Graze is a new company that sends selection boxes of fresh fruit, dried fruit, mixed nuts and seeds, crackers, Japanese snacks like wasabi peas and crackers, honey roast cashew nuts (oh my goodness) and TONS of stuff like that.

I just got my first box. It had olives, fresh pineapple slices, raisins and dried banana slices.

You can choose from their wide range what kind of things you like, and they store your choices, and send you selections based on that. You can get them every day, every week, or every fortnight. Or twice a week. Or three times. Or whatever.

Seriously, their selections are amazing. There’s honey roast cashews, salsa tossed almonds, chocolate coated pumpkin seeds, puffed rice crackers, white chocolate coated blueberries, dark chocolate coated cocoa beans … it’s just stunning. And healthy!

Check them out at graze.com. If you use my code (JZZTQMD), you get the first one free, then the second half price! Normally they’re £2.99 You also get a code that you can give to people, and when they sign up, you get £1 off! (I’ve already gotten £2, thanks people!!)

Anyway. It’s worth signing up, even if it’s just for the free one — and you can cancel whenever you like. Visit http://www.graze.com/p/JZZTQMD (discount code is prefilled for you).

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It is my ambition, as a writer, to use the semi-colon perfectly. Perfectly, not merely “correctly” as in, ticks all the boxes, follows all the rules, well-done-good-and-average-servant.

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 is something we all do to one degree or another. It’s generally a harmful activity: we are naturally self-critical. When someone says something negative about you, it’s hurtful, but when you say something negative about yourself, it’s much worse. It stops you moving forwards, it closes down opportunities and it causes you to do the opposite of growth.

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!

Spot the deliberate mistake! There is no such thing as “properly”. OK, so I wrote this in brainstorm format, but I think it works better that way. It’s about prayer and spirituality and how these things look in ordinary life. Hope it helps.

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.

I use a Macbook, a PC, and then also Windows when it’s running on my mac (through remote desktop). I also use keyboard shortcuts like my life depends on it. These are not standardised across the various platforms, and it’s been driving me crazy when I press certain keys expecting the cursor to move to the end of the line, or whatever, and suddenly it disappears to the end of the file. So I’ve worked out what keys do what in each OS, and made a table.

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!

It’s such a massive cliche, but it’s really true. It’s just about being positive, but pro-actively positive.

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.

So I’m thinking of starting some new blogs. I keep posting stuff about personal development that I’d like to move to another blog. I’d also like to start a blog about teaching yourself a language. I have a real ambition to learn German, who knows why, and I think it would make a good blog! There’s also another blogging project that I had a while ago that I think would be good to resurrect, but I might seek guidance on that one.

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?