In the universe of Pasricha, he was the kid with the thick Coke-bottle glasses growing up in Whitby. “I tried and quit so many sports.” He writes about that too in his blog. Although he finds the upside of being face-smacked with a hard-kicked soccer ball (No. 893, Orange slices at half time). He remembers being a happy-go-lucky kid, friends with everyone, even the bullies. At Queen’s University, he studied commerce but loved writing for Golden Words, the school humour newspaper. He’d found his calling: comedy writer. An internship at a New York City humour syndicate, a Brooklyn loft full of former writers for Saturday Night Live and The Simpsons, sobered him up. “I wrote for Cosmo, New York magazine, Yahoo. It was a cool rush. But it became draining very quickly. I realized this could never be my full time thing.” So he put on a business suit, did a marketing stint at Procter & Gamble, Toronto — “I know about the lengthening, separating and volumizing properties of mascara” – ran a Quiznos franchise in Whitby and took off for Harvard Business School. Somewhere in there, he got married. And then Pasricha hit what he calls his “gloom and doom phase.” His marriage was rocky, and his best friend emotionally unhinged. So what did he do? “I decided I needed to look on the bright side of life.” He went to his computer and started to write about a thousand — changed at the last second from a million — awesome things. No. 1000: Broccoflower, “... bizarre misfit child from two of nature’s most hideous vegetables.” So when in January 2009, his wife said she no longer loved him, he wept all weekend and then posted No. 854 Crying, why letting the big, wet tears rain down is great. And when the next month, his best friend took his own life — Pasricha was the last to speak to him — he wrote tenderly about his buddy, No. 829 Smiling and thinking of good friends who are gone. His manner is more serious, more intense now. “I think you can choose to be happy,’’ he says, leaning forward. “It’s why 11 million people have visited the site. You go through six green lights in a row, you think awesome. We all love snow days. They’re truisms. I’m just the one saying, let’s focus on the positive, we need it.” He plans to stick with the blog for the full thousand, sometime in 2012. Right now, though, his other life beckons: he has to head out to Mississauga where he works as a project manager for Wal-Mart Canada. “I have a cubicle. I’m totally Dilbert,” he laughs.