It’s relatively easy to use it correctly. The rules are fairly simple, once you understand them. But to use it perfectly gives a sentence wings. It’s quite possibly the only thing you can add to a piece of bloated prose to make it lighter. When it’s used perfectly, the semi-colon is like a letterless super-word. It’s like an invisible hand that lifts your sentence into ethereal realms.

The corollary, of course, is that there is nothing more offensive in the English language (other than the word naivety — which, unhappily, is a word without an efficient synonym, otherwise I would never use it at all) than a misused semi-colon. Nothing sticks out more glaringly. When it’s used properly, it’s like a tiny, hair-thin component in some well-oiled machine. But when it’s used in the wrong place it sticks out like pube in a restaurant napkin — that you only discover after it’s too late, after it’s already started making its way across your palate to the back of your mouth.

The better something is, the more foully and more completely can it be corrupted. A frog, for example, can’t really be good or bad. Nor can a cow, in any meaningful sense, be thought of as wicked. You can have a bad dog, of course, and a reprehensible man, but it takes an evil genius to really wreak havoc.

Likewise, you can scatter your text with superfluous apostrophes, and you merely look like a jabbering, toothless, cross-eyed idiot who smells of cow manure. You can slash all of your sentences into pieces with dashes until nobody knows where they are any more, or overuse an ellipsis to give the impression that you struggle to draw breath — or worse, write them with too many or too few dots, as if hoping to alter the volume of your dramatic pause. You can even leave your sentences strewn with commas that are like spent underwear on a bedroom floor, tripping your readers up and disgusting them with your slovenly habits at the same time.

All these errors are ridiculous but, let’s be generous, forgiveable (at a stretch at least). It’s only with a semi-colon that you can truly pervert perfectly good orthography into something heinous, something that stings the eyes in the same way as cigarette smoke. Nothing kills copy quicker than a semi-colon dropped haphazardly into a sentence. Bam. Suddenly it ceases to be meaningful communication, and collapses immediately into a collection of strange curved lines that once had something to do with the alphabet.

Be warned, then, aspiring writers: the semi-colon is not to be trifled with. Use it with too much caution. Use it as a surgeon uses his scalpel (having undertaken meticulous study and training). If you get it right, you will delight your readers. Get it wrong and, well, thanks for coming.

Comparison happens because we are all different. It will probably always happen. But how you handle comparison is what can make it a good experience or a bad one.

Comparison can be a really destructive force. It can wreck your confidence, ruin your self-image, cause you to try to be something you’re not. It can poison friendships with jealousy. It can cause you to give up on something you enjoy doing, or that you’re good at. It can discourage you from reaching a goal. It can make you devalue your existing achievements.

This is bad comparison. There’s also good comparison. Good comparison is what happens when we meet an inspiring person. There’s a sense of admiration and also the feeling that you could do what they have done, or if not that, then something similar. Good comparison can cause you to move towards better things. It builds confidence. It makes you feel good about your future. It turns intimidation into inspiration.

It’s a bad one if it causes damage to your confidence, or if it causes you to give up. It’s a good one if you learn from it and grow from it.

Turning bad comparison into good comparison is simple, but takes a bit of effort. The basic rule is the same one that underlies good mental and emotional health. Apply positivity to negativity. Stick with that, for long enough, and you will see vast improvements over time.

There are two things that I do when I feel intimidated by someone else, and they both begin with A. Accept and Appreciate.

Accept

Acceptance is telling yourself the truth about a situation. It means you stop lying to yourself, and you’re honest with where you’re at. Here’s a truth that’s painful to accept at first: there will always be people better than you at any given task. Once we accept that and make peace with it, we will be a lot happier and a lot more productive. You’ll begin to realise that you’re valuable because you’re you, not because of what you’re good at.

Acceptance also means you accept yourself just as you are. We place all kinds of standards and requirements on ourselves that we have to meet before we’ll consider ourselves OK. This is a difficult barrier to overcome, but with persistence you can bring it down.

Sometimes just saying, “I like myself” can take the pressure off. Say this before you meet your goals. Say this even if you don’t have any goals. Having a kind and gentle attitude towards yourself is actually really important. It’s worth investing into, and it’s not a selfish thing to do.

Appreciate

Comparison very easily turns into jealousy. Jealousy happens when we’re done damaging our own self-image, so we move onto other people! When we’re jealous of someone, we start looking for ways to bring them down. We look for failings, character flaws, mistakes — anything that makes them look worse so we can feel better. It’s a really ugly attitude, and it doesn’t do anyone any good.

Jealousy is worse than a waste of time. It’s a harmful use of your time and energy. It damages you. Instead of allowing jealousy into your soul, find a way to appreciate that person and the talent that they have. Admire it like you’d admire a good painting, or a piece of music. Analyse how they do it to see if you can learn from them. If you know them well enough, ask them a few questions.

If it’s not possible to learn from them, just be happy for them. Do everything you can to apply positivity to negativity. If jealousy is a struggle for you, remember to treat yourself with patience and kindness while you’re learning to get it under control. Jealousy already beats you up on the inside — there’s no point beating yourself up any more!

I hope this helps. Comparison is something that can really do a lot of damage to people, I really hope that these ideas have inspired you!

Prayer should be raw. True. Honest. Say what you really think, otherwise you’ll go no-where. It should be instinctive. Intuitive. Pray for what you want, not for what you think you should want. And never feel guilty for praying for yourself.

Don’t do all the talking, however. Don’t pray and then hang up the phone. Keep listening. When God speaks it’s nothing flashy, most of the time. It sounds just the same as your own thoughts, only there’s a peace and a sense of life and cleanness about them. People either take spirituality too seriously, or they make it spooky. It’s neither, even though it is serious and it is “mystical”.

The word “spirit” is from the Latin word “spiritus” meaning breath. Spirituality is as ordinary, everyday and easy as breathing.

Stay alert for “promptings”. Sometimes it doesn’t feel right to be so “honest” (i.e. moan about something), but to be grateful, or to pray for someone else instead.

Yes, this makes me an awful geek, but it will save much of my sanity. I hope that this helps you as much as it will help me!

I’m a natural depressive and pessimist. That means, I immediately spot the problems in ideas, the costs, the downsides, the ways it won’t work, the reasons why we shouldn’t do it.

Let me tell you, if you’re the same type of person, that being loyal and faithful to that side of your character will close down your life. You will get smaller and smaller till one day you realise that you’ve no life to speak of. Better for that revelation to come when you’re still young than when you get old, believe me!

The trick is to keep building positivity. Invest into a habit of positive thinking. The more you do it, the better you’ll get. The more you train your brain to be positive, the more opportunities you’ll see for good things. Sometimes the trouble isn’t that there’s not any opportunities, it’s that you see them all as problems. Problems are opportunities, it just depends what glasses you have on: the rose-tinted ones or the poo-tinted ones (remember diamonds and dog turds?).

Poo-tinted glasses see the turd. Rose-tinted glasses see the diamond. I guess in “reality” both the diamond and the turd are there. In one sense, pessimists and optimists are both realists. It’s not so much a case of seeing problems/opportunities, it’s more a case of whether you value the benefits enough to pay the costs. If you’re starting a business, do you value it enough to go through the hard times setting it up? If you really want to build your own house, do you value that dream enough to go through budget problems and design flaws and materials running out, etc. Pessimists don’t care enough about the dream to go through all the hard work.

Building optimism is hard work, but the more you do it, the easier it gets: the less unpleasant it is to say yes to things you can’t be bothered to do and the more you enjoy the process of getting there.

Anyway, my question to you, my readers, is what should I do about the address? I have already bought some domain names for them, but can’t afford the hosting just yet. In the interim, which is better:

• joy.beingmrkenny.co.uk
• beingmrkenny.co.uk/joy

It’ll only be for about a year, but which do people find easier as a web address?

I’ve never really liked Microsoft’s offering to the search engine industry, mainly because I don’t like its online presence. I hate MSN, I hated hotmail, I don’t like Live mail. I think they are all inferior products, and I really can’t understand why people don’t make the switch to Google’s online products. Up until now I would never have given Microsoft’s search engine another look, but I don’t like things staying the same for too long so I thought I’d give it a spin.

Firstly, I think Bing is much prettier than Google. They have a new background image every day, and the whole design is obviously more deliberate than Google’s 1990s colour scheme. I appreciate that. I never liked Google’s boring logo, nor its ugly results page.

Also, the images search function is light years ahead of Google’s. With Google you get 20 pages of about 100 image thumbnails that you have to laboriously scroll through. With Bing you get a sidebar of thumbnails which is refreshed with Ajax. You never have to leave the page, and you can still view all of the thumbnails it finds. I like the efficiency, convenience and cleverness of it.

They’ve copied Google’s novelty logo idea. Google puts up a special image for Christmas, New Years’ and special occasions, like famous scientists’ birthdays. There the focus is on learning more about, e.g., the famous scientist. With Bing, it’s more about you using their search engine, which I don’t like. It’s a sneaky way of promoting yourself by promoting someone else. It’s funny to see how deep that runs in Microsoft. They’ve resisted web standards, preferring instead to release their own proprietary codes, right up until IE7. I really hate this tendency in Microsoft.

As for what was going through their heads when they called it Bing, I can only hazard a guess. It’s a dreadful, awful name. Interesting to see that they’re stepping away from all their other branding (Microsoft, MSN, Windows, Live, etc).

I hate, and will always hate, multimap. This is probably irrational, much like my hatred of Yahoo. And there’s video adverts on the main page. I hate video adverts.

As for the quality of its search results — obviously the most important thing — I haven’t really looked into it all that much. I guess my expectations in that area are mostly unconscious ones, so I’ll continue to do side-by-side comparisons for a while till I find out what I prefer.

So far, Bing doesn’t feel like proper searching yet. I must confess I don’t really care. (It’s not exactly the most hugely important question in life, is it.) What wins is whatever works easiest. Bing is pretty and excellent with images and media, but has a dreadful name. Google has a boring design, but it’s familiar.

It’ll be interesting to see how it all pans out in the long run. My personal prediction is that in a year or so they’ll have another rebrand (they’re on their fourth as it is). We’ll be introduced to “Swish”, or some other equally silly name, but unless they do something fundamental to searching online muchbetter than Google it will fail to raise much interest.

Maybe pay people every time they use Bing. And change that wretched name!

It was really good fun! I booked it about a fortnight ago, and it made me feel grown-up and responsible. I encourage you all to take your diary right now and book in a check up! (I also registered with a doctor a few months ago, and I have just filled out an electoral roll form — I am all about the taking responsibility at the moment).

The appointment went much as I expected it. I used to want to be a dentist when I was about 14 (ha ha!). This came about because we learned about teeth in biology, and I found the whole thing blindingly fascinating.

Isn’t that weird?

Interesting enough that, when I had 4 pre-molars taken out to make space for my crooked teeth to move about it, I kept them. I still have them today in a film cannister (remember them, before the days of digital cameras?). They’re about an inch long, with the root, and I think they’re pretty cool. I’ll show you them if you ask nicely.

Anyway, I listened to the dentist reporting the status of my teeth to her assistant, and I mostly knew what she was talking about. I actually quizzed her at the end of the appointment. I’m like some kind of dental geek. I asked her about my wisdom tooth, because she’d said, “8 … watch” so I thought “Uh-oh dental caries!” and it turns out I have a small one forming that may need filling, but maybe not. (Teeth are numbered 1-8, 1 being the incisors at the front, 8 being the wisdom teeth right at the back).

I’m a little sad about that, actually. My wisdom teeth are only about 6 years old, and they’ve still got that new feeling to them. Kinda like when you buy a new pair of shoes, except they’re smaller and in my mouth. And sharper, on average, than my other molars. It’s a shame that one of them already has signs of decay.

Anyhoo, turns out I need two small fillings in tooth 6 or 7, I forget which, so I’ve got another visit coming up in October.

Hooray for NHS dental treatment, by the way! I walked past the practise the day after it opened. How lucky! I bloody love the NHS. Goodness me, thanks to Obama and all the American opposition to health care reform — and all those snide comments from across the pond about the quality of our teeth — I suddenly feel very proud of my country and its fraught-with-problems health service (a friend and I recently spent 7 hours in A&E). It may be inefficient, but it beats the horrors of health insurance. Just ask any American family on low income.

P.S. Isn’t it great? This is the first silly post on this blog in a long time.

These things are truly painful circumstances to deal with. They’re burdens to carry.

The way to deal with them is to do just what you do with a burdern — bear it. Because these are problems that involve other people’s free will, you can’t solve them like you do other problems. Let’s not be lazy: you should try to solve them as and when you can. But do so with the utmost care, and recognise that A) it will take a long time, and B) it may never be solved.

So what do you do? Here you are with a big, emotionally costly problem that will be around for a long time.

The answer is to let the burden strengthen you, instead of weaken you. If your boss is unappreciative, stop trying to please him and just do the best you can, and count it all as generosity towards the company you work for. You end up being a bigger person as a result. If your friend is controlling and bossy, learn to stand up to it, and use the emotional pressure as a motivation to get some steel in your backbone. If your parents are critical, take the difficult but incredibly rewarding journey towards a more independent self-esteem.

Above all, learn forgiveness. Forgiveness isn’t for their benefit, it’s for yours. It doesn’t mean being a fool and staying open to the hurts, but it does mean refusing to see the other person as a monster and letting hatred eat you up on the inside. Twisting the knife only ever happens in your own guts!

(If you’re reading on Facebook, check it out at beingmrkenny.co.uk!)

(Take a while to go through these questions, actually. It’s not just a gimmick I came up with.)

• Does worry help you sleep?
• Does worry help you solve problems?
• Does worry make you feel better about difficult situations?
• Does worry promote well-being in any important area of your life (relationships, finance, job)?
• Does worry help solve problems that you can’t really solve anyway (e.g. the recession)?

So does worrying have any kind of positive impact whatsoever in your life? No it does not! So why on earth do we do it so much? Genuine question! What’s the point?! Worry does nothing. You are not being irresponsible by refusing to worry about something. Worrying about a problem isn’t the same as trying to solve it, so it’s at best useless, and at worst, harmful.

I realised this one night when I was in bed. As ever, my brain sprung into action, winding itself tighter and tighter around a problem area in my life at the moment.

I suddenly realised that now was not the time and place to be trying to come up with solutions, much less make them larger in my head. It was the time for restful sleep! Since my brain was being naughty, I told it off.

Seriously, I literally told my brain off. “Listen up, brain, now is not the time for such rubbish!” And such like. Sometimes you literally have to prise thoughts away from your own mind, like getting a stick from a dog. It’s a sheer act of will.

Practical steps

When you take something away from a baby (scissors, screwdrivers, the cat’s tail) you need to make sure you give it something else or it will miss the thing it was holding before. Your brain is just like that. Stop the worrying with willpower, and then force yourself to think about something else. If you’re trying to sleep, think about the sea, or a summer’s day or whatever New Age-y imagery you want to use to help you sleep. For me, it has to be a pleasant day dream that develops naturally without much effort.

Writing down concerns is also helpful. It lets your worry-brain know that you’re taking its concerns seriously. Listening can be a really powerful tool.

If you’re worried about a job or some problem, I find a physical aid like a brainstorm is really helpful. It gives me something concrete to focus on instead of the formless crap inside my head.

Also, the more good stuff inside your brain, the more likely it is to come out. So fill your head with helpful books, films, TV, conversations, music. Then you’re more likely to produce positive stuff!

Read more

• Anxiety Culture
• How to stop worrying
• How to stop worrying and why

It didn’t!

Instead I found independence difficult, even though it was that funny kind of semi-independence where you went home at the holidays. I reckon most people don’t get a black-and-white “leaving home” experience, you do it (psychologically at least) over some years, I guess. But anyway. I found my student experience quite disappointing. I didn’t feel like I made the lifelong friends I had hoped I would make. I felt I’d left them all behind back at home. (In reality, I did make them, it’s just you don’t recognise them as such when you’re right there!) I didn’t get any epiphany moments as to what my career would be.

My student experience was one of confusing, half-formed feelings that melded into one another. It was hard to tell one apart from the other, despite my most strenuous analytic efforts.

And it just occurred to me, meeting up with a friend from those days, that not a lot has changed. Those feelings are still all mixed up and confusing, four years on. Now, there’s just more distance between me and them. I can look at them as an observer. It’s like visiting a museum.

I still have those same questions, too, but they’re not the menacing monsters they used to be. I have no idea how to answer, “Who am I?” but I’ve realised it’s not a question you can answer in words. Or not completely at least. Plus “I” is something that keeps changing, anyway.

Life is messy and refuses to fit into the boxes I try to put it in. But I like that. I guess I have always liked it, but back then “like” seemed to have a whole lot more pain in it. I don’t know. I haven’t lived life perfectly, but then no-one has, and I don’t believe that anyone really knows what “perfect” is anyway, so it’s effectively a meaningless question, but it’s funny how those questions we can’t quite answer are the most important. And enjoyable to try to answer! You have to answer them not just with thoughts thought, or words spoken (or written) but with life lived. You spell them out with the trail of the life you lead.

Well, my first reaction would be the same as to his question. Laugh delightedly. Well you would, wouldn’t you? The biggest worry in life (for me, anyway) would suddenly evaporate. It would be like being promised that you would never be rained on again, even if it was raining, there would be little rain-free bubble around you keeping you dry. (Maybe also the rain-drops would sing little songs to you as they passed, but maybe this is just my imagination taking things too far, though you have to admit … it would be pretty cool.)

I guess the second thing I would do would be to walk around feeling like I was floating a foot from the ground. All those projects that would suddenly become possible. All the things you could fund. You could solve so many of the world’s problems at once. In fact, you would immediately become the world’s only bank. You could lend as much as people wanted, and never worry about being paid back. You could give everyone else infinity money too, since you can never diminish infinity.

If you take the question to its logical conclusions, your having infinity money would totally change the world. Economics would be turned on its head. All financial motivation would be forever eradicated. People would no longer work for money, they would work for love. Social barriers would come down, or at least be revolutionised. Wow, thinking about all the possibilities makes the mind boggle. Society would be deeply and profoundly changed, forever. Think of it, capitalism and communism would become the same thing. Greed would be irrelevant. What would happen to business and employment?

But then, I guess something else would become valuable. Money would no longer be used as money. Something else would become sought after — what would that be? Natural resources? Mental ability?

Zooming back in to the original intentions of the question, though (and with some quick reinterpreting of the question) what would I do with infinity money, if that money was somehow limited so as not to change the world, only to remove financial limitations on myself?

This is a damn good question. How long it takes for you to come up with an answer shows you what dreams you have, and how much of them are limited by money. Would having no money worries suddenly satisfy your every desire?

Hmmm. This was an offhand question, but it’s really got me thinking. What’s important to you? What would you do if money was no longer a worry (or a temptation)?

Mood swings are just like this. When you’re happy, the world looks great, full of promise and wonder. When you’re down, everything is horrible — abject misery, and doom, doom, doooooooom. I’m being dramatic but actually it’s not far off how you can feel. I’m not just talking about feeling a bit blue, I mean the long term down-ness that can affect people (read: me).

Some people are less swayed by their emotions than others, and it’s certainly wise to make every effort to be consistent regardless of your feelings. But for those of us still on the journey, how do you keep going when the harbour’s empty? I ask myself, what’s at the bottom of the harbour?

In amongst the rusty nails and seaweed and dead fish, I find a few gems. There’s one called, “I am not a victim”. I may not be in total control of a situation, but I can change the way I see it. For example, I can choose whether I see a long day in a job that I am not passionate about as another example of how the world is rubbish, or I can choose to see it as an investment in the bank of “Time to start following your dreams!”

They don’t even have to be particularly clever, these gems at the bottom of your harbour. Another of mine is, “Life is good and it’s worth carrying on.” You know, when you feel fine, it’s embarrassing to remember that sometimes you need a bit of a boost. But when the tide is out, it’s good to remember that things didn’t always look this way, and that they will get better.

I also have a picture of my dreams. Your dreams are like mountain-tops, a long journey away, but there all the same. When you’re at the bottom of the harbour it’s not always easy to see those mountain tops, because they’re obscured by the walls. Looking at the photo isn’t as good as looking at the real thing, but it reminds you that you still have dreams, even if they seem impossible at the moment.

I keep photos of my family there too. And there’s a laptop connected to all the blogs I read! And of course there’s always prayer. It’s inestimably helpful to have God knocking around in your desperation. (Although he does have a habit of turning seemingly bottomless pits into mere hard work, so watch out for that if you were holding out for a pity party.)

What’s at the bottom of your harbour? Make sure that amongst all the detritus and debris that life strews across your path, there’s something that you put there, too. Otherwise it’s just rusty nails, seaweed and dead fish …