Who were you...

Do people change much after school. I had an old school mate around for Tea at the weekend and we dragged out the old school yearbooks to try and remember some faces.

Out of 90 girls in our year about 10 girls to my horror I couldn't remember at all. The rest of faces came flooding back with juicy gossip and some long forgotten rivilary. Once we had the faces we then needed to combine who was in what group. It's amazing how much like a bad American kids tv show we had "the quiet, nerdy girls", "the beautiful, popular girls", "the edgy, gothy girls", and then you had stand out individuals "the attention seeker" and "the annoying know it all".

Those beautiful, popular girls are still that - whenever I'm out in Limerick I see them - all still one big intimating group somehow taller, slimmer and better dressed than everyone else. They were the girls who had stepped out of a sweet valley high novel with straight A's, a gorgeous boyfriend in college and who's shirt collars were always chrisp, white and prefect. The gothy girls still haven't lost their edge I see them only on facebook living their bohemia lifestyle. The rest I don't see so can only presume or imagine what they are like.

What was I? A floater I think. I could wear pink floaty tops with light coloured jeans and then pottered off to Doc's but also could wear a velvet purple corset dress with too much black eyeliner and potter off to Termites. I was more a geek than nerd and managed to get detention a lot dispite being a good student and getting on quite well with the teachers. People still describe me with the same words "cuddly","nice" or "mad?". All these descriptions I hate but most people hate tags on their personality.

I find it interesting to think of people I work with as "who were they in school" - you can spot the ringleader, the follower, the loner, the nerd, very quickly.

To Spoil or Not To Spoil

Last night at about 2am I found a blog with massive spoilers for ep.1 of S3 of Torchwood. I didn't blink and had read the whole thing in 5 seconds flat. It was one of the best spoiler experiences of my life! Torchwood (like my fav. non cancelled show) ep.1 was meant to air at Easter but the cruel BBC have been pushing and pushing it back - until (we hope) settling on July 20th (a slot you give a programme if you want it to die a horrible death may I add - what are the BBC up too?) The trailers have been brilliant so I just couldn't help myself when I found the spoilers. I never do - Bones, Ugly Betty, Battlestar G, in fact every other Torchwood Series I'd read ahead- I simply can't help myself. Would I enjoy the programme more if I didn't know the juicy gossip (and it's really juicy)? Yes.

An interesting point I learnt at sales training back with SOS - Deferred gratification or delayed gratification is the ability to wait in order to obtain something that one wants. This ability is usually considered to be a personality trait which is important for life success. Daniel Goleman has suggested that it is an important component of emotional intelligence. People who lack this trait are said to need instant gratification and may suffer from poor impulse control.

The marshmallow experiment is a famous test of this concept. In the 1960s, a group of four-year olds were given a marshmallow and promised another, only if they could wait 20 minutes before eating the first one. Some children could wait and others could not. The researchers then followed the progress of each child into adolescence, and demonstrated that those with the ability to wait were better adjusted and more dependable, and scored an average of 210 points higher on an IQ test.



I'd of ate the marshmallows...

InspiredByRebecca

Very few people in these recessionary days are inspirational. So I do have to blog quickly about my good friend Rebecca Thorn.

The majority of us mill about like giant ants all our life (and there is nothing wrong with it) commuting to 9-5 jobs to come home to our now devalued houses to watch reality TV before eventually reproducing new ants - 80% of which won't study higher level maths. A few people however are always thinking, plotting, planning and being creative will stand out from the ground. To have the self belief, patience, talent and interest to try and succeed at something outside the norm is admirable which is no doubt why the rest of us who don't have the self belief, patience, talent or a big enough interest enjoy the likes of Britian's Got Talent or The Apprentice. Part of us likes to see an ant like us succeed - while the other part of course gets out the magifying glass like in Susan Boyle's case. 

Amongst the Grasses - DesignedbyRebecca would of made an excellent reality show. How one talented woman but amateur gardener came up with an excellence garden design, submitted her entry to InBloom and was a success. Work done? Roll credits? Nah! I "helped" on one or two occassions during the 3 week dig and by help I mean I brought my hardworking boyfriend - The interesting thing I watched was as with all first timers (whether it be putting on a concert, a debate or a garden) - nothing goes to plan - when where what how is not out of a book or part of a carefully plotted to do list but an improvisation or a piece of advice acted upon. 

So I haven't spoken about the third & fouth kind of ants - I've covered the main type of ants who use facebook at work and eat a lot of ready meals and the few and far between ants on the other end of the scale who are talented and pro-active but somewhere inbetween there are ants who try to stand out for one brief minute but when it gets too hard they give up and then there are ants who try and try - again and again - and then succeed. 

So at times during the 3 week dig at Bloom amongst the grasses it rained really hard - so Rebecca and her volunteers wore rain gear, no one knew how to operate a digger so they learned, they didn't have enough plants they somehow found more, so many mini dramas one after the other and Rebecca didn't give up and just go home she finished her garden and it was bloody great. Best described as a movie set - I could imagine Kiera Knightley sitting in the garden with a nice cup of tea(in the end it was Mary Kennedy). I really had this amazing urge to run through the grasses obviously I didn't but it was calling me! Better still it was garden that taught important lessons - now you could say "wouldn't it have been boring if it'd gone smoothly and the right amount of plants had turned up". Rebecca is now armed with experience and thats a stepping stone between talent and a gold medal in the years to come if you ask me.