Fat Man/Fit Town

I mentioned earlier that I am legally blind. There are a couple of ways to be defined that way. One is that your visual acuity is not correctable with glasses beyond a certain level. That’s not my problem. I fall into the other category of legal blindness. That is, I have a visual field of less than 20 degrees. These days, quite a bit less than that, but I haven’t had it measured in a while. I have retinitis pigmentosa, a term that refers to a constellation of degenerative diseases, all characterized by slow death of the light sensing cells of the retina.

I have a fairly typical case. I was diagnosed when I was in my early 20s, and, while the disease is caused by defective genes, there is no family history. My symptoms are classic. My night vision is extremely poor, and getting worse, and my mid-peripheral vision is pretty well shot. Oddly, I still have a little vision in the extreme periphery, but, believe me, it’s pretty much useless. I gave up driving at night in my mid-20s, and completely when I was about 31. Gave up the bicycle a few years after that (post a couple of bike-bike accidents), and now walk or take public transit when I need to travel alone. I still have good enough central that I can read in decent light, and I can use a computer more or less without any accessibility aids, although I do prefer light-on-dark color schemes for writing code (which is what I do for a living).

I carry a white cane for identification when I am in unfamiliar or crowded locations. It says to those around me, “STAND CLEAR! THIS LARGE MAN CANNOT SEE YOU, AND WILL CRASH INTO YOU IF YOU DO NOT GET THE HECK OUT OF THE WAY!” Quite useful really. But I think it throws people off that I can clearly see a little. It’s sometimes an interesting conundrum to decide just how blind to “act.” Sometimes, I can seem so sighted that people forget that I can’t see anything I’m not looking at directly, and hilarity may therefore ensue. But if I act too blind, people can try to help so much that I feel a little embarrassed, or at least get my pride wounded a bit. I’ll keep trying to strike the balance, but I know that, eventually, there won’t really be much balance left to strike.

Didn’t mean to sound self-pitying. I have a great life, despite my visual impairment, but wanted to explain a little what my situation is in this regard.

So, yes indeed, I am a fat man. Just about 100 kg, in fact. I like that number so much better than 220 lbs. I suppose 16 stone is even better in the “smaller numbers are better” sorta way. But only the English use stone as a unit of weight, and I am not English. At my height, this puts me just on the boundary between merely “overweight” and the horrible “obese”. Earlier this year, I went on the first diet of my life, and successfully went from the upper 230s to the lower 210s, but have gained back a bit. I must go back on the diet, as my goal is to reach the magic 200, which would make me much healthier in the long run. I do like food, though, and I may do some restaurant reviewing at some point.

In contrast to my general out-of-shapeness, I live in the fitness mecca of Boulder, Colorado. Everyone here (it seems) is lean and fit. Runners, cyclists, rollerbladers, skiiers, climbers, and hikers abound. I am not at all outdoorsy, so this is somewhat disconcerting to me. I do walk to and from work (35 minutes each way), but only because I don’t have much choice. The buses don’t run conveniently from home to work, and I am legally blind, so I can’t drive. More on blindness in a future post.

This is certainly not all there is about me, but I wanted to explain the choice of titles for the blog.

And now I have a blog I don’t know what to do with.

I will consider, and get back to you.