Okay, no funny links today. Today, I'm going to indulge myself and write a totally self-involved...

Okay, no funny links today. Today, I'm going to indulge myself and write a totally self-involved blog that nobody else will want to read. I briefly considered starting a "secret blog" to have personal, journal-type blogs in. That fell down because:
  1. I'm loath to host anything off-site
  2. I don't have deep personal thoughts nearly often enough to warrant a whole other blog (on the other hand, I surf the web all the time...)
  3. WTF is a "secret" blog? Either I want my thoughts made public, so I put them on my blog, or I don't. All the poetry is up already, and that's a lot more personal than I could ever get with just prose.
  4. Hey, nobody reads this anyway! So it makes no difference what the hell I put on it (although I get 50 hits a day at the moment -- they can't all be me)
Anyway, so on to what I'm actually thinking. I'm... overwhelmed, at the moment. I have too many things I want to do. I want to work on web2, my third year project; I want to update this site with a nifty new front page and a pictures section; I want to write another play; I want to learn how to program Python and use it to produce (a) an album-generator utility and (b) a utility that will automatically sort and rename my MP3s for me [isn't that a useful idea, BTW? I just had it last night]. But what do I do when I go home? I watch MTV; I read a book; I do my laundry. I get caught up in living and never produce anything (at work, too -- although at least I'm blogging, which is productive in my view). That sucks. I need to increase the efficiency of my life; squeeze a few more hours out of every day. Above all, I need to stop my wasting my time, because it's freaking August already, and then term starts, and we all know how little I manage to get done during term. Hopefully being on campus again will mitigate that somehow.
But my other main concern, rapidly overriding the others, is that I'm a bit lonely at the moment. Now, mom, don't worry: I'm not really lonely -- I'm surrounded by loads of people who I get along with -- it's just that none of my close friends from uni are around me right at the moment, and that's accentuating the fact that I don't have a boyfriend at the moment. I take my uni friends for granted when I'm at Warwick -- I willfully ignore them and tell them to go away, in fact -- but I really miss them when they're not around. But let's not stray from the main fact: I need a boyfriend, again.
It's a cycle. I meet someone, decide I like them, and become instantly infatuated. I expend huge amounts of effort getting them to like me. If successful, I then triumphantly get together with them. And, in less than two weeks, the infatuation fades, and I discover I've made a bad decision. Again. I've compromised too much, got together with someone who doesn't have enough in common with me, again. After a while, the relationship ends, time passes, and I begin to get more and more lonely until I begin to lower my standards for "good relationship material" until I find someone who meets those standards, and I decide I like them. Rinse, repeat until frustrated.
In only one relationship so far have I ever thought that we had enough in common to last, well, forever. He knows who he is. And I managed to fuck that up too. In all the others, I knew, deep down, when I went into it, that it probably wouldn't last forever because we didn't have enough in common. Now, before all my ex-boyfriends (there aren't that many) get simultaneously offended, that doesn't mean I regret those relationships. I had fun at the time, they were worthwhile relationships, and you know that because they existed. As soon as they weren't fun any more, I ended the relationship. But they ended because there wasn't enough to keep them going.
Hmmm... Winamp has come up with "Love is Rare" by Morcheeba, reinforcing my belief that it has a pyschic-mood-detector plugin
So, I have a relationship problem. And, as the saying goes, the common factor in all your failed relationships is you. So what's my problem? Are my [[goodenough|standards too high]]? Do I want something I could never get? I can't believe that -- that's the kind of thinking that's got me into relationships that don't last. Either I find someone who meets my standards, and the relationship will last, or I won't. By going for someone who doesn't have enough in common with me, all I do is fool myself into thinking it will work. I can't force it to work by changing my mind, any more than you can fly by deciding that flapping your arms will be sufficient (hmm... nice mental image).
So what, you may be wondering, are my standards? What do I think is "enough in common" with me? From experience:
  • They have to be a geek. I'm too much of a geek to go out with someone who doesn't understand that, sometimes, I just want to be with my computer. Somebody who can talk about a new computer game and be interested. Hell, someone I can discuss an annoying algorithm with. This has become so important to me now that everything else pales in comparison. Dammit, where are all the gay geeks?
  • They have to be cute. I wish I could exclude this. I wish I was the kind of good, decent, fair person that I could date a great guy who looks like he's just been repeatedly hit by a truck. But to be brutally honest, having a boyfriend involves sex. And sex involves sexual attraction. And that involves, for me, someone who looks good. How good looking is a bit of an issue -- in the world of my Jennifer Aniston, does it have to be Brad Pitt, or would David Schwimmer do? I think I'm not being dishonest when I say that being sufficiently geeky makes up for not being spectacular-looking, but I need someone on the cuter side of average.
  • My other main recreational activity is dancing. I'm kinda iffy about including this as a requirement, but I'm fairly sure I couldn't live without going clubbing at least sometimes, and I'm equally sure he'd feel left out if he didn't like clubbing. And not the blokey, going-somewhere-with-loud-music-to-get-drunk clubbing, the proper type that involves music you like, and dancing. The main problem is that most people I meet, I meet at clubs, and choose on the basis of the third requirement. And geeks who like clubbing are extraordinarily rare. In fact, the average geek, by definition, is kind of a stay-at-home sort of person. How do you meet geeks? Oh, that's right: the Internet. Which is why I decided to start GayGeeks.Org. Except I haven't had any time to work on it, so it's got nowhere. And so I'm right back to the problem at the beginning of this little rant.
    So come on, somebody, help me out! How do I resolve this mess?