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a picture of me sitting on my favorite workout machine getting ready to start my workout

We’ve started a new year, and two new months, (January on the Gregorian calendar and Shevat on the Hebrew calendar), and one of the things I gave a lot of thought to during the end of last year was getting back on track. I’ve been working out pretty regularly, but I know that I want to add more of this to my schedule. Also, I’ve been a slacker when it comes to tracking my food. For a while, the Weight Watchers app was pretty much inaccessible, so tracking food became a task that got done in the Livestrong app, workouts were (and are) being timed and logged with RunKeeper, and I’m using my Basis band to track the number of steps I’ve taken, number of calories I’ve burned, and my sleep habbits, among other things. So for me, that one app change kind of screwed the whole thing up. But starting last week, I started tracking my food in Weight Watchers again, since they’ve made a lot of changes to the app and it’s now pretty much accessible.

As far as the Basis is concerned, I love it, but am still disappointed that there’s not a full API (Application Programming Interface for the ess technically-minded), that we can use to manipulate and analyze our own data. There is a JSON feed, from which we can sort of pull data though, and I plan to write a widget that will let me display how many steps I’ve taken and how many calories I’ve burned on my sidebar. It’s just going to take some time because I’m working on other work-related stuff, and so that becomes not a top priority.

One of the things I have on my getting-on-track list is to pay attention to my spiritual life. I’ve slacked on this too, and would like to get that back together, especially prayer. I’m OK with the one-off mitzvot, and those that are sort of one-off, (candle lighting, for instance, happens once a week), but daily prayers have always given me some trouble. I still haven’t figured out how to keep myself from letting that one go yet. But I plan to try to be more regular with that this year.

Now to the writing goal. I’ve started writing on a regular basis, and this year I want to start posting more of that long-form writing. My original goal was two hundred and fifty words per day, and I’ve managed to meet that one regularly, so I’ve upped the goal to five hundred words per day. I’ve started using the wordPress new Quick Draft feature to write down ideas and save them as draft posts, which will make posting on a regular basis a little easier since I’ll already have partially-formed ideas ready. I’ve also pued together some sources with writing prompts for when I get stuck.

I also want to start preparing to give more speeches for Toast Masters. I gave one speech already, and want to start doing more towards the various qualifications. Good thing I can pretty much speak on anything I want. I may also post some of those in modified form as posts, if they’re appropriate to this space.

Finally, I plan to play Beep Baseball again this year, and we’re working on getting our local team, (the Augusta Hammers), off the ground. I had a lot of fun doing that last year, it served as an extra work-out source, and I got to travel, which I love. I want to get a guide dog this year as well, and would hopefuly like to do that in June or so.

given all this, I ought to have a busy year. And it’ll be interesting to look back at this a year from now and see how much of this I’ve accomplished. I may post more on what I’m doing in order to reach my goals at a later point.

Now it’s your turn. What kind of goals do you have for this year? Go ahead and share them in the comments.

Until next time.

Evans, Georgia, United States
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I’m sitting at the computer working, and I have the TV on Discovery II in the background. They’ve been running these shows all morning about super humans, people who can do all this amazing stuff that normal people can’t do. And sure enough, we’ve come to an episode with a superblink, one of these blind people who are just so damn amazing. This guy’s apparently superhuman because he uses sonar and makes clicky noises with his tongue in order to determine what’s around him.

I really, really hate this sort of thing. Maybe “normal” people find this amazing, but I, and most of the other blind people I know, find people who do things like make random noises for whatever reason, (specifically, going around clicking with their tongues), to be incredibly annoying.

Why is it annoying, you ask? Because it’s the exact opposite of something I posted on Facebook the other day that discussed the irrational fear by others that blind people have to deal with and combat on a pretty frequent basis. But where this article portrayed the feared blind bogyman as being extra stupid or extra poor or extra afflicted, this show flips the coin and puts blind people on an unnaturally high pedestal. But either way, we’re dealing with objectification of the blind, which is bad, and, whether good or bad, it’s something that’s dealt with by blind people all the time. We’re either incredibly stupid or so awesome that it defies explanation, which spirals into “you’re just so inspiring, I don’t know how you do it, Oh my God, Oh my God, Oh my God,” porn for the light slaves.

This might be cool if we could use it to our advantage, like maybe convincing sighted people that we’re all gods in disguise and therefore we need all sorts of offerings or whatever, and those offerings had to consist of lots of money and tech and big houses and such. But since that’s not the case, I figure we should just keep it at normal for all of our sakes.

As blind people, a lot of us complain when others treat us differently from “normal” people. And in a lot of cases, those complaints are justified. But we’re not doing ourselves any favors by contributing to that mistreatment. There’s a Hebrew phrase that seems apt here, Kol eravim zeh l’zeh, which basically means “we’re all responsible for each other.” It means that what one of us does has an effect on everyone else in the community, whether good or bad. In these cases, where the blind community meets the press, it isn’t the good we do for each other that gets the influence, it’s the bad. And that means every time someone puts themselves out there to be revered by sighted people, the rest of us are expected to either do that, or we’re assumed to have special powers, (which we don’t), or it goes the opposite way and it has adverse effects on our daily interactions, our travel, our business dealings, and anything else it can possibly touch. So I’m asking my fellow blinks to please keep that in mind if you’re ever tempted to put yourself out there for sighted awe, because the benefits just aren’t worth it.

Evans, Georgia, United States