Not exactly my procedure

I’ve had terrible vision for as long as I can remember. Yeah, I was the kid with the big bottle bottom glasses that were constantly breaking and therefore requiring various temporary methods of repair including the iconic white tape. Where did this white tape come from? I don’t remember…

Anyway, as a grown up (I use that term loosely), I’ve acquired an interest in things not compatible with extremely poor eyesight: swimming, motorcycles, and adventure travel to name a few. Sooner or later, I had to take action. It was actually while watching an episode of Lost when some castaways had to swim with their eyes open into a river to find a cave where they hoped to procure a nuclear device that I turned to my woman and said, “I can’t do that.”

The next day, I was at TLC uptown discussing my options. I opted for LASIK, but had to put surgery on hold until I ran that half-marathon. Once that was out of the way, it was two weeks solely wearing glasses only to find out at my last pre-op eye exam that my eyes are a slight bit screwed up… just enough to make my doctor not want to risk LASIK.

I felt terrible… but opted for PRK instead. Same thing, but with a longer recovery and some promise of discomfort/pain. (That said, since this was the only U.S. military approved treatment up until just recently, I’ve taken to calling my eyes “military grade”.)

It’s 2 days later and I’m writing this without contacts or glasses. My eye exam on Friday showed me at around 20/40… and it should only get better over the course of the coming weeks! No pain (yet?)… just dryness and a slight sensitivity to light.

I need to remember to do something worthwhile with these new eyes of mine!

I guess it had to happen eventually… Since I started running this Summer (though sporadically), I was bound to run in an official event. And with my woman being the woman she is, she was bound to sign me up for one sooner rather than later.

That’s how I found myself among a couple friends and quite a large crowd of folks in Prospect Park this morning getting ready to run 5 miles.

I have to admit, the Turkey Trot was a lot of fun. I finished in around 39 minutes and hopefully I’ll remember to do something like it again… although I imagine my woman will remember for me in case I forget.

Update: Turns out I finished 258th out of 1288 runners! Pretty good for my first race, I think. Official time was 39:41.83 with a pace of 07:56.4.

After years of thinking I would never get into running, I’ve joined the whole Nike+ movement. I don’t know what happened. I started running a little at first. Just a hit on vacation. Then, last year, during the Summer, I socially ran with my woman on occasion, but I never craved it… Now, I dunno… I get urges…

I just need to remember to actually get better as evidenced by my second Nike+ enabled run:

Last Thanksgiving I took a photo of a burning tire repair shop as it lit up the night sky and thrust huge flames over adjacent buildings. I thought this was a pretty cool photograph, so I posted it to Flickr.

Within 24 hours, Gothamist had run a story on the fire using my photo, The Brooklyn Papers contacted me for usage of the photo in their publication and the photo’s views shot up to around 150 views. Over the course of the next couple days, the views continued to rise and after about 4 days the photo slowly crested the 300 views mark. It took about a week for the views to stop coming in, leaving the photo at around 360 views.

In the months since then, it’s gotten around 15 views. Today, one of the better photos I feel like I’ve taken is hovering around 385 views.

Last weekend I posted another photograph, this one of a woman wearing a small bikini standing in front of a blurry sky and sailboat. I posted it because I liked it. I thought it was kind of a cool photo.

Within 5 minutes the views were at 25. Within an hour they were in the 80′s. A day later it was at 245 views! Two days later it was at 365 views! (A feet it took the fire photo about a week to accomplish.) Now, 3 days later, the photo has 426 views!

When I first started to notice the rapid rise in views, I thought about taking the photo down, but decided I was being silly because upon closer inspection, there was nothing lewd or unsavory about the photo. It was just a small black bikini bottom and a hand and a boat and a sky. Of course, the old adage “sex sells” is true, but the attention paid to this unremarkable photo is astounding to me. I mean, what’s the big deal?

I need to remember to put bikinis in all advertising projects I work on…

I saw a blind guy on the train while riding home the other night. Now that’s not something I would go out of my way to remember, but this blind guy was also listening to an iPod and that struck me as odd.

It’s one thing to be blind and rely heavily on your sense of hearing to get around, so why would he cripple his seemingly essential other sense by plugging his ears with an iPod?

The woman sitting next to me reached out and touched him on the arm (which I cringed at because it seemed like such an intrusion into his own world through his last remaining sense) and when he pulled out a headphone, she asked if he wanted to sit. He said no and returned to listening to his music.

When I got out at my stop, I turned around to take another look and saw the guy taking my old seat next to the woman.

The whole thing just somehow struck me as odd… and for some reason, I guess I should remember it.

(On a side note, I should remember to check out more books from Jose Saramago who wrote Blindness about a whole city going blind which I absolutely loved and Seeing… Which I never finished.)

As New York Magazine said about The Spa at Mandarin Oriental: “As close to heaven as a New York spa gets, this 35th-floor spot will leave you and your wallet feeling substantially lighter.”

There’s not much else that can really be said about this place. The sex-specific “heat experience” rooms outfitted with very large jacuzzi-ish “vitality” pools with submerged lounge seating, amethyst-crystal steam chambers, and interesting heat showers with colored lights corresponding to water temperatures are only the beginning to your “journey” at this place.

The services provided and products used are both unbelievable.

And ending the whole 3 hour experience with some time spent in the “relaxing” rooms looking blankly out of floor to ceiling windows at the amazing views from their 35th floor location makes you wonder how you can possibly manage trudging through the grime below again.

Expensive is an understatement, but I should remember to try to get into this place again.