unlike the human brain, blogs deprived of nourishment can survive many months.

It's 3 am where I live and I just spent the last two hours googling people from my past. Even though you'd rather not admit it, you know you've done it before. It's a dangerous, dangerous tool, this Google thing.... I'm not sure why I did just spend an entire dollar of my monthly US $90 researching these people. Some, I knew personally; others, I've spoken no more than one word to in my entire life, and yet something drove me to go stalker on them.

It's a little odd, I know. But then, I'll be the first to admit that I'm little odd--I'm in Peace Corps for crying out loud. What I don't understand is why am I up late googling people two days before a less than half-finished grant proposal is due? What makes me take the nail and scratch it across the proverbial chalkboard, because, essentially, that is what late-night googling is? You google these people, often those you envied, you see what they've accomplished since you last heard of them, and end up feeling exactly as you would expect to at a 5 or 10 year school reunion where only one person succeeded and it wasn't you.

But it was different this time. (Yes, I have done this on more than one occasion... and so have you.) I came across their achievements, and I felt good. I was pleased to know that people had succeeded in some way, and hadn't, well, wasted their lives. I wasn't envious or disappointed that they had done great things or become great people (difficult to admit for most, but I'm telling you because I'm past it now and can understand the utter waste of life such negativity is). I was just a little sad. A little sad because, in all my time around them, more often than not, I wasted it judging them instead of allowing myself to look past our differences and to get to know them. A little sad because I thought that back then I was the person (who doesn't irrationally dislike/judge people or wish bad things upon them) that I'd striven to be.

I came across the blog of one of the above-mentioned stalkees. Let's call him Ivan because I had my first Russian lesson today and Ivan was part of it. I have never had a full conversation with Ivan. But I've known him, or known of him, since middle school. Yes... it's been a while. Ivan and I went to the same high school and college as well, where we may have exchanged a total of ten words. Ever. In high school, a lot of people I knew were, to put it mildly, obsessed with him, which unfortunately and automatically put him on my people-to-avoid and be-unreasonably-unkind-to list. I haven't really thought about Ivan since I last read of him in our school paper. But when my insomniac's google-search led to the blog he wrote as a high schooler, I was touched. He became a real person to me, one that I could have related to and appreciated back in the day, and I was saddened by my single lost opportunity to have gotten to know him. Sad that I was so completely different in reality from what I had striven to be at that point in life. Sad, but not regretful, because among the many insights into life this tremendous distance from life as I knew it has given me is that everything happens for a reason.

Everything happens for a reason, and that is why I am still up at 6 am writing this and wasting more precious pennies online. That is why I spent the night feeling contented that people I hardly know are happy/successful/whatever.

Everything happens for a reason, and that is why, despite my acceptance of this philosophy, my stalker side came out tonight to allow me to truly internalize it.

Everything happens for a reason, and that is why I deliberately ignored a person who potentially could have been a great friend. If I hadn't ignored him and been unkind during our one encounter, I wouldn't have googled him tonight. I wouldn't have found the blog, that got the gears in my rusty philosophical mind shifting again. I wouldn't have truly had the epiphany (which I thought I had already experienced before) that everything happens for a reason and that the person I've wanted to be all my life is, among other things, happy when complete strangers do well for themselves.

It's almost 7 am. Everything has a reason, even my nonsensical writing on a blog that I thought was defunct.