I was spending some time carousing about the internets today and eventually encountered a somewhat profound question. I’m not totally sure how I ended up where I did (I don’t recall googling call girls or hookers at any point today) but my meanderings through the interweb eventually landed me on College Call Girl’s website and for reasons I don’t fully understand I was completely engrossed by her writings for hours, quite literally. Eventually while reading through the archives I found a post regarding online dating. This particular post references a site which is truly fascinating to me: Crazy Blind Date. Basically you sign up and it tries to set you up on a blind date in a potentially short period of time.

I’m kind of in a weird place right now and the mood struck me to sign up and give it a shot. I could after all use a little more adventure in my life and I’m certainly not ‘attached’ at the moment so I figured “What the heck” (no dates for tonight we’ll see how things pan out). The people running Crazy Blind Date (CBD) also run a dating site called OkCupid which, it seems, allows users to ask questions of potential matches and then uses the answers to create chemistry between people (I’m not totally sure on this I’m just guessing). Regardless of how it actually works on OkCupid they have taken the questions generated on OkCupid and put them on CBD and I started answering them once I had my profile initially created. Most are pretty standard fare and then I ran across this gem:

If you had to choose ONLY one, would you rather…

• Have great sex
• Have great friends
• Have great love
• Have great ideas

.. and I was completely taken aback. I immediately started to check off friends and be on with it and then I realized / remembered how much gratification and personal satisfaction I get from thinking about a problem, having a great idea, and coming up with a solution. Needless to say I was now stuck between friends and ideas. Then I started thinking about what great love would mean. I know some couples in real life who are incredibly happy and seem quite capable of subsisting on their feelings for one another without a real need or longing for the companionship of others. So now I’m thinking harder about it, I don’t think I’ve ever experienced great love. At this point it starts to really eat at me, what is great love? Is great love what those super happy couples in sitcoms like How I Met Your Mother (Marshall and Lily) or is sitcom / television / movie love truly so far idealized it is never really attainable?

I ended up, as you can tell, way over-thinking this particular entreaty into my psyche and as a result I ended up not being able to answer and had to skip it. I do believe it is an important question and the answer tells you more about who people are than a number of other questions more easily answered.

I realize to date the posts here have been largely technical or technology related and that was my original intention for how to use it when I decided to begin posting again largely because I had come into some freelance web development and I felt like I needed a place to talk about work related things I have done, heard about, or been interested in recently. However, if I take a closer look at the things I’ve written none of them are really solid technical advice and to be perfectly honest I’ve had to post updates in the posts I felt were going to be most technically useful stating I was wrong or incorrect in some assumptions. This all basically brought me to the conclusion (along with non-existent readership) I can do whatever the heck I want here. It is after all my sandbox.

So without further ado…

I just got back from the orthopedic surgeon I’ve been seeing while visiting my parents and after looking at my MRI film from last July and the film from the MRI I got taken on Saturday he concluded there is nothing wrong with my knee. This is both good and bad news, at least to me. The reason it’s good news is relatively obvious, there’s nothing wrong with my knee and hence no need for surgery.

The bad news is a little less obvious but quite real. Since there is nothing apparent wrong with the joints causing me pain and problems the most likely cause is something like Rheumatoid Arthritis, which at the age of 26 and knowing that this has been affecting me for at least three years is a little difficult to come to terms with.

I guess I won’t know for sure until I get back to the city and see a rheumatologist (sp?) but I have to kind of operate under the assumption it’s something systemic rather than a problem with one specific joint.