Hoo boy. This one has been a long time coming.
Probably ever since I started going to college, where my meals were part of my tuition and therefore there was no one at the dining hall to stop me, and also I didn’t have anyone around me that I really respected enough to listen to their advice on my weight, and also I might have started getting depressed then, I’ve been putting on weight. I was a pretty scrawny kid growing up, owing to Mom making all my meals and getting lots of exercise from having three brothers. Even when I was working at McDonalds, I would often bring my own ham and cheese sandwiches instead of taking the employee discount.
But that’s a lot of history, all to say that right now, I’m overweight. Obese, even. Possibly medically defined as morbidly obese, but based on what I’ve seen around me, that definition might need shifting. Maybe there needs to be “morbidly obese (American)”. Or maybe that’s just an excuse. Anyways, it’s a thing.
As previously discussed here, I don’t care about myself. Tracking down when that started, and how to correct it, is something that I plan to discuss with a counselor, and perhaps with you here once I’ve gotten a handle on it, but for now, it’s my main excuse for my weight. I’d just rather eat food I like to eat, and sit around, rather than take care of myself. And it will take something pretty serious to change that.
Well, serious has been happening to me recently. Revelations about myself did a lot to spur me forward, but I’d like to share a small story from earlier this month. I was invited to my brother’s wedding in Miami. Florida, not Ohio; it’s March, after all, we want to escape, not shuffle sideways. Needing a seatbelt extension on the plane? Not being allowed to sit in an exit row because of it? Sleeping through game time? Not going to interesting places because people were walking? I considered this all a small burden for myself, but also just part of what life was like for me. After all, I can’t get upset at my weight right now. I can’t change it overnight, so it’s too late to be upset, and I just have to live with it in the moment.
And then the day of the wedding came. We got dropped off on the beach for the oceanside ceremony…at the wrong spot. You can tell where you are on the beach by the numbered lifeguard stations, where Baywatch hangs out. We got dropped off at around 8 or 9, and we needed to get to 3. And they’re not that close together. So Otto, my brother, takes off, determined to get to the right spot and make sure that nothing else is going wrong. And my dad keeps up with him, and apparently, he’s venting the entire way. Hearsay from my dad on that fact, but honestly, I would be. And nothing else on that trip made me upset at my own fucking lazy fat stupid gasping wheezing out-of-shape ass than that moment.
I want to help people. It’s my brother. He’s at the most important day of his life, things are going wrong, and I can’t be there with him because he is able to walk at a brisk pace for 10 minutes in a suit and dress shoes, and I’m back there stopping every time I get to shade because I can barely catch a breath. What kind of a brother have I become, if I can’t be there for my family?
That was it. I’m looking back, and I think that if there was ever a moment in recent times that showed me that my poor diet and lifestyle have prevented me from living the life I want to live, that was it. I’m not ready to make a change yet, because I need to be certain that the change is going to work, and that I can stick to it for long enough to actually change. I’m seeing a general practitioner in 10 days for a check-up, and I’ll be asking questions about my weight and about choosing a counselor. But I need to change. I can’t keep lagging behind, or eventually, everyone will just walk on ahead of me. The world isn’t going to wait for me to catch up.
Song of the Week: Win the Race arranged by ITeachVader. This is going to be a tonal change from previous music, as this is what is categorized online as “YouTube Poop”. A lot of videos in that category earn the title, unfortunately (I may have dabbled in the genre a long time ago, those videos are private now because I’m very embarrassed). However, sometimes, the videos are good. The general idea of a YouTube Poop is: you cut and paste clips from popular sources (in this case, the Sonic the Hedgehog TV series) in order to get the characters to say funny things. Like cutting out words from a newspaper to write a story. ITeachVader specifically is very good at arranging those clips into music, editing the pitch of clips like a manual synthesizer. It’s not for everyone, but as for me, I enjoy creating art out of smaller bits, and this is the musical version of that.
That's Pretty NEET 