Hannah's Five Year Plan

Living in the moment is something I'm not an expert at. Yes, of course I can live in the here and now, experience life as it comes and be spontaneous but I don't do that as much as I plan. I love planning. Everything. I make plans to make plans.

 I can never be fully satisfied with where I am currently in my life, I always want to be 1 year, 5 years, 10 years in the future. Sometimes it's hard for me to be patient and I wish I could skip time but then I check back into reality and think about all the things I would miss out on.

 In my weird futuristic life I've already graduated and I'm living in London in an awesome flat with some really cool friends. Possibly YouTubers because I like being surrounded by creative, intelligent, internet people. I'll be doing some really interesting work in social media or presenting a sex education show on television. Oh and then after living in London for a bit I'll get a job in New York and live in Brooklyn for a couple years. Then by 26/27 I'll move back to an as-of-yet-undecided big city in England and start planning the rest of my life.

But alas, I still have 2 years of university left. These are supposed to be the best days of my life so why do I have the mentality that I'm just sitting around waiting for my real life to begin?

Am I crazy? Do other people do this? Well, I know that my dad does. That's where I get it from.

Hannah

Student Stereotypes

I've finished my first year at university and boy has it gone fast.

Before I came to uni I made this video talking about the different student stereotypes:

And now after I've experienced a full year being a uni student, we're going to see how I compare to the different stereotypes I talked about (watch the video first if you're confused).


1. The Studious Student
Although you only need to pass your first year (40%), I still like to try my best. I never missed lectures because I'd been out the night before or just through pure laziness- I only missed two when I was in London for a Channel 4 thing (priorities).


2. The Party Animal Student
I like going out clubbing but I only go about once a week (which is not a lot for a uni student). I do find myself in the pub a lot though.


3. The Gap Year Student
It's a given that if you put a bunch of people together who spent a year out of education doing whatever the hell they liked that they'll all talk about it. The novelty wore off after a while though.


4. The Societies Student
So in my first year I joined the History Society (duh), FilmSoc and as of a few weeks ago I'm now a member of Footnotes (the comedy society). I'm on the committee for FilmSoc, I'm a blogger for the Arts & Culture department of BurnFM (radio) and my friends and I have set up our own blog, We Play Fair. It seems like a lot but I want to get even more involved next year! I want to go to more comedy gigs and maybe try out stand-up myself, I want to volunteer for Sexpression who go round secondary schools teaching kids sex education (right up my street) and I want to dance and play tennis. Hmm...


5. The Political Student
We get to pick one module to study that's not part of our degree and I chose a politics module. I went to one protest on campus but I was more of a bystander and listener. Most of my political activity is online.


So what do you reckon I am? If you're a student do you fit into any of these categories? Or if you'll be a uni student soon, which one do you think you'll be?

Two more years to go!

Hannah

Personality Crisis?

So me and my friends were trying to psycho-analyse ourselves according to the Myers Briggs method. 

You may have heard of it but if not here is a quick low down:

Pick between each of these options (look them up if you don't know what each characteristic means exactly- we had to!)

Extroverted (E) OR Introverted (I)
Sensing (S) OR Intuition (N)
Thinking (T) OR Feeling (F)
Judging (J) OR Perceiving (P)

You can either do a silly online quiz or work out for yourself what you are and then the end result will be FOUR LETTERS. 

I couldn't decide between two different outcomes-

ENFJ - The Mentor
OR
ENFP - The Advocate

"ENFJs are externally focused, introspective, altruistic, positive and have excellent people skills. They place utmost importance on helping others grow. They are warm and have a natural desire to be supportive and encouraging. Being charismatic and possessing excellent language skills, they do well in leadership roles. ENFJs strive to enhance the lives of their human brethren."

"ENFPs are introspective, values-oriented, inspiring, social and extremely expressive. They actively send their thoughts and ideas out into the world as a way to bring attention to what they feel to be important, which often has to do with ethics and current events. ENFPs are natural advocates, attracting people to themselves and their cause with excellent people skills, warmth, energy and positivity. ENFPs are described as creative, resourceful, assertive, spontaneous, life-loving, charismatic, passionate and experimental."

Each individual characteristic of ENFJ suits me better but the overall description of an ENFP person just felt like it was describing me. Clearly, I'm a confused person now and I have no sense of identity. Oh help me. Personality crisis. 

Anyway, the point of this post was just to share with you my love for personality quizzes and psycho-analysing myself. Do you do it to? Which personality type do you think you are? Or do you think it's all rubbish and we shouldn't waste our time on things like these?

Hannah

Information from http://www.mypersonality.info/personality-types/

YouTube & Gender

Just from the title I bet a lot of you will have dismissed this post to be just some other rant about feminism. But please keep reading- this is going to be different. 

 One of the special things about YouTube is the fact that content is user generated. This means that no matter who you are, where you’re from, what religion, gender or race you are, as long as you have internet access you can be a content creator. It’s a completely equal platform; no-one gets an automatic head start because of their social situation.

 So why is then that men are more successful than women on YouTube? Don’t judge, hear me out. I’m not saying this in a disapproving or angry way, more just in a ‘this is a thing’ way. Men do better. I’m not saying that there aren’t any successful women on YouTube, look at JennaMarbles, DailyGrace and Hannah from My Drunk Kitchen, but there are just more men.

 My main theory as to why this happens is because most of the people who subscribe and watch videos are young girls and they’re more likely to subscribe to guys- I, myself, am probably subscribed to more men than women. But I don’t have a problem with that, I love all the people I’m subscribed to. I just think this topic is really interesting and I’m not having a go at anybody.

 But this here is what makes me angry. My friend Bing’s recent Future Bing video showed him and all his YouTube friends all hanging out together. And that’s awesome, I love it when YouTubers all get together! They kept saying in the video that ‘the whole of YouTube’ was in Bing’s house and I couldn’t help notice that they were all male. So then this happened: 

Seriously, Bing?! Harsh. What exactly is ‘that person’ anyway?

 A thing that I find quite frustrating is when a woman makes a comment along the lines of gender and a man takes this as a personal attack. We don’t hate you! In fact, Bing, I fucking love you, I think you’re amazing. And the same goes to everyone else in that video: Jack, Tom, Khyan, Tim, Jamie, Matt – seriously, you’re all awesome. I have no problem with you all being successful YouTubers, you’re talented and you all deserve it. So Bing, please know that I wasn’t attacking you so don’t get all defensive. I was actually hoping for it to spark an interesting discussion and I know you’re good at them, but not when you dismiss what I said with a rude comment like that.

 So, I’d really like to just have an open discussion. Why do you think men are more successful on YouTube? Or do you think that it’s actually pretty equal? And what do you think about how men and women react to comments made about gender?

Let’s not be mean and attack each other, let’s have an interesting open debate.

Hannah

Project Perfect

My last post about body image had a really good response and so when my friend Mandy wrote a piece for her blog talking about her body likes and dislikes, I thought I'd follow on from my last post and write about my personal body image issues.

As she said in her post, I'm not fishing for compliments- this is about sharing the fact that not everyone is "perfect" and we all have body hangups which just makes us human. Every part of our bodies, whether we like them or not, are what makes us unique and gorgeous!

Here we go...

1. Post a picture of yourself
2. State three things you DISLIKE about yourself
3. State three things you LIKE about yourself

I dislike-
1. My height- I'm 5 feet small (152.4cm). It's impossible to find jeans that fit and skirts and dresses always drown me and make me look even shorter. Also, my stomach is pretty much non-existant.
2. My thighs- They're short and they're big. Shopping for jeans is a nightmare- nothing will fit over my thighs!
3. My eyebrows- They're big, messy and ugly. I even I have big gap in one of them which is a chicken pox scar and it just looks weird. I pluck and pencil them in but I guess I'll never be completely happy with them.

I like-
1. My waist- I have a tiny waist and I love it! When tops and dresses nip in at the waist and really show off my curves, it makes me feel extremely confident.
2. My eyes- I love my eyes. They're big and brown. They're so dark brown that sometimes it's impossible to find my pupils.
3. My boobs- I'm not going to go into any specifics but I have massive boobs. Although, it means there are a lot of clothes that I simply can't wear, with a good bra and the right clothes I can make my boobs look awesome!

So what are your body likes and dislikes? Write a similar post if you like and share!

Hannah

Body Image

The UK newspaper, The Guardian, often holds 'comment is free' competitions where they pick a controversial issue and ask readers to write 250 words about it and then the best ones are published.

Back in January the topic was 'body image' and I felt compelled to write something about this because I have quite a strong opinion on this issue and it affects so many people. I know my writing style isn't very professional or journalistic so I wasn't surprised when my entry wasn't picked. However, I still think it's an important message to spread so I'm going to share it with you here.

[Disclaimer: I talk about female body image here, this does not mean I'm saying that men don't face similar problems, because they do.]


Girl body image is complex, frustrating and baffling. Everybody worries about the way they look, and if you disagree and say that you’re completely happy with your appearance then I’ll tell you that you are lying. To make ourselves feel better we’re told to be comfortable in our own skin and that appearance doesn’t matter and it’s what’s on the inside that counts. However, that’s not true is it? At least not for women. Society places an unhealthy amount of importance on aesthetic and no matter how much you dye your hair, do your make-up or dress differently at the bottom of it all a person cannot change how they look. So why do we measure a person’s worth by something we are born with and can’t alter?

 It’s no wonder that women, at all ages, feel pressurised to look a certain way. I feel like I’m lucky in a sense being a petite size 8 with large boobs, however, there are other parts of me that are ‘wrong’, which to me says that if I want to be a T.V presenter or in the public eye in any way shape or form I’d need to be a lot taller, in fact I’d actually need smaller boobs and skinnier legs would definitely boost my chances of success. 

 Naomi Wolf’s ‘Beauty Myth’ still exists and makes women critique themselves so harshly because they believe they don’t fit the mould that society has deemed ‘beautiful’. There needs to be ways to help women who punish themselves for not looking how they believe they should. One way would be to represent more ‘real’ women in the media. However, we can say with a lot of confidence that it’s very unlikely. How successful do you think The X Factor would be with two short, size 14 women with un-plucked eyebrows sitting on the judges’ panel?

I'd love to get a discussion going so please let me know what you think in the comments. Is the media distorting our perception of 'beauty'? And let's not just keep the debate focused on women, we should open it up to the effects of the media on men's body image too.

Hannah 

YouTube Identity

This is something that I've been thinking a lot about lately but I'm not sure how much sense I'm going to make, so bare with me.

YouTube is a very complex place but for the sake of getting across my point we're going to split it up into categories. In terms of people who create content on the site I can see four main categories: vloggers, musicians, gurus and film makers. Now lets remove musicians and gurus from the equation because I am not musically talented in the slightest and I haven't a clue about make-up or how to do anything. So we have vloggers and film makers. (As I said before it's actually more complicated than this but just go with it).

Now I would probably fit in the 'vlogger' category. However, I don't consider myself a vlogger. I don't think I'm actually very good at talking to a camera. The best videos of mine (in my opinion) are ones where I barely say anything or it's a comedy sketch of some sort. Real vloggers are people who have something interesting to say on a topic or their life such as Owlssayhooot, Emilythebravee or OhItsJustKim. But not me. I don't think I could ever upload a video that is entirely three minutes of me talking.

[Just as a disclaimer, I love all those YouTubers and I'm not insulting just talking to a camera because I think their videos are fantastic. I just know I wouldn't be very good at it.]

So I'm not a 'vlogger'. But neither am I a 'film maker'. I don't know how to use fancy cameras, lighting and sound confuse me and I've just installed Final Cut Pro onto my MacBook but I'm too terrified to start using it. However, being a film maker on YouTube- so making nice looking videos containing a sketch with a story and a punchline- really appeals to me. From recently meeting and hanging out with people who do make awesome sketches on YouTube, I am more and more fascinated by that side of YouTube and its content creators. One day I would love to be able to make videos as good as Slomozovo and OMFGItsJackandDean. But for now I guess, I'll just take it slow and learn a little bit at a time. Who knows, maybe my friends will help me and teach me the ropes...

Did this make any sense to you? I really hope so. I guess what I'm trying to say is, I feel a bit lost. I don't really know where I belong on YouTube but hopefully one day I'll find where I fit in and I'll be the best that I can be.

Just out of curiosity, which genre of YouTube videos do you prefer? And which of mine do you prefer?

Hannah