Fig+Sparrow

Right, so Manchester is already one of the coolest cities I have ever been to, and I’ve been here for less than 2 hours.
I know I have said before that this is not a travel blog and I will not be one of those people that posts about how amazing there coffee is, or how brushing their teeth next to someone passed out drunk from the night before is one of “the most exciting experiences of their life!” (Something I have actually overheard a human being say.)
But I think this post is the exception.

Due to my workplace being closed for two weeks, I have spent that time city hoping. I started off in London and got to visit two very close friends, one of which I hadn’t seen in almost two years, and the other I used to work with. Both girls reminded me how lucky I have been over the past few years to meet such incredible people both at home and away. London however, was very much so just London. I felt like I needed a shower as soon as I left, and the gaping hole made in my bank account from only one night reminded me of how I was not created to live in cities (if you can call London a city and not just a whole separate world completely.)
That was closely followed by a visit to Liverpool, a city I have been to before and loved. Not much is to be said for Liverpool other than, go there, and figure out for yourself whether you like it or not. I think it’s a city you need to experience for yourself, but also with friends. Do not go alone, I repeat, do not go alone.
Or do go alone, and find out exactly why I’m saying don’t go alone, and let me tell you, you will find out.

Now, the past 3 nights of my little mini trip have been spent in York, which was basically a fairy tale for me. I have been wanting to go to York since I landed in the UK, I attempted to move there, not once, but twice. I don’t know if you can call looking at jobs and flats really “attempting to move” but that’s what I call it. York is amazing, if you’re into the whole cobblestone, old houses, massive Gothic Minstrels, cute cafes, old bars, and real life Harry Potter then York is for you! I would go back there in an instant, solely to get lost in the streets again, which I managed to do for probably at least 6 hours of my time there.
They also have this cafe close to Cliffords Tower called The Nook where I spend a hefty majority of my time, and there was a lovely man there who pointed me in the right direction for pubs and other nice cafe’s.

There are few cities or towns that I have been to that instantly caught my heart. They include Jasper, Edinburgh, and now Manchester.
Jasper, because of it’s beauty (read my 2nd post written),
Edinburgh because I managed to have the best pulled pork sandwich ever, and because I was not bored, for one minute. Also because I took this awesome pub crawl and the lady walked me home and bought me Oreo’s on the way.
I cannot stress enough that I have literally now been here for two and a half hours, only walked down 3 streets, taken a wrong turn, checked into my hostel and came to this cafe called Fig+Sparrow and written this mediocre, pointless post.

If you’re ever in Manchester and want a good coffee and overpriced sandwich, come here.
I don’t know why I love this place already, and I am going to spend the next three days figuring it out, but I already know it will hold no disappointments.
If I could tell you why I fall in love with people, places and things so quickly, I would be able to tell you exactly what makes me tick and probably why I hate starbucks, but I can’t, so I won’t even attempt to, it’s just one of my things.

I have an idea though, and it could be the abundance of street art, the fact that everyone here looks like they also write shitty blogs and think they’ll be on T.V. one day, or maybe it’s because this is the last stop on my trip and I’m only getting more and more excited to go back up to Ullapool… (Never thought I would say those words).

But anyways, that’s the end of this shit. Hope you enjoyed reading about nothing, and there will be another post soon, hopefully one with a bit more meaning and content. Maybe I wrote this one to convince myself and you, the reader, that I am doing this again and that even writing something that’s shit, is still writing something, which is better than writing nothing!

Oh God

Look at me guys! I’m doing it again!
Well, trying to.

Those two wimpy sentences literally took me an hour to write. Mainly because i’m sober and this is way harder when i actually give a shit, and also because I’m on the internet and I spent half of that hour watching a corgi roll around on the ground. Don’t blame me for that, it’s so cute! See…

“Awwwwww!”

So yeah, this is quite possibly, maybe, probably not, a thing again! I might be writing this post because I’m a little bit bored, and I’m in a different city so I’m feeling inspired and all that shit, OR maybe my brain is actually onto something and I’m in a good enough place to pour my mental and emotional energy into something that people can tear apart and hate.

(I’m going to try to keep in the back of my mind that people might not actually tear this apart, because good self esteem is great!)

It’s been about ten months since I last wrote a post. In that ten months I moved up to the Scottish highlands and my life was consumed with work and drinking and sleeping a little bit, then more drinking and more work. So basically I’ve just been busy killing all my brain cells and trying not to fling myself into the Atlantic.
I’ve also managed to meet some incredible people, see the beauty that is the highlands, binge watch netflix blah, blah, blah.

“So is this like an re-introduction post?” You ask.
I don’t know.
I have no idea whether this will become a weekly, daily or monthly thing. Right now, it is a right now thing and that is the way it will stay, for right now.

Writing this is also terrifying. Not like “boo!” terrifying, like the kind of terrifying that grabs your throat and whispers terrible things into your ears and makes it hard to fall asleep at night. It’s like this because I have managed to meet a lot of people lately, a lot of very supportive people, the kind of people who i’m sure will read this then make sure to bring it up in day to day life just to see how much they can watch me cringe.
(please do not bring this up in public, or then i might actually fling myself into the icy waters and end it. Titanic style.)
But why would supportive people make things scary? Because supportive people have opinions, and they’re not afraid to tell me what they think or how strongly they think it. Because supportive people also care, they support and they are the people reading this, you are the supportive people reading this. I am not supportive of myself, (something I am trying to work on) so when other people support me, it freaks me out, a lot. So this is scary, this is out of my comfort zone a little bit, and i like my comfort zone, it is comfortable, and warm, and my teddy panda bear lives there.

But you know what?  F*ck it.
I’m going to try and do this, even if it’s making it hard to breathe.

I love doing little things like this, even if it is only a binge session of writing that lasts a month. It keeps me alive and focused, gives me something to think about throughout the day so i have the chance to look at the world a little bit differently. Gives me a bit of perspective and doesn’t let me fall into the routine of waking up and working and drinking and working ext…

So yeah, that’s all I have for you right now.
But maybe next week i’ll have something. Maybe this will give me something to do on the long bus trip i have to take in a couple days, or maybe this will be it for another 3 months, who knows!

The only thing I do know is that this is NOT a New years resolution. The only resolution I made is to drink more beer and less tequila.

Which is a total lie.

I don’t know what I’m doing anymore.

I cannot tell if I have writers block or if I am simply a boring person who has nothing exciting to write about.

I am teetering between whether this means I am a horrible writer, or if this just simply means I can’t draw anything from my imagination. I know that it cannot be the latter because my imagination varies from thinking that a wobbly tile on the floor will take me to another land, to spending half my day pretending that I’m a tyrannosaurus-rex. This leaves that I only think I am a terrible writer, which I also hope is not true. This is very frustrating to me because I want nothing more than to write something I find suitable to share with the world. I know I am a perfectionist when it comes to my writing, so even though I have written multiple and multiple posts I cannot seem to share any of them because I either deem them to bad, or too personal, neither of which I think is very good.

I seem to have it in my head that to write something worthwhile I need to place my entire being into it, which I personally think is not a bad idea to have. But when you’re someone like me I cannot put just a small dash of my soul or my personality into it. It’s either all in, or all out, and I have no happy medium to fall onto. I write things that break me down into tears, but then I also write things that make me feel like I’m a robot and I have no personality at all. Combining the two would only lead to a personal disaster and I would spend weeks on end trying to merge together two points with no similarities. I have no way of being constant, this may be because I am relatively new to the idea of sharing my writing and I need more practice, or it is something that I need to adapt and adjust to as a writer.

This may just be a filler post, but it is also a simple explanation.

I go through times of intense inspiration. I write chapters and paragraphs and I write poems and essays. I go through times when all I want to do is write and all I can think about are sentences and plots and things that will only make something better. I have nights where I only get two hours of sleep because I can’t tear myself away from a story. Then I have weeks such as this, where the utter thought of writing something makes me cringe because I come out with pointless jabber that leads on with no promise of turning into anything.

So if you can excuse my inconsistency, I can guarantee I will eventually come out with something worth reading. But until then I’ll leave you with a picture of a show duck.

You can take from this what you like.

There are a few things in life that make me happy.

Not the constant feeling of happiness that I feel through out the day though, more of a little bubbly feeling in the bottom of my stomach, kind of happy. This ‘happy’ is intense, it’s strong and it needs to be felt. I’m happy when I get photos printed off or finish a roll of film. I’m happy when I don’t have to wear pants and I can put a hoodie on. I feel this happy when I start a new book or get to drink a really good coffee. Clean sheets on my bed, a shower that for no inexplicable reason was way better than any shower I’ve ever had before. This list can go on forever, but the one thing that makes me the happiest, is writing. Just this simple activity of words on paper, or computer, gives me the greatest feeling.

Writing makes me feel like I am being sucked through my pen into the paper, or through my fingertips and into the keyboard. My fingers cannot type fast enough because everything is moving in my head so quickly. I like to imagine there are little people jumping and dancing in my stomach, causing a huge commotion. When I think of anything half decent my heart beats faster, and I lean into the computer, like the closer I am to it the easier it will be for the ideas to come out. The entire process or moving my fingers, thinking and producing, re reading and correcting. The entire experience of writing is like therapy for me. I can put my feelings and thoughts into it, but I can put them in a way people hardy realize. It is a sneaky way to show how i feel and it gives me the biggest form of satisfaction. Writing is like creating a maze, but the walls of the maze are made with a piece of my soul.

This feeling, is the feeling people always talk about. This is what love is, and how lucky am I to have found it so early in my life.

I am looking for it in everything I do. New places, new people and new hobbies. So far I have found love when I read Roald Dahl, and when I am walking around a new city or on a new footpath. I have found it when I’m talking with my best friend and my family or seeing an incredible band live. What keeps me going, is all the other things in this world I could also love. All the choices and options I have in life that will introduce me to new experiences and will only add to the dancing people in my stomach

I don’t think anyone should ever stop looking for love. Once you stop looking, you stop feeding your soul, you stop nourishing your heart and your mind, and my soul has only just gotten hungry.

Titles are overrated

Motivation is a funny thing, isn’t it?

Some days I have enough motivation to take over the world. I can clean my room from top to bottom, go for the longest run of my life and then come home and write three pages of absolute mind-blowing, personal inspiration.

Other days I can’t even put pants on.

Today is an in-between day, and these days are the worst.

Days like today I struggle to do anything, but then I struggle to do nothing. I feel like crap sitting around doing nothing and I get angry at myself for wasting time. My brain feels like it’s not working and I have stared at this computer screen for at least an hour working on the same piece of writing but only seeing it as an awful waste of time. Cleaning anything only makes it worse because I get frustrated at how I can even manage to be so messy. It feels like I have zero motivation, but then I attack myself for being lazy and I try to force myself to do something, only resulting in more frustration, way too much anger and it usually ends in tears with a chocolate bar. Days like today I am stuck in limbo, floating between self hate and productivity.

Most people say to embrace days like today. To give your mind the rest it needs, drink lots of water, read a good book and get a good nights sleep. To embrace the absolute chaos and just appreciate the simple things you have in your life. I laugh in the thought of that. I am the last person to embrace a day like today; Instead I binge watch television programs, I drink nothing but gin and tonic and in about half an hour I am going to devour an entire pizza. The only thing  I have done all day that takes the slightest amount of motivation was memorize all the words to the Catfish and the Bottlemen album, and I watched a video my brother sent me about deep-frying gnocchi that made me laugh a bit too hard.

Basically, this post has no value to me, and it is simply just so I can feel like I accomplished something today. So if you managed to read this then I send you a virtual high-five and you’ve gained 2 points of my respect.

home is where the heart is

Yesterday was the 4 month “anniversary” of me landing in England.

The most popular question I get, besides “where are you from in America?” is, “Do you miss home?”

I never really knew how to answer that question, because it’s more complicated than just “missing home”

Most people automatically assume that I must be sobbing myself to sleep over not seeing my family all the time and I must miss my friends, and of course I do. I miss my family just as much as the next person who is in a different country. I miss calling my best friend at 3am when I’m drunk and upset. I missed being home for Christmas, bickering with my siblings over which movie to watch and which board game to play. I miss coming home and having the most delicious soup made with love by my mother, I miss my dogs and my grumpy cat.

But that’s what people want to hear when they ask that question. They want to hear that I’m missing my family, friends and my pets.

With technology these days I have been given the amazing chance to Skype with people who are over 4000 miles away. I can see my Mom whenever I want and I can talk to my best friend if I want to over messenger. I don’t need to wait for a letter to get to them 3 weeks after I sent it and then wait again, for a reply. So, with modern technology, I miss my family and friends a great amount, but much less than people assume. If I was going weeks at a time without talking to them, I would probably miss them way more, but in all honestly, it hardly feels any different from being in Canada.

Now, I do not want anyone to get the impression that I don’t miss my family and friends like crazy, but there is another part of Canada that I miss a great deal.

Before I came to England I lived in the beautiful town of Jasper. I lived there for about 8 months, collectively a year if I count the summer before that. I had already had the chance to detach myself from my family. I was already given the opportunity to know what it’s like to not be able to see your friends every day. On top of that, if you know me, you know that I absolutely loved Jasper. The entire town is a dream for me. I loved my two jobs, I had incredible friends, I was absolutely comfortable there and even after my first Summer there, I thought of it as a second home.

I never knew that it was possible to miss a place as much as I miss Jasper, and boy, do I miss it. I miss it because I can’t Skype the mountains. I can’t walk in the park through the laptop and I can’t breathe in the air through the phone.

It’s hard to say that to people when they ask if I miss home, because home has become two separate places. Home is one with my mother, my pets and a bed that I have slept in for many years. but home is also Jasper, with mountains and incredible memories and if I am completely honest, I miss Jasper the most.

I miss the way the mountains made me feel secure, like I was always being hugged by the planet, I always felt safe. The way the multitude of trees created so much oxygen, and after a snow or rainfall it smells amazing, because it was the cleanest air you could ever find. I missed how the sun looked on the mountains at exactly 10:25pm during the peak months of the summer. They turned a beautiful golden-yellow with the most amazing streaks of orange and how they made the whole sky turn a bright pink. Those mountains made me feel emotions, they made me think, and they made me honest, which is more than I can say for some people in my life. Being unable to take part in activities I did on a daily basis in Jasper makes me incredibly nostalgic for that little mountain town. My daily sandwich from the deli and coffee from Snowdome has been replaced with nothing. No similar routine was put in place of what I had. Sure, I am working, and I still eat sandwiches and drink coffee, but something you love can never really be replaced.

So, I do miss my family, but I can talk to them.

I can’t talk to the mountains.

Saying all of that, I have almost managed to get to that spot of comfort and familiarity with England. I have managed to find things that I love just as much as the mountains, if not more. I am getting more and more comfortable, and England is feeling more like home. When I see the news on my Facebook changing from the currents on British Columbia to the latest news in the royal family, it doesn’t bother me as much. Not being able to find cheese curds has become something that I have accepted, even though I still consider it blasphemy (yes, cheese curds are a sacred part of my life). I have stopped noticing that the plug-ins are different, and I have stopped converting the price of pounds into dollars just to freak out about how expensive it would be at that price back home. Also I never feel like I am going to be hit by a car any more because I have become used to looking left first instead of right.

That all may be because I have been very lucky and I have been put in a job with a girl who is now one of my closest friends, I have had support from my family, and I have been placed in two great jobs where the locals did everything to make sure that I was comfortable. I have been very lucky, and very blessed to be in such a comfortable position and to feel so at home in a country that is completely foreign.

it’s never too late to miss home, but it’s never too early to love somewhere new.

well, shit.

I am going to start this whole thing off with saying that I have absolutely no idea what the hell I am doing.

My mother told me to write a blog, so here I am.

I am not the kind of girl who grew up doing what my mother told me to do, to be fair I don’t think that many of us are.

She has told me not to touch the fireplace because it was hot, to be nice to people, to always respect people in positions of authority and my friends parents. She told me to always ask before I used something that wasn’t mine. She told me to be smart about important decisions. That I should always eat my vegetables, drink enough water and get plenty of sleep at night. If I am totally honest, I probably listened to her about 80% of the time, if that.

When my mother told me to do things I was always defensive, I wanted to be independent and “grown up.” I always thought I knew what was best, and if I wanted to stay up all night watching Supernatural re-runs and only get 2 hours of sleep there would be no repercussions at all. I would still be on top of my game at school and I would ace the test I spent absolutely no time studying for. I thought that I already knew what the world was like and I already knew what my body needed to be healthy. I was always okay only drinking 2 glasses of water a day and, if you believe hard enough, potatoes can pass as a vegetable. I have a bad habit of removing the filter from my head to my mouth. I constantly find myself saying things that I don’t really mean, and hurting people’s feelings, people I truly care about, and on a less dramatic note I swear, I swear way too much.

My mother was someone I always wanted to defy. When I didn’t get something I wanted or if I thought she was being unfair, or picking favourites between my siblings and I, I was cruel. Between the ages of thirteen and seventeen I was a “devil child” as she puts it. We can blame it on hormones, or high school. We can blame it on the friends I had or the hobbies I was interested in, but when it comes down to it, I just really didn’t want to listen to my mother. I wanted to prove to her that I was an adult, and that I knew what I needed

“But why now Sarah, why listen to her now?”

Because somewhere along the lines of being a total disaster and actually doing something kind of right, I realised that the only times I was doing really well and I was actually happy, was when I had listened to my mother. When I was trying to save up to travel she told me to work hard, to save, to live on a budget. She told me to drink less, which never actually happened because if you know me at all you know that drinking less is never, ever an option. But, when I listened to my Mum, I had results and I managed to get across the ocean. My mother, when it comes down to it, will always be the smartest women in my life. She knows what is best for me, and she knows what steps I need to take to get to where I want to be, that’s why she is my mother.

So when I shared with her that I maybe, one day, way down the line, wanted to be a writer, she fully supported me. She told me that to do that, people would actually need to read the things that I write, even if I think they are total and absolute shit. So I made the executive decision to listen to my mother, and I have my fingers crossed that this is another one of those times where she is right and I might not look like a total idiot.

So this is what you get.

I am not going to build this up as something that it is not, it is a blog. Simple as that, It is an internet page being plagued by a 19-year-old girl living in a different country with a bad habit of never doing my laundry on time. I am going to make mistakes in grammar, spelling, general knowledge on how to actually write something that doesn’t fully butcher the English language.

Saying that, if you think you might enjoy reading about the stupid things I do, or even things that might be somewhat exciting, by all means, read on. Because, at the end of the day, I’m just here. I’m just trying to do something worth while that might let me live in a nice apartment one day.

Sarah