I’m sad…

I LOVE this guy!  He’s retiring after this year’s US Open and I’m extremely sad.  He plays Nadal in the next round and though Nadal isn’t the greatest grass court player, I’m still afraid.  I just want Andre to have one last great year before he retires!

My Internet at home isn’t working and that pisses me off.  They can’t come to fix it until Monday which sucks even more.  I’ve been gone the last three weeks for work traveling to a bunch of different places.  It’s good to be back now knowing I don’t have any trips until the end of July.

I’m sad right now because my parents are in Houston for Bongoshamalan and this is the first year I’m not going.  Earlier on, I didn’t want to go.  It’s all crap anyway and I’m at that weird age where the NextGen stuff isn’t always fun and the adult stuff isn’t always fun.  It wasn’t until I looked on their website yesterday and saw that one of the seminars was being led by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni that I wished I was going.  It’s a seminar on Bengalis in literature and I know it’s one I would have loved.  I was reading and interview with her yesterday also and read that for her next book, she’s working on a story of the Mahabharata but from the females perspective.  No wonder I love this author so much.  I’ve read so many books by different authors that tell the stories of the Bible from the femals perspective or stories about Helen of Troy from her persepctive and when I’d read those, the one thing I’d always think to myself is that if I were a writer, I’d write stories about the Mahabharata from the female’s point of view and now I come to find out that my favorite author is doing this.  I met her last year and got her to sign one of my books, but I didn’t really get to talk to her and I wish I was there this year to do that.  In that same interview, she was talking about how she writes books about fantasy….almost fairytale like…like in Mistress of Spices  or Queen of Dreams.  She talked about how when she was a child back in Kolkata, she was influenced by stories from Thakurmar Jhuli, which translates to "Grandmother’s Sack (of tales)".  The funny thing is, just the day before I read this, I had found on line a english translated version of these old stories too and I had bought it.  Those are stories I grew up with.  My mom used to read them to me every night before I went to sleep and to me they were far more exciting than Cinderella or any other Western stories.  I’m excited about getting my book and I hope it lives up to my expectations.  From my childhood memories, I remember stories of princes being born in bodies of owls and monkeys and traveling far away and marrying beautiful princesses and comeing back to save their father the king and then revealing their true forms.  Or stories about a sister dressing like a man and climbing the toughest mountains to save her brothers who had been turned to stone by the evil witch.  Or the story of the two sisters, one who was kind and the other mean and their adventure which in the end leads them to get exactly what they each deserve.  I think those stories contributed to who I am and shaped my way of thinking from an early age.  I think they made me believe in fairytales and happily ever afters.  For a while now, I’ve been saying that I miss the old me…the me that did believe in all these things.  I’m hoping the book will help me find tha person again.