Personal Statement

This will be a somewhat  egocentric post.  When you are looking for a job, no matter how you are to mums, dads and close friends, in an interview you have to sell yourself 100% and no what you want.  Not knowing what I wanted 100% and not being confident is where I went wrong yesterday.  Since you are the general public and I haven’t met you (except for when my sweetie, beloved Mr A comments from time to time!) you are the perfect people for me to practise selling myself to.

So, what do I want out of life?

• I want a family with Mr. A and bring them up well and be a fun mummy.  And do art and start a little internet business and learn languages and pass on my knowledge to whoever REALLY would appreciate it (aka not school kids!).

• In the short term I would like a job in a business…I don’t know which business.  I could be good at whatever I put my mind to.  I would like to earn money to do a CELTA (Certificate of English Language Teaching to Adults) and maybe find a position in a language school.  I also think about getting a job in the EU.  As you can see, my ambitions are diverse.

When I was younger I wanted to be everything under the sun.  I wanted to be a pop star, ballerina, surveyor, graphic designer, architect, journalist, teacher, TV presenter, Radio presenter, something in TV production, film-maker…the list goes on.

So realistically, the business/CELTA route is a little more achievable.  Although yesterday when I said I wanted to be placed in a business environment, I couldn’t define this.  I’m more than a little vague.  I’d be happy wherever and do a great job wherever, delivered with passion and enthusiasm.

Who am I and what am I good at?

I spent my life trying to be good at something.  Although, as with my career ambitions, my skills are diverse and not very well pinned down.  You see, I get excited about many things but never focus enough on one thing to become an expert.

• I love languages.  I did French and Spanish at university.  I did two years of Portuguese, which I loved.  Now, I feel I’ve done all I want to do with French and Spanish in terms of studying and now I want to enjoy them as a leisure.  Studying makes you hate the thing you study.  I want to learn Arabic and Romanian.

• I love art.  I’ve dabbled at painting, card-making and making earrings.  I would really love to get into silver-smithing one day.  I really feel I could be good at this and start a little business one day if and when I am a mummy and need something to keep me entertained whilst looking after the kiddy.  For now, I think I will try and sell at my car boot sale which I plan to do this summer as a way of getting rid of my clothes and books that I no longer like/need.

• I discovered recently that I love to bake cakes…and actually my biggest critics (family!) are very positive.

How does any of this apply to a job?  Well, I obviously have a nurturing instinct which could be harnassed in a customer services role.  I have experience in customer service and I do love to look after people and try and answer their queries as best I can.  In my job, I became aware of this and how, when something doesn’t go right for the customer, this directly impacts the morale of the staff and the reputation of the company.  Simple things can be done to aid a smoother operation…but these things are not put in place.  Why?  Because the management are either blind / stupid or puppets of their bosses.  So, given my passion and enthusiasm to make life easier for everyone, I believe I would be well-placed in a customer service role or a management role…I am a people person and a creative…I also need to be challenged.

I also love the idea of wearing a suit.  Since being a child and seeing my then young mother dressed up for her office job in a smart suit placed a firm image in my mind of what a job should be like…very superficial, I know.  But to me, that represented being a woman, confident, adult, capable.  That was the difference between being a child and being all grown up.  As I grew up, the line got blurred.  University provided 4 extra years of school and even though we gained experience, got our education and saw the world, we didn’t become any more responsible.  The result?  Coming out of it older, more qualified and yet no more wiser.  And now we can’t get jobs.  I’m no closer to wearing the suit and still desperately trying to find myself in a world full of demands.  It comes down to presentation.  Creating a succint, condensed illusion of all the complicated tangle we really are.  They demand that we should be this and that and have this and that, but that shows they want, want, want without the willingness and the wherewithall to train us.  No.  They want the finished product NOW.

Sorry for the confused structure of this post.  I feel I’ve raised some valid points.

In conclusion, I am a rounded person with lots to offer someone who is willing to take a chance on me.

Unemployed

Okay so things didn’t go so well at Litchfield.  It was basically an interview for a position on a programme, but the programme only had eight places in my chosen destination and there must have been about 30 or more people competing.  The interview was in Spanish and I felt so nervous and unsure even though I knew what I wanted to say before but…somehow, I didn’t win the interviewer over.  Besides, even though I’ve studied Spanish at university, I still feel very weak speaking it.

So I have to look for alternatives.  I really want to get to Spain because I want to improve my Spanish but also I want to see my man.  I really want a job that will help me build my confidence in a Spanish speaking environment.

Being a graduand, I feel the need to boost my CV.  How do you get a job without experience? Employers are so damn fussy…no room for a blank canvass like me.

All is not lost…

Like everyone, for me things are uncertain.  No-one knows what the future holds.  All I can say is that I believe in God, the One True God and I put my faith in him that when all looks messy here, there is a method to the madness.

I have got my degree in Modern Languages, I passed and I can move on.  I feel like a weight has been lifted and I want to start looking at my life.  I have so much to give.  I want to learn new languages and do art.  Now that university is over I can look forward to all of this.

I’m still looking for a job, just a job to help me out of my financial problems.  I’ve applied for Jobseeker’s Allowance whilst I’m looking, because I am entitled to it, and I am looking for a job.  I am not sponging off the state as I’m a real case, and I hope to be earning soon.

Tomorrow I shall take a trip to somewhere called Litchfield.  I’ll let you know what happens.

Sorry

Was pointed out by Flighty that when I leave comments, people can’t come back to my blog.  So for those who wanted to say hello, sorry, and for those who came to say hello in spite of this problem, well done for making the effort!

It’s all sorted now.

Will update later. xx

Meet Mr. A.

Looking at Olivia’s blog and her photies with her man made me want to introduce you all to Mr. A. Mr. A and Ms. Crazy.

Feed a Child with a Click

Anyone on Facebook, look for this group:

It gives lists of sites where you can click and companies donate things like food.

I personally am having so much fun on this link:

www.freerice.com

Here, you take a quiz and for every answer correct, they donate 10 grains of rice through the UN World Food Programme.

I’m learning lots of impressive vocabulary.  I’m also quite impressed to learn just how good I am at guessing the words I don’t know.

Enjoy it!

shocked and disgusted….post script

I realise I know nothing of anorexia, and I don’t want to fully understand it.  I am ignorant.  But I want to say…I published my reaction and I feel justified in doing so as I am entitled to my reaction.  It is a very strange issue and I feel for anyone  who has lost people to this awful condition or who knows people suffering from it.

And on that note…

The Lovely Kirstie Allsopp.  She’s a beacon for us ladies who think that curves are fab and should be celebrated.

Don’t ever change!

Shocked and disturbed…

It’s been a little while as I’ve had to do a course work which hasn’t gone so well, very nearly handed in let, got a bollocking by lecturer…oh it’s all so hard on the self-esteem.  I wish I could motivate myself.  I attribute my malaise to two primary reasons, number one, I just don’t enjoy studying, it’s not for me and it’s nearly the end.  Secondly, I miss A and feel lonely a lot of the time.  So there you are.

I saw the second half of a programme that just shocked me, yesterday.  It was about websites that “support” anorexics, although in reality they encourage it even more, as the girls can put pictures of themselves up.  Didn’t say anything about men, but maybe that’s not such a public issue at the moment (men don’t like to talk about their lives so much, I’ve noticed!)…anyway, these sites allow you to post pictures of your skinny self and they are considered beautiful, the thinner the better.  Now, I’ve always wanted to be thin, and we all feel that we want to lose that little extra bit of weight, but seeing these pictures took the word thin to a whole new level.   I thought I’d seen skinny, that I new what skinny looked like.  How wrong I was.  I saw pictures that shocked me to the core, girls who where no more than skeletons, literally, with a layer of skin and that was it, a girl who looked like the muscle on her arm was being eaten into, disgusting!  There was a picture of someone who looked like they belonged in a Salvador Dali painting and not in a photograph.  And to think that other girls find beauty in this!  And they aspire to it, not feeling content with their own skeletal parts?  This is definitely a mental illness as it is impossible to be in your right mind and find that beautiful.  I know that we look at celebs, and one in particular strikes me.  It’s Nicole Kidman in the Chanel advert, and I notice that her vertebrae sticks out a little too much which ruins the advert.  So, okay, girls find this pretty…it’s still just about acceptable although not to popular taste.  But seriously, I’m disturbed.   Is it really that they see themselves as fat as in it is really Mr. Blobby staring back at them, or is it that they see what we all see, ie a skeleton, but they consider a skeleton to be fat?  Are we talking fact or opinion?

I started to worry.  This year I’ve not eaten perhaps as well as I should have been.  I’ve been skint, or I’ve wanted to reduce food in the daytime so I could really enjoy an evening meal without feeling guilty and I am fairly happy with the way I look now. But seeing that programme…I just want to stuff a big pizza down, a really rich Dominos one in rebellion of this thin culture.  Seriously, curvy is gorgeous, a healthy face is gorgeous, sparkly eyes are gorgeous, luminous skin is gorgeous, hair is gorgeous, muscle tone is gorgeous, a smile is gorgeous.  I wish we could all be content to know that there is not just one definition of gorgeous in this world, and it really isn’t the one the TV promotes.  I think men don’t necessarily subscribe to the idea that skinny is gorgeous.  Mine actually seems to quite like my curvier shape of last year (though I didn’t have a waist, all I wanted was a waist, as waists can disguise a multitude of sins!), though he will never say he prefers me one way or another.

I remember when I was little, celebrities seemed bigger than today.  I would say they looked more size 10-12 than 4.  Even David Grant remarked on Living TV’s Extreme Skinny Celebs that a sample costume for a modelling shoot would be an 8.  Now it’s a 4.    When I was at school there was a girl who was very what I would have called skinny.  She was tall and lean and her hips stuck out a bit.  That was her natural physique and all her sisters were the same.  She commented that she couldn’t find jeans to fit her in shops.  I doubt she’d have a problem today.  I asked my mum what was the ideal figure for women when she was younger.  She said a dress size 10-12.  Funny, because I’m sure people aspire to be slimmer than that today.  It’s a sad state of affairs.

Sometimes we  are up and sometimes we are down. Our sizes change throughout the month and throughout our lives because we are alive and not static.  We are not a painting, we change.  We have children and lots of things change there.  In search of new levels of thinness, do these girls not realise that they are losing their lives?  How they are physically alive is a wonder to me, but they must surely feel spiritually dead, putting aside a life for a relationship with an eating disorder…losing the opportunity to have children in some cases, losing hair and a lot of other things. I’m sure.  I’m sorry if I seem judgemental.  I don’t understand, and I don’t ever want to be able to understand 100% because these extremes scare me so much.  I wish we could make it all better.  I certainly never want to have to have a child go through that horror and be so ignorant to the horror to which they subject themselves.

I had a friend who had this problem and I knew her before she developed it (although it must have been the beginning stages).  It went like this.  We were in France.  We would go out for breakfast for a pastry or a croissant.  We would try a taste of each others as we usually chose different things.  Then she would try a bit of her own and then give me a huge chunk of hers saying “Take it, I’ve eaten loads already.”  She’d barely touched her own.  Throughout the day we’d not eat as that was our routine, so naturally come the evening, I’d want to pig out on a kebab.  She’d just not eat that much of her meal, maybe a few chips and then share with someone else.  I’ve no idea how it went after that, as we went our separate ways, although she’s been having treatment for it.  I asked her at one point if she was developing an eating disorder, but she said no.  I believe that she didn’t think she had one, but she was showing early signs.  She never believed us when we complimented her.  Very sad.

So girlies and boyees, whoever pops by, I’d sooner be huge and have a huge heart.  Your heart is more important than your frame and life is more important than being thin.  And you’re beautiful xx

I’m sneaky…

I went behind my fella’s back last night and created this:-

Tangawi

I think he takes great photos and one day we’ll get him a really great camera.

Enjoy!

Crazy