a wonderful Easter break, filled with family, good food and Easter egg hunts. I have refrained from posting this last week, mainly because my posts would have gone something like this: Grrrmumblegrrkjvdfkvnd %&*$ fghfdsd &^%$ WHY WORLD, WHY?! No, nothing terrible happened. At the worst, it was a mildly irritating week. But I did decide, for whatever reason, to throw myself the largest one-woman pity party the world has ever seen. Family, chocolate, friends, chocolate, chocolate... nope none of that was going to cheer me up. I was determined to wallow in my own self-pity, everyone else be damned. I try not to do this, I really do. But every year, for a week or two, I fail. I crawl into bed and refuse to get out. I bitch, moan, complain and throw myself around the house like a wounded animal. But this time was a doozy. Saturday two weeks ago I got the flu. Oh and what a flu it was. Raging fevers, runny nose, sore throat, you name it I h...

Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier 'til this terrible disease came. I can't fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that – everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer. I don't think two pe...

They sit in the car side by side, neither one of them speaking. They’re not really sure what to say anymore. They know that they want to say something, anything, to fill the silence. Because the silence is saying all of the things that they don’t want to hear. She looks across at him. Looks across at the man she loves. The one she knows better than anybody else. The one who knows her, both the good and the bad. The one who loves her for her imperfections. She wants to reach across and take his hand. Tell him that she loves him. Make it all okay again. But pride and stubbornness hold her back. Anger too. Yes, there is plenty of that. So she looks down at her lap instead. And another brick is added to the wall that is being built between them. She looks down into her lap and sees the two of them together in fifty years. The car has changed and so have the people within it. But the silence is still there. It is not full of resentment anymore. Just resignation. They gave up on t...

At the end of every semester, when all of a sudden everythingisdueatonceandeventhoughyouknewitwascomingyoudidn'tbothertostartuntiltheverylastsecond, I. get. sick. Without fail. There is only one logical conclusion I can draw from this. I am allergic to homework. Now I'm off to go and inform my teachers. You guys will back me up, right? RIGHT?! ps. (this whole ps. thing is becoming a habit, sorry!). Thank you for your book recommendations. It was cool to see a couple of titles pop up numerous times: Water for Elephants, The Alchemist, The Hunger Games and the Bell Jar. I will definitely have to suggest these at the meeting, along with the other recommendations as well :)

I am feeling quite proud of myself: I have officially started a Book Club. Ok, so I started it a while ago, but when you forget to schedule meetings and decide on a book to read...let's just say it doesn't really work out all that well. But somehow, I have managed to pull it all together this time around. We have a meeting time, a meeting place, most members have bought the book AND (here's the important part) most have READ the book already. Does anyone have any great books that they can recommend? I have a hunch that this Wednesday will be the only successful meeting we manage to have, what with most of us being completely scatter-brained. But hey, at least I can say I started a book club, albeit a short-lived one. So time to get out my pen and cross that off my bucket list! ps. If any of you are from Canberra and want to join in on the fun, we are meeting at King O's at 7:30pm in the reading room. The book is called 'Of a Boy', it's in the Penguin Classi...

Sometimes I am a teensy bit girly. I have a fondness for colourful dresses that knows no bounds. So of course, when I stumbled across Pushing Daisies, I was smitten. Aren't you?

I had been feeling very Zen like lately. Which is strange for me. Very, very strange. It’s not that I am highly-strung or anything. But I am jittery. Fidgety. I cannot stand sitting still. I bounce from one emotion to the next. I worry about all of the things I have to do that I did not make time for. But somehow over the last few months something shifted. I began to feel more...peaceful. Instead of bouncing from over the moon ecstatic to painfully ordinary feeling in a heartbeat, I am stable. I am happy. It doesn’t take one silly little thing to throw me into the depths of despair anymore. Or at least I was feeling that way. Feeling particularly Zen like at the coast, I was congratulating myself on the great work/school/life balance I have going on at the moment. And I thought ‘hey, this is the perfect time to start working on other aspects of my life.’ So I decided to focus on getting enough sleep, getting regular exercise and eating healthily. How could that do anything ...

Well I have officially finished the 29 Day Giving Challenge (actually I finished it a week ago but am incredibly lazy when it comes to writing posts). I don’t think I have done anything recently that has had such a positive effect on my life. Soon, I didn’t need to remind myself to give every day. It just came naturally. I felt more connected with the world around me. I felt more willing to care. I didn't always give money or things. Sometimes it was smile, a compliment, a kind gesture. Strangely enough, they seemed to make an even bigger impact. Who knew that we were so powerful? That by simply caring , we could make someone’s life a little bit brighter? That was what really stuck with me. I have always talked about wanting to make a difference to someone’s life one day. I just never realised that I already could. That I already was. A week after the giving challenge has officially finished, I am still giving every day. They may not be huge, earth-moving things; but they ...

I love our annual beach trip. When my friends and I all pack our bags during the last warm week of the season; to soak up enough of it to last us for the next six months. I love hearing the sound of the waves as we pull up to the coast house that is so familiar now. I love drinking cider and talking about nothing and everything around a campfire. I love lazy days, filled with sun, sand, scrabble, and all the episodes of Skins. I love feeling sick from eating junk food for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I love playing in the surf half an hour after I open my eyes in the morning. I love trying to body-surf with friends, though none of us can really swim. I love the in-jokes, the laughter and the late night conversation. I love heading back to Canberra on a Sunday evening; sun kissed, exhausted and happy.