bookshoplaura

Okay so you know that feeling you get in your gut that tells you something bad is going to happen or this is not the right apartment for you or that guy is not who you are looking for. You do? Great.  Well do you know when you ignore that gut feeling and go to that place, rent that apartment, date that guy and much later down the line when it all goes to shit you remember that bad feeling you had in the  beginning. If you do understand where  I'm coming from and maybe are even a little guilty of it yourself then yay, I like you and we should be friends. However if you  Are scratching your head and wondering why someone would behave in such an illogical manner then maybe you should go be perfect somewhere else. I jest, sure read on if you want to. So far this ignoring that feeling has taken me on some really interesting turns. it has steered me into more than one disastrous relationship and more recently I found myself going on a string of dates with a...

Let's just start of by saying that I am not complaining about advice given by people I know. I am the first to admit I am often in need of some of that even when I am less appreciative of the variety that is volunteered rather than requested. Even though I don't follow this advice to the letter or at all (in some cases) just keep it coming. Most of it will be appreciated at a future date when I am a little more willing to accept it. Here is my real objection. Everywhere you look and I mean everywhere there is some 'expert' giving advice that they are clearly in no position to be giving. A book by some fitness 'guru' ( and I use this term lightly) was recently pointed out to me in work. This guy, whose name I've promptly forgotten, claims he get you in shape in 30 days and to be honest it's a somewhat dubious promise given that even I can see he's not exactly in great shape himself. I'm sure it's up there somewhere with not trusting a skin...

I'm trying ( and failing ) to practice the mandate of not saying anything when I've nothing nice to say but let's just say It's something I need to work on and truthfully what Comes out is closer to the ecard above. Sarcasm is my comfort zone, my main line of defence, my base line and I really need to break the habit of  falling back on it. Today in work we had a popular young adult author in to do a signing. By all means he seems to be a nice enough chap and has quite the adoring fan base but having read a chapter of one of his books a few years ago ( an ex of mine was reading it, we will move swiftly away from the fact that he obviously was reading at the level of your average 13 year old ) and oh my god it actually pained me to read it. To say I did not enjoy it would be understating the matter and I am not one to understate. I did briefly worry that he might ask me if I'd read any of his books at which point I'd be forced to lie. I'm pretty sur...

I don't like to say I'm partial to a bit of theatre because it sounds pretentious and if I'm really honest I don't see a whole lot of it. I always say I'd see a lot more plays if there was more good theatre on near me and I could afford it. I also say I'd be far more of an outdoor person if we had better weather but living  In Ireland, we really don't so it makes for rather pointless speculation. A few days ago I got an invite to go see the national theatre live production of Othello. It's showing in the national theatre in London ( I'm only guessing here because where else would the UK's national theatre be based ) and for one night they were screening it in cinemas all  Around the UK and Ireland so it seemed too good an opportunity to pass up.  After trekking down to dungarvan to see it I was lamenting the fact that its not available in Waterford and then later discovered it is. I'd just ignored the posters advertising it be...

I can't think of anything that makes me squirm more than the recording of my voice. I think I like how it sounds much better in my head . I have probably had more opportunities than most to hear how my voice sounds for other people and no, this is not down to any secret masochistoc tendencies I may be harboring. Despite my dislike of this kind of work, I have worked in three different call centres since 2008 and hated them all equally for different reasons but one key factor they share is the belief that listening to your own calls is a beneficial training tool. For those like me there is little benefit in this when instead of critiquing it, to ensure you do a Better job next time, you find yourself wriggling uncomfortably in your seat thinking oh god is that what I sound like. I suppose it could be worse and I am Grateful that I managed to not pick up the Clonmel accent, not even a little bit. I used to date a guy years ago who slagged me about this as though it was so...

You have to love the awkward pause when I run into someone from college while I'm at work and they ask what I'm up to these days and I just take a breath while they work out I am not serving them on the till for kicks. I was in college in the same city I now live in and it actually happens to me a lot. The first few times I served my favourite college lecturer I was mortified when he looked at me questioningly but said nothing and I just knew he was wondering why I was working in a bookshop when I'd only recently graduated college. The truth is I don't know why I'm not working in social care. okay so that's not entirely true. I have a decent enough idea. My best guess would be the fact that I don't think I've applied for a social care job in well over a year. It's funny that you think they would hear about your honors degree and pursue you but apparently that's not how it works in the job market.  The longer I leave it the harder it will act...

Like an explorer bravely going into unknown territory I found myself heading out in Clonmel on a Saturday night without drinking. While my liver thanks me for my forethought and I am thoroughly glad to wake after a night out without the feeling of oh god did I really ...... I'm not sure I'll be getting any gold stars for my efforts on the Social front. In case you haven't already surmised this, this post isn't really about the perks of being a wallflower because I'm not entirely sure there are any. I'm sure I mentioned before that when I started drinking socially at 14 I realized I didn't have to be shy and awkward and it seemed like I had discovered some amazing secret that adults were deliberately keeping from us. Having alcohol to fall back meant that I never learned to go out for the night without it and you know that's not entirely a bad thing because some of the best nights I've ever had involved some friends and a few drinks. It'...

I have been living on my lonesome in a reasonable sized apartment coming up close to a year now and I really like it, living on my own that is. The apartment itself I am not that keen on.  When I got here first I liked it. I wont ever go so far as to say I loved it. It was pretty big for one person and I enjoy all the space but last winter I nearly froze in here and that's even with the two extra heaters my mum gave me because the storage heaters that this came equipped with are less than useless when it comes to providing some sort of warmth as well as being the most ridiculously expensive device to run. Can I just ask what Genius came up with storage heaters and really they should take the word heater out of the name because they are ugly boxes mounted on my walls that do little to remove the chill from my apartment. So the last few months I've been contemplating a move and the list of cons just keeps on getting longer. Not that I actually made such a list as the D-day (...

I was going to start off by saying that perhaps politeness as an epidemic is a truly Irish problem but suddenly I remembered all the terribly ignorant people I know and interact with daily ( joys of a job dealing with the public ) and I promptly wanted to take that statement back.  But for some of us , and you know who you are, are unfailingly polite almost to the point at annoying ourselves. Now I don't know how much of that has to do with my upbringing (thanks Mum) and how much is down to the fact that I am recovering people pleaser who isn't doing all that great a job on the recovery side. Now you know you can be counted as one of us if you find that when you go to the doctors for some ailment and the doctors asks how you are, your automatic response is I'm fine thanks and you almost have to bite your lip to stop you asking the same question in return. Obviously if you're sitting in a doctors office you're not really fine at all. Unless you like to fork out 5...

One thing I regret Is that I didn't travel more when I had the chance. It has not escaped my notice that at this point in my life things I regret if written in a list could fill a note book the size of war and peace and would be mostly filled With things I have done as opposed to things I have not. Let this be an exception.  I let my twenties slip through my fingers passing up the opportunities to do more and be more. If I was to cast the finger of  blame then I would look not only to myself ( for clearly I am responsible for my own inaction ) but also to my au pairing experience at 20. When l was 20 I had many plans. I had just completed a childcare course and I wanted to get out there and do things. I was going to be an au pair and I was going to travel and it was going to be great. And it was sort of, until I actually became an au pair and between the pockets of new experiences there were long gaps of loneliness and a home sickness so raw I could taste it. This wa...

I life in an apartment With no television. True fact. I have lived in my smelly damp Apartment for 10 months now and I haven't had a TV in that time. Sometimes  When I tell people this they look distinctly uncomfortable as if they no longer know how to make conversation With me because surely what horrible story is in the news and did you see x tv programme last night are the only viable topics of conversation. The thing is I am not making some sort of statement by not having a tv. The truth is much simpler and far more boring. Here goes, I have never owned my own tv. I have always either lived somewhere that has a tv or lived with someone who had a tv so it's never really been an issue until last November when I moved out of a dodgy house share in a hurry and after looking at many, many different options I found myself moving into a one bed apartment by myself and guess what it had no tv. Not to mention the fact that just before I'd moved I'd taken out a ne...

Lots of people have irrational fears. Like my fear of moths or pigeons both relatively harmless creatures but don't bother telling me my fear is illogical when I'm trapped in a small space with either of them or both eeekk ( Let's not pause to question how exactly one ends up trapped in small space with a pigeon and a moth). I also have more rational fears like rejection. It downright terrifies me and that's normal right? okay well I'm going to tell myself that's normal and in the silence that follows I'll pretend you all are nodding and smiling in various degrees of agreement. The trouble with fearing rejection is that it really holds you back in life. Trust me, I've practically written a book on it. The other problem with rejection is that it's almost impossible to avoid or at least those doing a better job than me haven't exactly been forthcoming in sharing their methods ( lousy !). My own almost fail proof technique is in refusing to put ...

One of my all time favourite non fiction books is a book called 'blink' by Malcolm Gladwell. He's an odd looking dude (think sideshow Bob but not ginger) but he writes an excellent series of books on psychology and social psychology. Blink is about that gut reaction we have or what it is commonly known as intuition and he talks about the different ways in which we use our intuition while peppering the books with interesting real life examples. One of which is about a forged statue from Grecian times I think but it was such a good copy that it passed all sorts of tests and it would have been thought to be the real deal if several of the art experts who came to view it didn't report that there was something just off about it and that it left them feeling cold. The interesting thing here is that it was their intuition at play, allowing them to sense that something was off about the piece but not being able to articulate what that was. It was subsequently proved to be an ...

In the interests of full disclosure I must now advise you that this isn't really a girl scouts guide to anything and if I am completely honest, I will also admit to never being in the girl scouts. I just liked how it sounded as a blog title but it's my blog so I'm allowed some creative licence. I was, however, in the brownies for a year (for children too young to join girl scouts) but I soon realized that it wasn't really for me. I am delighted that I learned how to make a no bake cake, no really !, I am but I was smart enough to see that the boy scouts were the ones having all the fun with their camping and survival skills and quite frankly I was bored so I quit.  When we were kids my mum was all about the natural remedies. She had a cure for everything and a press full of herbal remedies and tablets for every non fatal ailment going. If you didn't need to hospitalized you were probably trying a homeopathic remedy first and seeing a doctor was for more serious ...

If you're not familiar with Nicholas sparks then you're not really missing out on very much. Unfortunately as a women working in a bookshop with eyes that see stuff, I find him hard to avoid. I have seen a few of his movies but have refused on principle to sit through the notebook. I am not known for being a lover of all things sappy. Despite reading quite voraciously and managing to suffer through a good few Cecilia ahearne books in my time ( the library didn't have the best selection and I was starting to run out of things to read ) but I have never once read so much as a page of a Nicholas sparks 'novel' and yet I feel more than qualified to judge him but that's just the kind of woman I am.  I am armed with some knowledge, not just my scathing review of the blurb on the back covers as seen by me. I once read this article on cracked.com about Nicholas sparks and they were mocking him in the sarcastic fashion that readily appeals to me. He has claimed t...

Habits are a funny thing, we all have them. Most people will only refer to their bad habits like laziness, gorging themselves on junk food, drinking etc and I know there was a time when I could have counted those and many more as habits of mine.  I have stopped drinking for a few weeks and junk food is a thing of the past for me but that doesn't mean I'm entirely vice free. I'd be better off but a little more boring if I was. I still live a life swaddled in bad habits I'm struggling to quit, except I'm not all that sure I'm doing very much about them.  I like things a certain way. I prefer to sleep my own bed ( It's the cosiest ) and will only eat certain foods and can't stop judging books on Their cover and people on their  Appearances, try as I might I still hear my brain gently whirring around in the background, whispering snap judgements to me.  I am sarcastic as a first response, I can't help putting myself down or saying th...

Anyone who reads my blog on a semi regular basis might have noticed I haven't posted anything new in a few days but I'm here to say fear not, there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for my absence. I've been sort of sick all week so I've been much too busy hosting a one woman pity party. If you've never had one then you wouldn't know but it's extremely time consuming. Largely involving trying to do all the things that need doing either at work or at home while enduring waves of pity because I'm not feeling well and then giving up to lie under my blanket where I sip tea and whimper softly.  I do not enjoy being sick and I am not a delightful patient but then again who actually enjoys being sick. Possibly some weird sadists out there get a kick out of basking in their own misery but not me. I miss the days when being sick meant a day off school , being left in bed with a hot water bottle and my mum coming home at lunch time with a giant stack of ma...

Last night, In what felt like one of the braver moves of my thirties, I went to a bar in town with a friend to see a gig. The act of bravery wasn't going to see the band ,who turned out to be pretty damn good, but the fact that I was out in a late bar surrounded by the hammered and disheveled of Waterford and I was sober as a newt sipping from a glass of water. Yes, I know and this is a true story even if my college friends would not recognize me now.  I did feel the odd pang of regret for my last drunken night in that same bar when I parted ways with my iphone 5 but it only strengthened my resolve to persevere with this mini alcohol free holiday. Now, I don't have a whole lot of practice being in a pub sober, it is not my favorite activity by far but it certainly was an interesting experiment as these things go. The music was pretty damn good so I did surprise myself by having a good night but there was more than one moment when I'd catch sight of someone and ho...

This morning at my parents house the radio was playing in the background and I found myself half listening as they ran through the news headlines. It made me want to crawl back into bed. God, the news is so damn depressing. It's all about the next economic crisis or death and there is a whole lot of death in the news. I do wonder sometimes how people take all of that on and still manage to go about  their daily routine because the overall feeling you get from the news headlines is that we live in a horrible world and it seems the stories are purposely compiled in such way to highlight all the negativity in the world.  I do know that these things are only in the news because they have happened and that's a bigger problem in society than I can hope to deal with. But I also know that the world we live isn't always quite so gloomy and it would be nice if we could focus on that I occasionally. Who wouldn't like to hear more good news and I don't mean the so...

Today Laura is not a happy camper, not a happy camper indeed and it's all because of my stupid stomach. Now I will admit to having a tempestuous relationship with my stomach for many many years. It was always too big, too fat, too squishy and It totally wasn't my fault that my diet of crap food and my exercise plan of doing as little as humanely possible helped shape it so, or perhaps it is my fault but I'm not here to point fingers tonight because it's hardly the case these days. I have mentioned before that my wake up call came when my stomach/gut problems got so bad that I ended up in hospital. It was like a magical combination of generally bad diet plus way too much wheat plus a whole bucket full of stress and it made me feel so wretched that I began to question my whole outlook on food. Since that time I have steadily been working away on my diet and my health but it's been an uphill climb. I gave up wheat which helped a bit and then I gave up spelt once ...

Learning when to let go is one of the hardest things I've ever had to do. Of course it sits upon a long list of other very difficult things that I've struggled with but have still come through the other side, able to display trophy bruises from all the times I've stumbled along the way. I hit my thirties smarter and more self aware than I had been the decade before and a large part of me becoming the woman I am now was learning how to let go. Over the years I have let go of friends I had out grown which is never easy but sometimes you find your lives are no longer in the same place and you run out of things to chat about it as common ground becomes harder to find and then you find yourself drifting. It's best to not fight it for the same of whatever it was that you used to have because in life there's no going back only forward, the power of now and all that jazz (I'm sure Eckhart Tolle would not mind me paraphrasing his philosophy as such).  I remember w...

One of my favorite things to do when I feel a little bit down is to buy myself a present. Now I am not talking about spending half my wage packet on a pair of shoes because I am far too sensible to spend money I'll later need for bills. I know in this day and age being sensible isn't considered a very sexy trait but I feel more secure than more spontaneous friends who are scrabbling to pay their rent while I have my bill money set aside. For me a cheer me up present is usually small but ever since I was a child I have always been delighted by the smallest of gifts even if they are now purchased by me. I like nothing more than to trawl the shelves of tk maxx looking for cosmetics or notebooks or cute little household gifts like a tea pot or a really nice mug. I am in the market for a really nice tea pot and I know when I find what I'm looking for I'll be pretty excited with my new purchase and then I'll have to pause a moment to wonder if this is a sign I'm g...

One area I have never excelled at is in selling myself (and no, I don't mean in a prostitutey way but I probably wouldn't be much good at that either). You know when someone who doesn't know you very well wants to know a bit more about you and the general idea is that you are supposed to high light all your good points so they can see how amazing you are or whatever. Yea, that's the part where I get distinctly uncomfortable. Now this arises most often with men, either on a date or trying to make a date happen and I hover awkwardly between trying not to sound like I'm bragging and trying not to actively put myself down. Admittedly the latter is more within my comfort zone which is it's own kind of awful. Now I know within Irish culture we have for the most part become a nation of people that don't really talk themselves up. It is the exception as opposed to the rule and I sort of like that, it backs me up and makes me not so much an extremely under-conf...