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I did my usual thing yesterday and went to Weight Watchers. It was incredibly crowded so I didn’t get to weigh in before the meeting. Denise and I stepped out while everyone else was doing a written exercise about planning times for meals to go weigh in, and I was down two pounds. I only have one more pound to lose in order to make my ten percent weight loss mark. This, I think, is pretty damn awesome. I’ve been keeping on track with things so far this week, (which started Saturday according to the app), so I’m hoping to lose at least that one pound. But I’m also looking out for those intangible victories I spoke about earlier. I think it’s important to keep in mind that even if there’s not a tangible result you can look at, (a number on a scale, for example), you can still win. For me, this has been a very slow process given my health issues. So for a lot of the time I’ve been keeping track of this thing, the intangible victories are what I’ve had to sustain myself, or at least my self-esteem, which is something I’ve also had to watch, especially when depression sets in. But of course, I always shoot for the tangible victories because I like those for the proof I can show to myself that I’m still on track and doing what’s best for me.

 

As I mentioned above, it was quite crowded yesterday. The crowd was made up, I’m assuming, of those I’m calling the Resolutionaries. Resolutionaries are people who set New Year’s resolutions for themselves, usually involving weight loss and getting fit, and then crowd your local gym or Weight Watchers store in order to carry those out. Most of them usually disappear after about three months at which point everything returns to normal. This group of people presents me with two conflicting emotions. On one hand, I’m glad to see others trying to succeed, and I wish them success. It’s always a good thing to try to improve oneself. But on the other hand, they make my life a little hectic and inconvenient. And when I’m having a less-charitable moment, it’s this, (and the fact that most of them will be gone in three months or less), that takes center stage. I know that this is selfish on my part. After all, there was a time in my life that I was a Resolutionary too, and I was just as bad, if not worse, at keeping up with the goals I set for myself. But now that I’m sort of on the other side, I’m wondering if other regulars at those gyms and stores I mentioned feel the same way I do about the beginning of the year and everything that comes with it. So I’m trying to keep all this in mind when I encounter this group of people, and when I do encounter them, I say a simple prayer that they will have the resolve necessary to achieve their goals, and thereby be successful. I think this attitude is something all of us regulars can benefit from. If you’re not the praying kind, take a moment to think at least one good thought about these people. And while neither the prayers nor the good thoughts in themselves will grant these people success, it will at least put you in a better mood and you can go about the rest of your day not stewing over the Resolutionaries.

 

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