Stay Free, Don’t Go Cause We Don’t Need No Shows''

Hey Everyone!

If you can read this it means I've survived my first week as a Sixth Year student! I went back on Wednesday morning with my blazer, new school bag and a knot of nerves and anxious feelings in my stomach.

It was slightly strange going back to school for the last time, it felt much more real when I realised that the day was my last ever 'back to school day' in secondary school. We got our timetables sorted and had Assembly which was littered with the words, ''Leaving Cert,'' ''Achieve your potential,'' ''Results day'' and ''Points'' at approximate 30 second intervals. As you can imagine my back to school nerves just increased tenfold during all that. (Not fun but I feel most of the year all needed that little DMC)

I have some different teachers this year but most of them are the same. In all honesty by the end of the first day, it felt as if I never even left the school for 3 months for summer. Slightly sickening however I'm glad with how smoothly I've adjusted to going back to school.

I don't really want to talk too much about school in this blog post. A main reason for this is that a lot more people from my school now know about The Random Life of Aveen. It has made me feel much more conscious about what I type here. At first this was a place where I could write quite freely, however now I think that certain topics are either censored or an absolute 'no-go' zone.

It's a little weird to say but two of my teachers mentioned my blog to me during the week. One of my teachers saw me in the corridor saying that they saw the article of Grace and I in the local paper and congratulated me for it. Another mentioned it in class time and wrote down on the white board what website to vote for me for 'Best Blog Post' in the Blog Awards Ireland was and made everyone in the class write it down in their journal. (My face turned beetroot red in all of this but I genuinely appreciate the gesture)  If you're curious about what the competition is, the link is here.

 I wouldn't go as far as to say I feel restrained in what I can say or discuss here, yet it is playing on my mind that there are many more eyes on my page, reading my words and possibly looking for something meaty or juicy to discuss during lunch on Monday. I won't lie but I got that feeling on Wednesday morning at approximately 10.25 am. Not calling people out however I would just like it known that if you talk about people in a large crowd, there is quite a high chance that said person could be 8 paces ahead with quite good hearing. That is all.

I'm quite grateful it's now the weekend, I was only in school for three days yet I feel completely drained.
I will most likely be even worse as the year progresses. Fun times to look ahead to! (Along with a possible coffee addiction) In Fifth Year I became quite dependant on coffee however I stopped drinking it over summer. I think I'll be back on coffee quite shortly though!

To try ease the pain of starting Sixth Year, I treated myself to a new pair of Converse! They're blue and utterly gorgeous! I'm nearly too scared to wear them as they're immaculate! I have a teeny bit of an obsession with Converse, I wear them in different colours depending on the outfit! I was in my local bookshop and picked up ''Eleanor and Park'' by Rainbow Rowell. I'm currently engrossed in 'A Game Of Thrones' ie the first book of GOT which is excellent so after that I'll read Eleanor and Park probably!

All my family were in my house today (Sunday) for a local event in the graveyard (everyone visits the graves of their loved ones and a Mass is said then everyone goes home) So the majority of my aunts and uncles on my Mam's side of the family came up to visit. Needless to say the house was packed for most of the afternoon! It was great seeing most of my relatives, except that none are my age, they're all either toddlers or adults! I seem to forget that I'll legally be in adult on September 26th this year

My Week In Photos!

My Sixth Year timetable *cries*

That's all from me for this week, back to the books for some study! (Did all the homework on Saturday but still have some study to do, it never ends!) 

Stay Strong, Happy and Fearless!
Aveen xx

Lyrics: Gerard Way ~ No Shows 

I started listening to Gerard Way's new album (the two songs released so far) and they're so different to his music with MCR, yet I still find his new songs quite easy to listen to. What do you think? Were you a hardcore MCR fan before they split?

It's Like I Got This Music In My Mind Singing, "It's Gonna Be Alright."

Hey Everyone!

Hope you're well and enjoying your summer (what's left of it!) I'm starting Sixth Year on Wednesday which has left me feeling both nervous, yet excited about my final year in secondary school.

Upon my imminent return to school, I've been thinking a lot about my life, school and also possible careers to consider after my Leaving Cert. It's quite scary to think that my time in second level education is drawing to a close in this final year, as I can still recall my first day as a First Year as clear as anything.

I know that this blog post is late, I was constantly distracted with various things particularly on Sunday. I've been getting ready for going back to school and just organising my exam papers is a nightmare! I'm bringing my books to my locker tomorrow (Tuesday) so I won't be dragging them in on The First Day.

On Saturday night it was my friend Mary's birthday dinner! We all went to the chinese and had a lovely evening. As you can see below, as a group photograph was taken, a surprise photobomber emerged! I asked his permission if I could put it on my blog so here it is! Thank you Mysterious Photobomber!

Later that night I went to my cousin Claire's 40th birthday party (yes two parties in one night!) Where I chatted with my lovely Aunties and cousins (It was a girls only evening) and may have been force-fed a glass of wine but we won't talk about that. I spent most of the evening talking to my Aunty Pauline and Godmother Rebecca about books and tv shows. In general it was a brilliant night!

On Sunday, my parents, brother and I went to the shopping centre and I did some shopping (for exam papers *cries*) but I bought some things in TK Maxx which you can see below.I also got Converse socks (Have an obsession with Converse okay) and they're really comfortable. I bought a new purse for school which is an Osprey purse. Needless to say I adore it! I also bought a Parisian style box which I'm keeping all my notebooks and letters in so they're not cluttering my study desk like they have been doing all summer..

***You can click HERE to vote for me in the Blog Awards Best Blog Post competition. Just look for ''The Random Life of Aveen'' and vote. I promise it'll take less than a minute!

Hello Photobomber!

Selfie! (Shock horror I'm actually wearing make up for once!)

Photo with Casey and Aisling!

'Not Impressed' by Grace

Aisling claimed I'm photogenic, thank you but the jury is still out on this one

Sweets from Claire's 40th!

That's about it from me! Keep me in your thoughts on Wednesday morning as I embark on my last year in secondary school and the start of 'the rest of my life' *shakes from fear*

Stay Strong, Happy & Fearless!

Aveen xx

*********************************************************************************PS !! Grace of Dainty Sprinkles & I did two more Awkward Sprinkles videos which you'll be able to view on our channels. Links will be here when they're uploaded!

Did I mention that I did the Ice Bucket Challenge this evening? It was cold. Text 'MND' to 50300 to donate 2 euro to such a worthy cause. 

*Lyrics: Taylor Swift ~ Shake It Off

My Room Redecoration !

Hey Everyone!

Sorry for being very quiet here and on other websites as of late. This is mainly due to preparing for going back to school and everything else life throws at me. However the main reason is that I recently got my room redecorated!

From previous blog posts and YouTube videos, you might know that my room used to be what I called, 'A Fandom Room' which was turquoise and covered in huge posters and quotes from every fandom known to man. (Including my favourite, the Phandom)

As I'm approaching my eighteenth birthday and being told how I'll be an adult (voting is probably one of the things I'm most excited for) I decided that my room should reflect how my life is going to be changing in the next year or two, ie Leaving Cert and college.

I really like my new room colour scheme, my room feels very peaceful and quiet. It feels like my place to just relax, except next week when I'm back in school! Here are some photos of my room, if you flick through previous blog post you'll see a dramatic difference in its appearance!

I will also be uploading a YouTube video of my room as well which you can view as soon as it's uploaded!

 

New duvet/pillow/curtains are from Arnotts. 

New canvas pictures! I bought them all in Dunnes Stores

Yes I bought the Dan Howell poster in Shout! I am such a fangirl..

Casual selfie..

New laptop, an Asus.

New mirror!

PS, Myself and Grace were in our local newspaper for being nominated in The Blog Awards Ireland! Click HERE to vote for 'The Random Life of Aveen' Voting closes on 18th September and you can vote once a week, thank you all for your support in this category and in other categories. It's been utterly surreal to have been nominated!

Stay Strong, Happy & Fearless!
Aveen xx

A Letter To My Ten Year Old Self..

Hey Everyone!

As you can tell by the title of this blog post, this is a letter to my ten year old self, basically if I could meet my ten year old self, I would offer myself this advice. So here goes!

Dear Aveen, (Aoibhainne, long story okay)

Well, this is weird. You thought of this idea in work and thought it would be a cool thought. At this moment, it’s nearing the end of summer 2014. Which in all honesty was a pretty good summer for you. The Gaeltacht, a summer job, blogging and just, living. Living and breathing happily with no anxiety or worry building in your stomach is quite a good thing. I think going back to your time it’s a completely different scenario filled with the things I hate now.

Age ten, being told you have your whole life ahead of you (which is true) but feeling stuck in a never ending spiral of hate, tears and questions. The year you got your first mobile phone, the purple one with the pretty design. You were also in Fourth Class, the year you started writing in your diary about what everyone in school was doing to you. I still have that diary in my room despite not writing in it for nearly seven years. It’s painful to read whenever I muster up the courage to, but you’re stronger now for going through it all.

At the moment life is really good. I’m nervous for starting Sixth Year, a time you never thought would ever come. It always felt like you would never escape that gravelly yard with the ‘gold stones’ which you all collected in the pencil sharpener.  Even then you were so determined to do well in the Entrance Exam for secondary school. To get away from all those awful girls was one of your main plans for years. Good news is that you do get away from the majority of them which makes you content for a while. A word of advice, those who you trust most mightn’t share the same trust and respect for you. The people you thought you could trust most, will try drag you down past their low level but all you can do is keep your head held high and ignore all their online taunts and be a bigger better person with the moral high ground.

Please don’t be ashamed of my actions. When the flashbacks start when you’re older, don’t ignore them. Please. Do something about it and go see someone earlier than I should have. When the darkness starts following you in the inescapable maze, fight it and fight it hard. There’s so many more happy times to follow, not just for you age ten but for me, a month off eighteen. Remember that ‘’Happiness can be found, even in the darkest of times, but only if one can remember to turn on the light’’ You read it in The Goblet Of Fire aged seven remember?

You’ll get glasses in another year. It seems so horrible at first, these grotesque awkward things on your face but when you have good vision wearing them you won’t complain for long. Your chubby cheeks will disappear in a few years. They might start calling you ‘’Four eyes’’ and countless other insults but trust me, you’ve something they don’t, imagination, motivation and a hell of a lot of determination. I can say this enough, It Gets Better, I promise. Just hold tight, something that seems impossible when you’re desperately hiding your tear stained cheeks and red eyes from the teachers and those awful girls every day in that horrible playground.

At the moment in 2014 you have a much better life. You feel happy, you remember what a smile is and you know how to produce one on your own face with one dimple on your right cheek. You still have glasses but they’re actually kind of cool. You have a blog that’s been nominated for awards and people actually email you for advice on blogging and all sorts. Slightly weird thing to balance with studying Leaving Cert subjects at Honours level. Yes, even maths! The reason you were so awful at maths in 4^th class is because you couldn’t actually SEE the board, despite your arguments that you could. You actually love school now, you always loved learning but even more so now with teachers that have faith in you and know you are so determined to do well and become a primary school teacher. Yes, STILL you want to be a primary school teacher even though your experience of the place was so horrific.

However, maybe that’s why. To stop any other innocent child from having to cope with so many horrible bullies, self-doubt, self-loathing and general atrocities that you did. I’m not saying the next few years will be easy, they won’t be I can promise that. But, they will help you develop into a more confident girl, still striving for perfection in your school work and with that same hard work ethic and determination that the ten year old girl with tear stained cheeks attempted to strive for.

Keep Strong.

Aveen. (It’s only Aoibhainne in school now, yay!) 

'Born Digital' Swipe Festival

Born Digital

This is a topic which has really gotten me thinking in the past few days. As I sit here typing on my laptop, listening to Arctic Monkeys (accessed on Spotify) with the hum of the radio distantly humming through the house and flicking through my Facebook Newsfeed on my smartphone, I realise how much technology has affected the lives of millions on this planet, in particular in the past decade or so called ‘The Digital Age’.

I can still recall when we got our first ‘House Computer’ in my house for Christmas when I was around eight years old, nearly a decade ago. 

At the time Wi-Fi didn’t exist so we had to use the dial-up connection, which looking back on now was quite horrific and worked at a pain-staking slow rate. However when you’re eight years old playing games on the computer (Pinball had my heart) attempting to become the latest Picasso on Microsoft Paint and worrying about what a ‘search engine’ is, minor things like a slow Internet connection don’t really matter. Did I mention I once thought Google was a virus on our computer?

When we first switched on the computer and it made the distinct Windows XP sound, I ran out of the room fearing for my life, thinking it was a virus. Literally everything I’d ever read and heard about the Internet was that, ‘’you don’t click on the ads, they’re a virus,’’ ‘’don’t go on that website, it’s a virus, ‘’ and so forth.  I believed that practically everything was a virus! I think as the Internet was relatively new (my school had recently gotten a computer room with computers that had Microsoft XP, huge celebrations!) there was a lot of scaremongering about ‘The World Wide Web’ and how every link you click COULD be a virus and destroy your computer.

However my attitude to the Internet soon changed and I began to watch videos on YouTube to pass the time, as I wasn’t allowed on Bebo or Myspace which I thought was the greatest tragedy known to man. I remember a year or so later setting up my own YouTube channel (which no longer exists thankfully) so I could actually ‘favourite’ and comment on videos! I was a huge Rihanna fan back then aged 10, ‘Umbrella’ had been released that summer so I ran to buy her album in CD form not on iTunes, a relatively new phenomenon at that stage. (But that could have been a virus too!)

Another leap into technology and the digital world was when I was given my first mobile phone for my tenth birthday. When I look back, I think it’s an incredibly young age to have a phone, however being the youngest child I can imagine I used a huge amount of ‘pester power’ to get the phone and other electrical items during the years such as the PlayStation 2 (in pink of course) a Nintendo Wii and other electrical items throughout my childhood.

I can still recall when, at thirteen and a half, I set up a Facebook account. The ‘thirteen-and-a-half’ was a big deal for me, as I was a whopping six months over the age you had to be when joining the website, unlike many of my peers.  As I’m writing this, I’m scrolling through my Timeline from 2010/11/12 and can honestly admit it’s possibly the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever seen.  Despite thinking I was ‘cool’ for being on Facebook, most of the status’ I posted were littered with poor grammar, ‘’txt talk,’’ and lots more embarrassing and unspeakable things. ‘’Like for a rate out of ten’’ is something that features highly, along with ‘’Like for a H’O’’ An Honest Opinion, which is making me shudder just from thinking of it.

In a whirlwind of the past four/five years, I’ve joined various websites in this ‘Digital Era’ starting with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, YouTube (again!) and my two latest favourites, Tumblr and BlogSpot. My biggest leap into the Digital world so far has definitely been by setting up my blog ‘The Random Life of Aveen’ in March 2013 following a school trip to London.

August 2014 and my blog has nearly 30,000 page views along with nominations in ‘The Blog Awards Ireland’. For a person who once thought that the search engine Google was a virus and could rob my parent’s credit cards and details (even without buying anything on the Internet, but viruses were clever and could do anything you know) I think that this is definitely a big achievement in the time of all things digital.

I don’t really think I personally was ‘Born Digital’ I genuinely think that I’m a 90’s kid as I was born in 1996. It was only in my ‘later’ years that technology began to affect me and my everyday life, unlike people who are just two years or so younger than me. I slowly but surely began to embrace the Digital Age as any young, enthusiastic child would and now I’m an absolute Internet and technology addict.

 However it’s when I see my cousins who are all younger than eight years old, I genuinely believe that they are ‘Born Digital.’ When your four year old cousin can use an iPad to take selfies, play games and browse the Internet but can’t read or write as they haven’t started primary school, I believe that that is being Born Digital. At age four I had a baby Annabell, which only said one sound and occasionally made slurping noises when you fed it.

I may have been born a few years too early to be ‘Born Digital’ however I still believe I’ve experienced a huge technological advance in my lifetime and a definite relaxation on the Internet, viruses aren’t a life or death situation as advertised when I was young, they’re just extremely irritating! I’ve a cousin aged eight who uploads to YouTube about Minecraft, at that age I was playing Pinball on the house computer, not on a fancy iPad or using an iPhone.  (The iPhone was released three years later when I was eleven or so) But as I sit here tapping away, sending Snapchat’s, I realise how different my life as an eight year old nearly ten years ago in 2004 is to the typical eight year old, ‘Born Digital’ in 2014. 

Hope you enjoyed this blog post, 

Stay Strong, Happy & Fearless!
Aveen xx

''I'm With You Every Step Of The Way.. Tomorrow's A New Day. It All Works Out..'''

Hey Everyone!

So I've had a really busy and fun August Bank Holiday so far. It's been a brilliant start to my last month before starting Sixth Year *gulps nervously* I've spent the past couple of days down the town with some friends drinking milkshakes, slushies and feeling both exhilarated and terrified on amusements!

Photo with Grace!

In my town for the August Bank Holiday we always have The Market House Festival which basically means we have the amusements, concerts and lots more fun things for everyone of all ages to attend. On Friday night, myself, Grace and some of our friends went to the amusements and later in the evening, the Fashion Show 'Boutique Boulevard' which was hosted by Brendan Courtney (Who I took a sneaky photo of!) The fashion was lovely and we had a brilliant time. Photo below is of one of the models if you're wondering!

Afterwards we went to the concerts,which is basically the main event and involves lots of loud music which you can literally hear in your heart as it's so loud. The concerts on Friday night were the bands, White Chalk, Corner Boy and one of my favourites, The Riptide Movement! *fangirls* We watched all three of the fabulous acts and in reality they were all fantastic live! Here's a link from a local radio station of part of 'It All Works Out' and you can see how everyone is bopping around having an amazing time!

Selfie with Leah!

With Viv & Leah

Slushie!

Staring..

Casually having a blue tongue after drinking a slushy

Trying to overcome human head giraffes!

I arrived home later than I intended and as I live near town, could still hear The Riptide Movement performing! It's quite an experience to go asleep and listening to the band! I didn't go to anything on Saturday as the weather was simply atrocious so I stayed at home and watched 'Dirty Dancing' I absolutely adored the film, it's such a lovely classic at this stage.

Today (Sunday) I went down the town again to the amusements with Grace, Vivien and a few others. Viv & I went on the waltzers, however we were the only ones on it (because we're cool) so they kept us on it for longer. At the end I started feeling queasy and could feel stomach acid bubbling up my throat! Lovely. (Don't worry I was fine afterwards)

I also looked at the sheep and goats which were on the Main St (Honestly there was vintage tractors and farm animals) and as I simply love sheep and goats, took some photos. So say hi to my best friends down below! They might 'baa' in response ;)

So that's about it from me, I hope you're all having an amazing bank holiday weekend wherever you all are!

Stay Strong, Happy & Fearless!

Aveen xx