Friday I caught a bug. My guess is I got it from the staff gym on Thursday. It’s on the outs now, but it kicked my ass for a day or two. I took Friday off work and slept it off enough to make it to Burly’s wedding on Saturday. The wedding was good.

Over the past few days I also decided to work on a little theme change for the blog. WordPress 2.7 came out last week, and I felt a new theme was in order. It’s a lot like the old theme, except the HTML/CSS behind is lot cleaner in my opinion. It’s always good to look back at code you wrote a year or two ago and think, “Man, that code sucks.” It means that you’ve gotten better since then.

I had a brief brainwave today about relationships and what they mean to me. The last part of Brian’s latest post made me think a little. For a while now, I’ve looked at the need to have a romantic relationship as weak. Trying to hook up with someone strikes me as lustful and as a sign of low self-esteem. Why would someone want to spend the effort needed to charm someone into a relationship?

I can only see through my own eyes. If I were to try my best to woo a girl into a relationship, it would be for bad reasons. I feel comfortable enough with myself that I don’t feel as much of a need to be intimate with someone of the opposite sex. And I understand that it’s supposed to “just happen” or whatever, and that may or may not have happened to my married/soon-to-be-married friends or not. But I guess I looked down on it to a certain extent.

I don’t know if it’s because I’m secretly bitter that all my friends are getting married or whatever. Well, actually there is no secret. I am sort of bitter about it. When I examined myself a little though, I realized that maybe my sometimes strong and powerful need for close friends isn’t really all that different from someone else’s need to have someone to hold hands with.

I’ve always struggled with people doing things which I would feel bad/guilty/ashamed about doing. It’s sometimes hard for me to comprehend that what might be wrong for me to do might be perfectly fine for someone else. Maybe it’s just a matter of timing. Do I want to get married someday? Yes. Why? I don’t know. Maybe it comes down to the instinctive need to continue the human species. Maybe it’s just that I don’t really care either way, and if it happens I’ll go along with it. Maybe it’s just because I want to be “normal” and to fit in with all my married friends so I can feel better about myself.

Probably the most driving thing is the need to love and be loved. I feel that the best way for me to do that is through friendship. Maybe that’s just because I haven’t found the person out there that completes me in a way that fulfills that need completely. I’m a little bitter maybe because my friends who have that need fulfilled by their girlfriend/wife need less from me than they used to.

The older I get and the more intricate my relationships with people become, I realize that it’s really, really hard to blame someone completely for something. It’s almost always also (at least) partly my “fault” (for want of a better word). That sucks, because it means that I have to look inside myself to see what needs to be changed. That’s how growth happens, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t suck. The alternative sucks even more, however, as I’ve discovered.

At some point I have to stop blaming someone else. Sometimes, it’s easier to try deal with a problem completely on my own rather than have the guts to confront someone about something. But, that’s a different issue.

I always seem to write about this stuff after weddings. Well, get used to it, since there’s way more weddings to labor through in the near future, heh. I told my co-worker that maybe after all of these damn weddings I will have learned some sort of lesson that God wants me to learn. I’ll either have learned it or become that much more bitter.

As a great man once said, “Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says otherwise is selling something.” It’s easy to blurt out feelings and hope it makes things all better. Sometimes it only makes things worse. But, as they say, sometimes things have to get worse before they get better.

In happier news, the guy who I wanted to win this season of Survivor ended up winning. I’ve always been a bit fond of physics teachers. My high school and college physics teachers were pretty awesome.