4XLT

Today’s Weigh-In: 390.0 pounds
21 Days Until Goal Two
10.0 Pounds To Go
50 Pounds Lost Total!

(I have been mulling this particular blog entry around for a few days now. It is coincedence that I happened to write it on the same day I hit fifty pounds of weight loss.)

I’ve always been prone to flights of fantasy.

In third grade, Final Fantasy II came out for Super Nintendo, and I was immersed in its epic tale of good versus evil. A few years later, Final Fantasy III was released; it remains my favorite video game to this very day. I actually spent one summer advancing every single character in it up to the max level of ninety-nine – a feat that took weeks.

And if RPGs (role playing games) on the Super NES and Playstation weren’t enough, the sheer amount of creative possibilities at my disposal through pen and paper RPGs (namely Dungeons and Dragons) caught me – hook, line, and sinker.

Come my college years, I had my own computer and ready access to high speed internet. The world of MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games) was mine to immerse myself in. Since 2003, I have been playing City of Heroes, an MMO of the super hero genre. Fighting virtual crime as a character of my own creation has been a total blast.

Shortly before graduation, I stumbled into an organization known as the SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism), which is loosely a medieval research and reenactment organization. Effectively, it’s an avenue for people to dress up, take on a different persona, hit other grown men with big, heavy sticks, and get drunk together. And while I never have been a “let’s get wasted drunk as fast as we can!” type of guy, it was a ton of fun, as it fed my ravenous love of history and gave me a ready made social circle once I graduated and moved back to Tulsa.

Weaved throughout all these was my literary love affair with the fantasy genre that got started with the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Or, to be more specific, all the many detailed appendixes at the back of The Return of the King which detailed the vast history J.R.R. Tolkien created for Middle Earth.

Trading in the Make Believe for the Real

I was having a blast in the SCA. But in the midst of my research into the Holy Roman Empire of the early14tth Century, and while pounding away with the hammer and anvil to make actual armor, and in between throwing shots and getting hit with what amounts to baseball bats, I had a realization.

None of this was real! I was prancing around on my weekends wearing funny clothes with folks who pretended they were 9th century Danes or 15th century Poles. And there I was, trying to act the part of a minor noble from around Basel.

It was like a light switch turning on.

I don’t want to be the guy who spends ten years and untold thousands of dollars and man hours in this fabricated society to become elevated to the status of a Knight of the SCA (a herculean effort rightly lauded, let me tell you) and still drive a junker, live in a falling down house, and be delivering pizza.

The realization with City of Heroes came much more slowly. I gave my heart and soul to that game; it’s taken up more than five years of my life! At times, it really was my life. Embarrassingly, I remember my last semester at Oklahoma State. When I should have been spending every available moment to enjoy the college life and live it up with friends I would be moving away from, I instead poured hours into this online game.

Time playing the game ebbed and flowed, but it spiked again during the first six months I lived in Portland. I didn’t know anyone, and instead of branching out and establishing new friendships, I retreated back to the comfortable safety of a world I knew: the imaginary world of Paragon City, RI, where I fought crime and protected innocents as The Imperial!

I spent as much time as I could in the game, not just making my characters more powerful, but developing them as wholly realized literary protagonists. They had rich personal histories and personalities, and I enjoyed the hell out of slipping into that role, much as an actor would, and playing the game with other like minded folks.

But slowly, I began to have the same wake up call with City of Heroes as I did while playing in the SCA. I looked around at some of these folks and realized that the entirety of their lives was entwined in this game. Here they were, some in their twenties and some much further along in life.

While I haven’t been the type for some time to spend all weekend (fifteen hours plus, easily) and every night sitting in front of the computer screen, I don’t want to become that again and refuse to continue being it any more.

Valuing the Positives

This isn’t to say the friendships weren’t real. While I haven’t kept up with the SCA Tulsa crowd, I have been playing City of Heroes with the same core group of people for years now from the fan forum CoHGuru (tell ‘em TheImperial sent you). I consider some of them genuine friends.

Neither is this a broad value judgment on anybody’s choice of hobbies or life goals or values. Everybody has different ways they like to pass the time, and if I was going to make disparaging comments about how I lived vicariously through my own geeky hobbies, then I would have to throw the same barbs at the millions of men who do the same through watching sports, pouring time into fantasy leagues online and drooling over their brackets during March Madness (yes, I watched the championship, and hurray Kansas and the Big XII, just for the record).

I’m just tired of living vicariously through anything, anymore.

A Life Lived Wholly in the Real

Am I throwing out all the traces of make believe and fantasy in my life now? Emphatically, no. My little collection of action figures and such of The Thing is going nowhere (because he’s the most awesomest, rad super hero of all time, thankyouverymuch). From time to time, I will still whittle away at creating my own fantasy world, and from there, proceed to write my own Tolkien-esque epic. I’ll still pick up a fantasy novel on occasion – Steven Erikson’s Malazan series are just too good to stop!

I suppose the point here is that I refuse to return to a life where the majority of my personal time and effort is spent investing (emotionally, financially, chronologically) in any hobby or pastime that isn’t solidly grounded in an experience in the here and now world of who I am and who I am striving to become.

I want the best life possible, and nobody and nothing can accomplish that except for my own effort and determination. For me, that best life starts and ends in this journey of getting healthy and dropping the next ninety pounds. All my dreams of future relationships, a family, financial freedom, travel (especially that dream of sojourning a few months around Beunos Aieres and Argentina) are effectively put on hold because of my obesity, either by my own volition or the simple fact of my size.

So, here’s to the unbelievable fifty I’ve lost so far, and here’s to the ninety I’ve left to go. Let’s see if I can hit 300 by New Year’s Eve. But, I’ll talk about that far fetched goal some other time!