This is my 200th entry. I've been thinking for past two days that I should write something profound and meaningful for this milestone. then I smelled the coffee. I don't have anything profound or meaningful to say most of the time. It's not like I'm writing so that people 200 years down the road will marvel at my creative skills and insight into the human condition.I'm vaguely recalling a saying that the greatest form of flattery is imitation. The Chinese way of paying tribute to the greatest writers is to appropriate some text from their writing and making it their own. So, my point of this blog is to "appropriate" other's ideas and give it the Mannanmania treatment. Now that's creativity.
This is not my first blog. I started in Livejournal, documenting my dating and relationship frustrations two years back. Somehow, after three months, it seemed like a log of my pettiest thoughts, and weirdest emotions. And then I discovered this site while I was in Ethiopia, and wanted a place to put up the travel pictures with commentary, I discovered Blogspot. Then Google bought it and made it better. And now here I am.
How have blogspot made me better? If you look at the earlier entries, they were all smart-alecky, sarcastic and condescending. I was angry, upset, confused and felt hopeless, and needed an arena to vent my frustrations. I'm still angry, upset and confused, but somewhere along the way, I've found hope and a renewed faith in my potential. Things change, people come into your life, people leave your life, things happen, but you continue to grow and grow, absorb more and more and become a richer, more textured person. Someone joked this week when I was talking about layers that I'm becoming an onion, making others cry, but that's another story.
There's this other thing that I believe in: The power of wishing out loud. The picture on this entry is the ultimate proof of wishing out loud. On my Lycos profile in March 1999, I wrote, I really want to see Grand Canyon. I never thought about it, until I met Paul M in August 1999, then he had a work assignment in Phoenix, Arizona, and some frequent flyer miles, and somehow we ended up in Grand Canyon. The other two in the picture are Ishti and Shanto. Ishti I'm still friends with, Shanto I never met again after that one day. So, you can never predict who'll last, and who won't.
Similarly, after leaving ETV, I wrote on my blue notebook, "I want to go to Latin America" and forgot about it. After one year, I opened it again, and by this time, I've been to Bolivia for work. Within last 12 months, Myanmar and Beijing happened because I wished for them. I've put Egypt and Europe on my wish list. Let's see what happens when I review my list in April 2008.
Just three/four days ago, I wrote on my bluebook a new difficult wish. I wrote: "I want to forgive myself and move on with my life."
Onyl time will tell. Meanwhile, i'll keep doodling.
