What am I doing?

Explanation (aka: You’re gonna do what?!?)

 ~waves hello~

If you’re reading this site, you’re either:

1. a friend
2. a family member
3. someone who reads my other blog and is trying to make sense of what the heck I’m doing.

If you fall into that last category, give up now.  Even I don’t understand me sometimes.  ;)

So, yeah…I’m out of shape.  Not too surprising considering that for someone of my racial characteristics, over 70% are overweight or obese and of those, 30% fall into the obese category.  (NHANES [2001-2004], NCHS.. Health, United States, 2006..)  Yeah, I looked it up.

No clue which category I fall into.  I’m not sure I want to know.  (Actually, if I am to believe this online tool, I’m considered obese.  /sigh)  I get told by people I know that I look fine and they wouldn’t call me overweight or obese.  Heck, some women even find me attractive, go figure.  ;)  My Dad likes to remind me when I see him that I need to lose weight though.  Thanks Dad.  Seriously though, I take it that he’s concerned about my long-term health, which I appreciate.  Of course, he could just be rubbing it in that he finally weighs less than I do, hehe.  ~grimaces and shakes fist angrily~

Anyway, I need to get in better shape.  Like so many others out there, I’m sure, I used to be in better shape…once.  hehe.  I mean, yeah, I was a bit of a chubby kid.  I wasn’t what anyone would really have called fat, but I definitely wasn’t skinny like a lot of my friends.  I was in my best shape, probably, my Senior year of High School when, through a bet, I joined the Wrestling team.  I’d never wrestled or done High School sports at all…last time I’d played any kind of competitive sport was in the 8th grade and it was Basketball.  Yeah…it was an interesting bet, lemme tell ya…

But I won.  In multiple ways, I guess.  I ended up weighing in at 155 lbs (5′ 7″), had great stamina and was toned, but not necessarily muscular.  I think I was around 165-170 during my college years and hovered around 170-175 for the years after college where I ran an afterschool program for Middle School students.  Playing sports for 2-3 hours a day with them did wonders for my stamina while the non-profit hourly wage kept me from gaining weight.  (ie. I didn’t eat much other than Ramen and PB+J.  hehe)  At one point, I even joined a gym and had a trainer to help me get in better shape while working there.  I’d say at that point I was around 165ish again, but then I changed jobs…

To a desk job.  Not only was it a desk job, but it was in a call center, I worked the evening shift (4-midnight), and the cafeteria was closed at night.  /sigh  There went that.  It didn’t happen all at once though, it was like a slow, gradual shift.  Having the money to eat out (usually bad food, of course) + weird hours + inactivity was compounded by the general malaise that one gets when answering phones for 8 hours a day, which made it a never-ending spiral into ruin.  By the time I had more normal hours, working a day shift, I was using every ounce of mental willpower I could just to go to work, get through the day, then come home.  The last thing on my mind was exercise.

After 6+ years in the spiral of doom, I quit.  Boy was that ever refreshing.  I felt like I imagine Atlas would have if he’d been allowed to put the world down.  I felt light enough to float off the ground and drift off with the wind.

Except I now weighed in at 220ish lbs.  /facepalm

While all this had been going on, the world of MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games) had been growing by leaps and bounds.  I have always loved games in general, but video games have always held a special fascination for me.  Maybe it’s because my Dad refused to buy me any kind of video game system when I was growing up (~shakes fist angrily again~) or maybe just because they offered the ability for just one person to have fun with something that took a bit more skill than Solitaire.  No clue, but I do know that of all the video games I played growing up, RPGs (Role Playing Games) were the ones that fascinated me the most.

I’d always loved to read, especially fiction whether it be science fiction, fantasy, mystery, etc., so the idea of being able to actually live inside a story via a video game interface called to me.  At the same time, I always enjoyed playing games, video or otherwise, with groups of other people.  The conversations, the humor, the shared fun was, and is, one of my favourite things about games in general.  So when online, multiplayer versions of RPGs started showing up, I kept my eyes out for one that would be set in a world I really wanted to experience with others.

That world ended up being a galaxy.  Star Wars Galaxies (SWG) to be exact.  The first MMO to be set in George Lucas’ worlds.  For someone that grew up with Star Wars action figures, stood in line and sat front-row for the re-release of the Trilogy and did the same eventually for the prequels, this was the ideal story I wanted to experience with others.  So my roommate and I both picked up copies of it and started playing right after it released in June of 2003, about a year after I started my desk job.  It quickly became a great way for me to save money as, despite a $15/monthly fee, it kept me from going out every night and spending the money I was now actually earning from the job I was already coming to dislike.

Of course, this meant I was also spending a good chunk of my free time sitting in front of a computer, just like at work.  /doh  But hey, I was paying off credit cards and loans and had money for short vacations and to go out to movies (my other love) whenever I wanted.  I didn’t mind in the least bit.

By the time I quit my job, I had played five different MMOs and on multiple occasions had seriously considered going back to school to get a degree in something related to the video games industry so I could do that for a living.  (still a dream job, for now…)  The thought was seriously put into my head by a group of Developers/employees from SWG that I shut a certain bar down with…hehe.  One of the Community Team had told me I needed to come work for them and one after another, the other people there kept backing up her statements, including the rep from Lucas Arts that was there.  I was a handful of Jack + Cokes in by this point though (purchased by them, they were trying to get me drunk! I swear!), so I didn’t take it seriously.  It may not have been.  Doesn’t matter.  It put the idea in my head and that’s all it took.

So, when I quit my job, the first idea I had was to go back to school and get a degree related to the gaming industry and go from there.  For various reasons, that didn’t happen.  What did happen was that I stopped playing the most recent game I had switched to and I started playing a new one called Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning (WAR).  Besides enjoying the actual MMOs, I find I really enjoy the communities that spring up online (and off) surrounding these games.  WAR had a huge and very active community, especially on something called blogs…  :p

I am someone who loves information, the more the better.  But I had never been much for blogs, they all seemed very meh, usually involving tons of “I’m doing this right now” posts as opposed to actual game-related information.  I preferred to get my game information from the official game forums.  The problem was, WAR didn’t have forums.  There were fan-sites (forums made and run by fans of the game as opposed to the game company) and blogs. T hat was pretty much it and you had to scour every last one of them to find the information you needed, it was rarely all found in one place.

To someone like me, that wanted as much information about what I was doing as possible, it meant I was spending hours of time each week just looking things up online and either committing it to memory or documenting it in files and spreadsheets saved to my desktop.  The problem with that was people would ask questions on the forums and I’d see them and I couldn’t not answer.  The information was sometimes very hard to find or just wasn’t compiled well anywhere, but was scattered, so it was just easier for me to answer their questions than tell them where to find the answer.  That then started taking up a lot of time each week as well.  I quickly was spending more time on the forums and blogs than in the game. :(

One day while scouring the interwebz for information, I found out that the then-head of the game company that created WAR had a blog.  Off I went to read it and see if it, too, was a meh-filled page of “What I did today” posts.  What I found instead was a site full of conversational-toned stories about all kinds of things MMO-related.  For someone who loved windows into Developer’s minds, this was great!  Except he didn’t post often.  :(  More important than the information I gleaned was the fact that I’d finally seen that blogs didn’t have to be meh, they could be informational tools as well.

So, when a blog-related fansite put out the call for more people to start blogging about WAR, I answered the call, in my own weird way.  ;)  I created a blog that, yes, held the occasional “This is what I’m thinking about” post, but was mainly filled with compiled bits of information about the game that would be handy to everyone that played it.  Originally, I figured it would only be read by my friends in-game who I would direct there for information when they needed it.  So much for that idea…lol.  Since it’s inception at the end of January 2009, it’s had over 160,000 views and is still going.  It gets between 500 to 5,000 views a day, depending on what’s going on in-game at the time and what information people need.  Not bad for a guy that hated writing in school huh?  :p

Anyway, to make a long story longer (hehe), when I finally decided it was about time I got off my ass and got in better shape, I decided the best way to do it would be to mix the things I now enjoy so much and see if it keeps me motivated.  What you are reading is the first part of the mix: a blog/journal/scorecard of my efforts.  (More of the mix will come in the next few posts.)  Primarily, this is just my means of holding myself accountable…to myself.  :)  No doubt my friends and family will probably chime in on occasion to keep me going as well.  However, who knows?  Maybe some other gamer/blogger/whoever that is also in need of a little motivation will read this and use what I put here as a catalyst/roadmap to get themselves in better shape as well.  Stranger things have happened.  (especially to me lately, seriously. lol)

So…as I did in my first post on that other blog, I shall conclude this first post with a quote:

“Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going.” -Jim Ryun

And so it begins…again.  ;)