Hello, my lovely people.
So, amazingly, the 200K thing happened.
I mean...
OK.
It feels like just two months ago I was on 20K.
...It was.
I'm stunned, but...
Hi, hello. Welcome to everyone who is new, everyone who has come in.
I thought, since we have lots of new people,
that I would tell you some things about me and that then you can get to know me better
which feels like a really strange thing to say, because you've been watching a year and a half's worth of
videos in which I tell you personal things
about myself.
But! Here are some facts that you might not know.
Yes! In a completely random order.
Some of them may even be interesting.
My birthday is the 25th of January, 1989,
but I always think of myself as two years younger
because I was so ill for my teenage years that I genuinely don't remember two years of my life.
So I don't think they should count.
I'm allergic to rabbits, cats,
dogs, hairy caterpillars
(REALLY allergic to hairy caterpillars),
bark (I mean sap, mainly), grass (REALLY allergic to wild grass)--
Yeah. I actually once got out of a technology exam
that I had NOT studied for
(don't do that)
by going and rolling in wild grass with bare legs
and my entire legs came up in blisters and sores
and boils, and it was...
Eurgh. There was blood!
It was pus-y. It was not good.
I should probably remind you that I have neurological damage and therefore cannot feel all of my skin,
so it looked WAY worse than it felt.
Anyway, got out of the exam and didn't have to re-take it until the week after
when I had time to actually look stuff up.
My all-time favourite pairing: Buffy and Faith
from Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
They are my OTP.
They are perfect together.
I love everything
about them.
I have read possibly every Buffy and Faith fanfiction that there is on the internet.
Actually, no, I think I have--I have read every. ALL of them.
Every single one.
Even the bad ones, I'll read the first paragraph,
"Eh." Skip down a bit to see if it gets better.
And still give it a little go. See how long I can hold out.
But no. OK, no. But that still counts as reading.
My other favourite pairings are Kim and Shego
from Kim Possible;
Bubblegum and Marceline, from Adventure Time.
And yeah, there's a theme.
I also liked--kiiind of liked Blair and Serena
in Gossip Girl for a little bit, but not really, because I can't really understand the attraction
to Serena, so...meh.
But I did really like Bleighton, which is Blake Lively and Leighton Meester
because Leighton Meester is so God damn adorable, OK?
I also,
[clears throat] every time a Fast and Furious movie comes out,
read the Fast and Furious fan fiction
that has Letty and Dom in
for...yeah.
I mean, it only lasts three weeks, and they are my only straight pairing,
but...
every time.
Every time those films come out.
Following on from that, and you could probably see this one coming:
I write fanfiction.
Yeah. I've been doing it since I was thirteen.
[Quietly] God, that's a long time.
I have had three different usernames
and I'm never going to tell you
what any of them are.
But let's just say, if you read Buffy and Faith fanfiction, you have definitely read something I have written,
because I was quite prolific.
And again, I still do it now.
I didn't eat carbs for ten years.
Zero. Zilch. Nothing.
Not even gluten-free replacements.
Yup.
Noth--no, no.
I mean, it's not like I was on some incredible low carb diet,
although obviously I was,
but it wasn't intentional.
I just couldn't deal with that.
My body just thought that carbs were poison.
I am awful at responding to messages.
This is something I really don't like about myself. I find it...quite frustrating.
Because I'll get a lovely message
from my friend.
Get a little text message, look at it and be like, "Oh, yeah, yeah. That's so sweet!"
I think up the entire answer in my head
and then for some reason
I decide it's too much energy to take that from my head, put it in the text and press send.
So, I put it down, go, "Oh, I'll do that later!"
and then of course because it's already been opened,
it never gets looked at again.
I'm so sorry.
OK. I'll try--I will try. I will try harder.
I have a dent in my head.
I'm pretty sure this is because the ceiling fell in on my mother while she was pregnant with me.
I don't know. It's kind of--it's sort of like this. There's a literal...
There's a dent. There's a dent.
And
there's a bumpy bit at the back and for a while, between the ages of maybe ten to twelve,
the bump sort of grew and it was quite painful
and...
hard?
But no one ever did anything about it
because
no one listens to the child who cries wolf.
And anyway, then it stopped growing and shrunk back a bit, and now it's just kind of solid and there.
The great thing about that, though, is that the dent creates a kind of
natural valley for my headbands to sit in
or my bows.
In Chinese astrology, I am a Dragon.
An Earth Dragon, in fact.
And that fits me completely perfectly.
To a T. Seriously, go and look that up.
That's me.
And Claudia is a Rabbit, so we--we go together.
Lumping this in together as one fact:
My personality on the Myers-Briggs scale is ENFJ,
which I think also fits me quite well.
Which is:
ENFJs are very firm believers in people
and I think I am, too. I'm very optimistic
about people, humans, the world.
I think we're all good people.
I am obsessed with growing my hair.
I--I just... I just!
And yet I keep cutting it. Why, Jessica?
Why?
When I was four, the little girls who lived next door to me held me down and cut off my hair,
because it was the same colour as Barbie hair.
And then my mother gave me a hair cut to try and salvage this.
The mushroom hair.
Yeah. It genuinely--it looked like I had a mushroom on my head.
It was quite possibly the worst thing
you could do to a child's hair.
And I didn't let anyone cut my hair for ten years after that
NO.
But then, unfortunately, I got to fourteen and I decided that I was becoming a woman now
and that meant taking off all of my lovely hair!
Who knows why?
Since then, it's kind of gone up and down and
you know, ish.
But it's never really been that long
lovely, luscious hair that I want it to be.
That's what I want. That's all I want.
'Cause when you curl your hair
it just gets shorter.
Basically, I just want Jessica Rabbit hair. I mean, who doesn't? Hair goals.
This might just be feeding the trolls, but
I still get upset when someone says, "You're not deaf."
It's not even an insult, but
it hurts.
I used to want to be an architect
but then I discovered that I hate modern architecture.
I'm really, really interested in houses, though. Kind of obsessed with them.
Almost. I mean...
public buildings are nice and all, but houses,
homes - that's where my interest truly lies.
Ooh, I spend too much time rightmove-ing.
My favourite periods are Georgian and Edwardian houses.
I have never lived in a modern house and I never intend to.
I--I can't deal.
I can't deal with it. There should be a breeze moving through at all times.
Obviously, I do like some classical architecture,
particularly Ancient Greek public buildings.
Not so much the houses, though, so...
My favourite place in the world is the Lake District,
which is in England,
if you did not know.
My grandparents bought a place there when my mother was just six-weeks-old
and then they retired there later on
and we would go for every school holiday, and I loved it.
It was such a magical place; I felt like every time I was there, I was dreaming.
I want to keep going there every year
for the rest of my life.
What could be better
than a peak
and a lake?
And woodland
and forest.
And as you can see from our Lake District travel vlogs
that we made, not even rain stops us.
It's just too beautiful.
To make my little brother happy, for around five years, from maybe the ages of seven to twelve,
I pretended to be a...dolphin, called Zoe,
every time I hit the water on a family holiday.
No speech.
No legs - no, no. I was all Zoe,
all the time.
And thus, I am now fluent in dolphin.
And my brother can swim. That was probably the more important part.
My favourite animal is a peacock!
You probably could've seen that one coming.
I drink every drink through two straws
because, well, I drink an awful lot, and there's no straw big enough to get enough
liquid in it, you know?
Also, if you're drinking through a bottle,
and you put your straws in, you'll notice it gets all fizzy,
but if you have two straws and you drink through just the one straw, but leave the other open to the air,
then it stops the bottle from fizzing over.
Also works on cans.
I am generally always cheerful.
Because I don't see a point in not being.
I'm very, very empathetic and I tend to absorb the emotions
of everyone and everything around me.
If I'm reading a book and the protagonist is having a hard time,
then I start feeling like I'm having a hard time.
[Sadly] Oh!
It's not very productive, because then I find myself crying about problems that aren't even mine.
For this reason,
I like to fill my life with happy media.
Claudia insisted I put this one in
but fine.
My--my unhappy face
is an upside-down smile.
Yeah.
Happy face.
Unhappy face!
Wait, wait, let's see if I can do it.
['Rainy day' sounds]
Yeah. Genuinely. That is my unhappy face.
Claudia says it is very hard to take me seriously when I'm unhappy.
...Yeah.
I am probably one of the worst people to get into a fight with.
If you try and start something
I will just walk away, because
I don't care
for that.
Claudia and I have never had an argument
because why would we? Nothing's more important than our relationship.
If we disagree on something,
which is actually incredibly rare,
but if we do, it kind of goes along the lines of,
"I really like this thing. Oh, you don't like this thing?"
"OK, er, why don't you?"
"Very valid reasons. I see."
"Well, here are my reasons for liking it."
"Yeah, you know what? It seems like you dislike it more than I like it."
"So, we'll just not have it."
It's very simple. but it works.
I love historical fiction.
Absolutely, completely obsessed with it.
Yes!
Whether it's books, TV shows,
films - oh!
If it's fiction
kind of based on fact;
little bit of history thrown in there
- ooh, a lot of history thrown in there
- it makes me soo happy.
I am always writing at least three books at once.
Always.
On my phone.
I tend to write them on my iCloud, so they're safe.
[Thunder claps]
But the thing is: I'm genuinely always writing.
I'll be there, having my dinner, and then suddenly
I'll be sitting on a bus, and suddenly
I'll be pretending to watch TV, but really
I basically just love writing. I've always written books, ever since I was a tiny, tiny little one
and it's what I hope to do for the rest of my life.
I promise they won't all be about Buffy and Faith.
Sorry, mother.
So, there you go - there's twenty facts about me.
I hope you enjoyed. I hope you found out some things about me that maybe you didn't know before.
Ooo.
Thank you so much for subscribing; for joining us;
for just being part of this really amazing...thing
that appears to be happening in my life.
Wow.
I hope you stick around. I hope that I can continue to make content that you really enjoy.
That inspires you or educates you, or just makes you happy.
If you're new here, then also hi, hello.
Please come, subscribe, join me.
Follow me on my social media channels, which will all be in the description down below.
I say "all of" - it's really just Instagram and Twitter.
Sometimes I put things on Facebook, but I don't do the Snapchat stuff because that confuses me.
Now, here's a game for you if you're still watching:
I want you to write down below in the comments when you first found me.
It doesn't have to be the exact day, obviously.
That would--that would be...probably kind of difficult to do.
Just the general month
/ year.
How long have you been here? Has it been a month?
A week? A day?
A year? Five years?
Why would you have been following me five years ago? Did I make videos five years ago?
Oh, I did!
Ooh, I did. Ooh, university.
Oh, yeah!
Again, thank you for joining me, and I will see you next video.
Bye-bye, my loves.