My main resolution is probably to blog more consistently, I haven’t posted in about six months… (sorry!)

Good luck to everyone else with resolutions, I hope you succeed in keeping them!

So, in Australia, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part 2 is coming out on the 12th of July, when I’m in Tasmania (which I will blog about) so I’ve been fangirling it a lot (a lot) recently. And like all good Harry Potter fans, I have put up a mini-calender-countdown-thing on my bedroom wall, counting down the days until the release. Of course, this makes me extremely hyped up . Other preparations include reading the books again (and again) – which I am currently doing for the 9th or 10th time.

As my sister used to say: “I’m an obsessive-compulsive-addictive-fanatical-Harry-Potter-fan”

I think today I’ll just start with a basic definition for the word ‘fan’:

HaPpy BiRtHdaY!

With a chocolate fountain

This post is simply to say goodnight.

So; Goodnight.

To you, the reader, and to winter, this being the first day of Spring.

Goodnight moon, goodnight stars, goodnight world.

Goodnight.

Yet, in today’s society, it seems it is the lack thereof that does the damage.

Initial impressions are formed within the first minute of meeting someone. In that time you’ve already subconsciously weighed someone up, and formed an opinion that is hard to shake off.

What can you see in a minute? You can’t gauge a person’s intelligence, their humour or personality. But what you can, what you do, is judge their appearance.

On the covers of magazines, the only time you see pictures of girls with frizzy hair and glasses, wearing “yesterday’s” clothes, with accompanying articles about how they got their dream job with their Harvard University scholarship is when someone is making a social comparison to the norm.

The norm being pictures of beautiful, impossibly slim women, and muscular, handsome men, all airbrushed to impossible standards of perfection. The real crime being that this is the image that lives in the subconscious mind as right. Anything else is not just undesirable, it is *wrong*.

It is not that women want to be these girls, it is that they think they *should* be them. Whether they graduated from university, or even finished high school, is irrelevant. Intelligence is a secondary concern to appearance, because those who are not pretty, are not considered as valid members of society. And belonging in the crowd will always be more important than improving yourself.

Psychological studies, such as the 1972 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology have shown that it is a commonly possessed human flaw to subconsciously attribute positive characteristics to attractive people. Meaning we are more likely to consider a pretty face as kind and intelligent, than someone with more average looks.

Consider the people you look up to. Chances are, most of them are physically attractive. Some of them may be intelligent, but it’s likely a lot of them aren’t.

Models, sports stars, actors, anyone and everyone who is aesthetically pleasing.

Think about the insults people throw around. ‘Bitchy’ might be one, ‘slutty’, another. Most likely you’ll hear ‘fat’, but hardly ever ‘stupid’.

“Is ‘fat’ really the worst thing a human being can be? Is ‘fat’ worse than ‘vindictive’, ‘jealous’, ‘shallow’, ‘vain’, ‘boring’ or ‘cruel’?”

Personally, I look up to JK Rowling. Not just for her writing, her intelligence that shines through every page, but for her personality and her opinions, like the ones expressed above.

But we are all too lacking in intelligent role models, the people society promotes are not those designed to encourage us to new heights of human brilliance, rather, those who can stand there and look pretty.

—

Every year, at my school, we do a public speaking competition, involving a 3 minute prepared speech and a 2 minute impromptu speech.

What do you think?

Outside of the Civic Centre where the competition was held, there was a lovely big grassy space where we sat, ate lunch, and played spotto.

The grass was really nice and green, and soft-ish, even if it was wet.

French is good.

Good is, well, green.