C'mon ya bhoy ya!

This guy is apparently the answer to our problems at Celtic...his name is Nakamura.

I enjoyed "lost in translation" so much that I reckon the Japanese can teah us a whole lot about a range of things...hopefully including Football.

One of the important things we can learn from the Japanese is the concept of Kaizen. Kaizen is the principle of improving a little bit at something every day....not big mad leaps and buck leps...just a consistent gradual practicing and honing and improving every day over your whole life.

I'm a hoor for the big leaps....and if i fall I then feel sorry for myself for ages..and reckon the thing was too difficult or that it's easy for them.. they have...whatever (substitute your own excuses).

anyway.....I know the Kaizen works....just needs a bit more patience that Paul McKenna.....I hope you man Nakamura works too.

It's been very busy in newton land ....working like hell....looking forward to a few weeks of in August.... we we're rubbish in the Senior championship on Sunday.....have to go to training now...have a feeling I should not really mention the Kaizen thing there

Cheers

P.

Cast a cold eye!

Wonder what William Butler Yeats would have made of your man?

The object of my desire.

I want that one!

This is the apple powerbook, 17 inch portable computer and I am going to get one. Mainly because they are just too drop dead gorgeous ( have always had a weakness for drop dead gorgeous).

I have had such a brilliant working week, the new contracts that developed this week will ensure that the business has a superb year, and I am not even sure how the latest pitch to m******s is going to work out, I know I will get some stuff from it, but It could be huge! Anyway..... It is important to stick to the knitting as well so on Monday and Tuesday I will be one on one with the new *** man in Mayo.

And also this week the Roscommon "masters" team I play on qualifed for the All Ireland semi final, which is deadly, the game is apparently fixed for the sixth of august, we will have to see how it goes....but its nice to be there.

Have a busy weekend ahead, training tonight, community games connaught finals tomorrow, watching organising and refereeing, and then sunday its the senior championship.... around that I have to fit in revamping the front (quiet) room, cut the grass, eat a few meals, blah blah blah.

Its a powerbook, its slim and sexy and just totally gorgeous and its about 2700 euro, and I already have a perfectly good laptop.

This job with m*******s, I am going to buy myself one of these out of the first cheque, its a business expense after all and I do deserve it.

Have a lovely weekend, did I mention the powerbook..................

Wow!

It"s a weird and wonderful life at the moment, Ive a lot of work on, a lot of work to prepare for, and a lot happening in all the other areas of my life.

Ive just been asked to tog out for the senior team on Sunday, I was not planning to be with them this year because I could not commit with the business and everything, but its lovely to be asked now, Ive gotten in 7 or 8 weeks good training and I am thrilled, I love being involved, feeling "part of" something.

Tomorrow night I have an All Ireland quarter final for the Roscommon over 40s, this is something else I have really enjoyed this year, it would be great to get to the semis of final in this, they are a good bunch of fellas and some of them are fifty years of age, its inspirational.

Today I have a day more or less in front of the computer, I have a presentation to a very big company tomorrow and its vital that microsoft publisher makes me look as good and experienced as I am, I often have doubt about these things, I know Im really good, and these guys have told me that they are sick of bringing in people from England to do this work, but I have to be on a par or better to get the work, and this stuff is all about perception, so I have to put in the work.

This blog is mainly written for my benefit, its gets stuff out of my head and into some kind of order, if you read it or stumble upon it, id love the feedback, but I try to write it with only myself in mind.

Finally I have to say a word about friends, they enrich my life so much, I have a wonderful family who are the cornerstones of my life, but a lot of the flavour and wonderfulness is supplied by my friends, human connectedness is such an important thing for me, when I have that I am so much happier, so much more content within my own skin.


I know my sister Caroline in Boston reads this sometimes (Hi Caroline), so I just wanted to throw in a few pics from the last couple of weeks.

This is Cathy with Malcolm X.










Joy (pigtails) messin as usual with her community games relay team







Maggie at home with a very thoughful looking carmel (her little girl Lily is so gorgeous)






Thats all for now.....catch you later!

Choose Life

There's a great line at the start of the movie trainspotting, "I chose not to choose life, I chose something else"

The way I'm seeing it at the moment, we can either choose to live it or hide from it.

I've had my moments of hiding away from life, of not getting stuck into it, of not really communicating with people I need to talk openly with. I've hidden behind lots of things, (not heroin fortunately), but theres lots of ways to escape that are not as obvious as heroin.

I'm choosing again to engage with life, to get out there and show the world who I am and what I can do, some of them will like it and some may not, but I'll know that I won't go to my grave with my music still in me.

I choose to choose life.

Taking over the World

These lads we're always trying to take over the world, and always failing, but they would always be back the following week, trying again.

I'm trying again with stuff in my life now, trying to be more straight, more honest with myself and others, more clear in what I really want and more able to ask for help in getting there.

I need help to get to where I want to go, Can't get there on my own, I'm really lucky that I have fabulous people in my life who can help me to make sense out of "daftness" that somtimes is my head.

Sometimes when things are not going my way I tend to hide, I tend to hide myself and my feelings away from people and the last thing in the world I'll do is ask for help, but when It comes to the point where I have to ask, then people always come through for me.

Pinky and the Brain would have figured that out yonks ago

Skeletons in the cupboard

Dealing with other people I used to think "what you see is what you get" but I now know that everybody has "secrets" everybody has a dark side and everybody is less than honest (self preservation anyone?) with other people and even with themselves.

It's like we all have this editing suite in our heads where we make judgements on what to present to people. There is no such thing as total honesty, it's a stupid aspiration, and those who aspire towards it will drive themselves mental in their chasing of an impossible dream.

I trust no one, I know that if the stakes are high enough that everyone will fight to protect themselves, put anyone in a corner and they will fight to protect themselves.

The reason that desperate housewives was such a success (apart from the fact that there are some serious babes in it) is that everyone can identify with it, everybody has this alternate universe running in thier heads, and everybody knows that there is conflict between thier "internal" world and the external world that gets presented to everyone else.

Trying to get the two of these in tandem will definately drive you nuts,

Enjoy your secrets. I know I love mine.

My name is Inigo-Montoya

What a wonderful movie the Princess Bride was, stupid but wonderful.

I have been thinking a lot the last few days (too much) and I now know that I usually see my whole life as a competition, and everyone in it as a competitor.

Now I know where this comes from, when I was younger I would bring my school reports home and in some subjects I would get A's, but back then they also wrote down your position in the class, and unless I was 1st, my father was not happy, second was no good!

These days this thinking still haunts me, if I get up at 6 to go to work I feel good until I notice all the other people who have been up already and I feel like a loser, if I perform really well at something I feel good until I'm compared to someone better and then I feel a loser again.

The problem is simple, I see life as a competition in which I am up against everybody, in everything and therefore I simply cannot win. I cannot beat everybody and be the best at everything, It's impossible, my dissapointment (my fathers dissapointment) is inevitable.

Now I can decide to continually put myself through this drama with it's entirely predictable consequences, or I can withdraw from the competition. If I get up at ten nobody gives a fuck, If I get to work at 11 nobody gives a fuck, If I quit at 3.30 nobody gives a fuck, If I do my best and still finish 227th, who gives a fuck?

I am going to stop living my life as if it's going to be the lead item on the six o'clock news, as if it will be analysed in sundays papers, nobody really gives a fuck anyway so I'm just going to get on with it.

Possibilities

This is the newborn son of a friend, he's a bit tiny yet but we got on pretty well.

The world ahead is full of possibilities for both of us, granted he's 40 years younger than me and may well get to walk on the moon, but I have to understand that my life is also full of possibilities and that the things that will determine those possibilities are my beliefs, my choices and my courage.

What do I believe? I believe that we as humans have the ability, nay the duty, to create a better future for ourselves and our children. I believe that we are not "victims" of fate or circumstance and that we can drive the bus ourselves. We get to "choose" the type of life we get to live, in fact we have already "chosen" the one we are living right now.

"two roads diverged in a yellow wood" the famous Robert Frost poem sums up very well the dilemmas we face every day, the movie "sliding doors" did a good job of attempting to show two simultanious realities caused by choices and how we are defined by the choices we make. The only bits we ever get evidence for is the current reality, but would that have been different if we had made different choices, of course it would, if i had decided to emigrate to England instead of going to college, what would my life look like now?

We tend to try to justify our past choices by being glad for the place we are in now and saying we "would'nt have it any other way" but thats rubbish, the reality is that once we make our choices we "could'nt have it any other way" until we get to make a new present or future choice.

So our choices don't only exist in the past, we have present and future choices too, and what my life looks like when baby Conor is 10 will simply be a consequence of the choices I choose to make over the next ten years.

I choose to be fantastic, to live huge, to grasp life in two big hands, I choose to let go of the past, to release it's hold over me, I choose to move on, I choose to take chances, to risk being laughed at, to stop settling for mediocrity. I choose to be braver.

and finally what of courage, what does it mean for me?

It means to begin living to my own instincts, my own gut. To stop living my life so that others will feel safe or approve. To stop seeing life through the lenses of the past and to start to see and explore the infinite possibility that remains in my life.

starting now!