Wishlist as diary
Keep a wishlist as a mememto of past states of mind
I have been keeping a wishlist in Amazon since the year 2000. It started in the same way all diaries are started: to keep books I was interested in. The Spanish blogospheric potlatch came later, back then in the year 2000 I didn’t even had a blog, didn’t even know they existed.
But I do know that, right before summer holidays, I wished for a Good Old-Fashioned Future. I don’t really know why. I know I liked Bruce Sterling back them (I am not so sure I do now). Maybe I was really thinking about the future; one year later, the future came crashing down on us and we started to denote events by numbers with letters as a suffix. But right before that, a couple of months, I added Strategic Warfare in Cyberspace.
I wrote a novel that summer (which you can buy if you can read Spanish) but it was only a bit later when I became interested in how to write; I added Science Fiction 101: Where to Start Reading and Writing Science Fiction by master Robert Silverberg the next summer.
Which, by now, starts to look like a pattern: I wish the most during summer. That’s something I didn’t know about myself before I started to write this piece. But that stopped later on. In May 1st, 2004, I went on a wishing spree that started with Murakami and proceeded until I added a beautiful Paperblanks light lined notebook. A diary meets a diary: wishlist-as-diary includes tools for writing diaries. Beautiful tools.
I could continue with comic books, non-fiction, story anthologies, up to The Interestings, which I added yesterday. 365 wishes, as in the 365 days in a (non-leap) year. Not all days were the same; in some of them I was too busy to even wish anything and during some others I just whiled the day away wishing. In fact, some of the wishes became fulfilled; I got some stuff from that list. Right now I can’t think of one, and, what is worse, I can’t think about what I was thinking when I made those wishes that became true.
Which probably means that wishes are best left alone. Giving one as a gift would be like tearing a page from a diary.