Monday 1553: My Great Minnesota Get Together

I wish I could provide you with a great weight loss update last week, but instead I'm going to tell you a story.  See, while I'm trying to get healthier, I also get easily distracted and end up drawing faces on my fruit instead of eating it.

What can I say?  I'm easily amused.  In my head, Pear is freaking out because he thinks he's about to fall off the desk, but Orange realizes that both fruits are at a safe distance and are in no real danger, so he's judging Pear's neurosis with that sarcastic look.  Screw you, Orange! All it would take is for Banana to come by, get naked, and leave her outfit next to you for you to slip and fall to your death!  Then who would be smirking?  Not Pear, because Pear is respectful and would send flowers to your mother.  Wait, what?  Ummmm, sorry about all that....

Anyway, The Young and The Seedless was not the story I intended to tell you today.  In an effort to gain my official Minnesota residency, I decided that it was time to jump head first into a Minnesota tradition: the State Fair.  Growing up in South Dakota (and probably anywhere in the Midwest, for that matter), fairs were essential in my childhood experience.  Since I grew up in the greater Sioux Falls area, the Sioux Empire Fair was always a much bigger deal to me than the South Dakota State Fair.  The SE Fair always felt bigger and more geared towards me because it had more modern concerts (Sheryl Crow as opposed to Charlie Pride), more rides, and less tractors.  I had friends that would show cattle, so they'd be around all day to hang out with.  Our parents would buy us the daily/weekly ride passes, so they could drop us off and take a week off from the stresses of parenting as the toothless carnies took their turn in the child-rearing department.  Judging by the looks of most of them, rearing a child was something they were quite familiar with.  Kind of a sidebar, but my two favor carney stories.  One: It was the mid-90's, so bright neon colors were in.  I had a pair of cheap plastic sunglasses that had neon green sides.  Thor Carney (he looked like the superhero Thor, only if Thor was on meth) was running the Viking Ship ride (fitting) and decided he quite liked my shades.  He offered me $10 for a pair of glasses that I had spent $5 on that morning at Lewis Drug.  I gladly handed them over and told him where I got them.  He told me that if I could get more pairs, he'd give me even more money because he knew that he had friends that would like some, too.  Thankfully, someone's parents caught wind of our little money turning scheme as we all begged to go back to Lewis for more glasses.  I'm pretty sure that had we been allowed to continue our business transaction, Carney Thor would have had a box of free sunglasses and the rock quarry directly next to the fairgrounds probably would have had a fresh batch of 9-year old's carcasses.  Second carney story:  They paid some drunk asshole to get dressed up in a clown costume and sit on a plank above a pool of water.  His job was to be as big of a prick as possible in an effort to get you to come throw balls to dunk him in the water. This guy was like a mix of Don Rickles and Satan.  Oh, and he had a megaphone so everyone could hear him.  As previously documented within this blog, weight has always been an issue for me.  I kind of looked like Jerry O'Connell in Stand By Me, and on that unfortunate day, I was wearing a striped shirt.  The clown must have been on his third fifth of whiskey that morning because he decided he was going to ruin everyone's life.  We sat from afar and watched as he eviscerated teenager after teenager, picking on anything from their hair to the likelihood that they were homosexuals.  We were having a good chuckle, as 10-year olds are wont to do, when I saw him lock in on me.  I froze in terror as I saw him reach out his gloved hand and point directly at me.  "Hey fatty, what are you looking at?  If you want a corn dog, the stand is just down the way, so stop looking at me like you're about to eat me!  You know, it is a good thing your mom dressed you in that striped shirt today so that she could tell whether you were walking or rolling!"  That's right.  The asshole clown from Hell dressed me down in front of everyone in the middle of the day on the midway of a county fair.  Through a megaphone.  At some point someone must have reported the guy because there was a different clown in the tank for the rest of the week.

I digress.  Every Minnesotan I have ever met gets excited about their state fair.  The biggest draw seems to be the fact that there is all kinds of wacky foods on sticks.  For a guy trying to drop pounds, this probably wasn't the best place for me.  Still, I had to see what the hype was about, especially since my sugar mama had bought me a ticket.  Upon entering the gates my first impression of the great Minnesota get together was that it was the great Minnesota cluster fuck.  There were people in every direction for as far as I could see.  I asked Molly what we were supposed to do, and she said that we just kind of walked around.  Awesome...

I took her hand and she helped navigate us through the crowds of people standing in line for something known as "All The Milk You Can Drink", which sounded pretty reckless considering the hot August days and spinning rides everywhere.  We went around and checked out different barns and arenas with different vendors selling their mops and salsa makers.  It quickly became apparent to me that no matter the size of the fair, you pretty much know what to expect.  I had it in my mind that I wanted to get some cheese curds, something on a stick, and some Sweet Martha Chocolate Chip Cookies, all staples for the essential Minnesotan experience.  I started with a huge order of cheese curds that reminded me of why I hate dieting.  Seriously, is there anything greater in the world than breaded, deep fried cheese?  Who in the world wants to eat a sarcastic orange when you could have fried cheese?  Unfortunately for me, this was the first thing going into my stomach.  The amount of grease located in the crevices of the cheese immediately dripped to the pit of my stomach and left me with a sudden sense of urgency.  I have a tremendous dislike of public toilets...would I really be forced to use one right after some sweaty fat guy who was battling a funnel cake?  I set my mind to persevering.  Molly went with the corn on the cob, which was a much more reasonable option.  We did some more walking around, including a trip down the midway.  I saw two of my all-time favorite rides, The Scrambler and the Alpine Express.  We used to be able to sit on those rides and not get off because there was no one there during the mid-day.  I'm not ashamed to admit that I peed my pants a little one time when I was on the Alpine Express with Ryan Kapperman.  He was also a bigger kid (more in general size than being chubby), so we tried our best to make sure that we set it up where gravity would pull us towards him so that he didn't crush us.  Well, it turns out we cracked that code when the Alpine spun one way, but when it unexpectedly switched positions, so did all the kids in the cart.  We were all screaming in pain while laughing our heads off, which is what a carnival ride is supposed to do.  Anyway, through all the screaming, squeezing, and laughing, I peed a little.  So what, don't judge me.  It was the time of my life up to that point.

Anyway, with the cheese curds starting to settle down, I decided it was time to find my food on a stick.  They really don't exaggerate when they say that they have almost everything on a skewer.  I really wanted to try the hot dish on a stick, mostly because I couldn't wrap my brain around its physics.  Instead, I went with something that sounded a bit more reasonable and more fair-ish: a pretzel dog on a stick.  As I chomped down on the buttery, meaty deliciousness, Molly led us to something called The Miracle of Life barn.  I choked down what was remaining of the hot dog before we entered in an effort to not offend any the piggy brothers located inside.  Maybe it is because I grew up in South Dakota and had to help one time with calving, or maybe it is because I'm a logical, reasonable human who doesn't need to see gross babies shooting out of their mothers, but I wasn't as impressed with the whole exhibit.  They had all sorts of baby animals that had just been born in incubators feeding on their mothers or trying desperately to figure out how to coordinate their new legs.  I guess that part was cute enough, but it was hard to focus on it all when every five feet above my head there was a video screen with an animal squeezing out another animal.  I fully plan on being a Ricky Ricardo someday and smoking in the waiting room until someone hands me a nice, clean baby that I can name.

With our visit to the piglets out of the way, we made our way towards what would become our final destination.  Sweet Martha's Cookies are a Minnesota State Fair staple.  Check out their website for more info:  http://sweetmarthas.com/  Sweet Martha has a sweet gig that pulls in millions every year at the fair.  I would estimate that while we were in line, at least 100 people were sharing the waiting experience with us.  All day long I had seen people with buckets of cookies, so I figured that must be the way to go.  We could have purchased the much more reasonable cone of cookies, but the fat-guy economist inside me told me that I would save more money by buying more cookies, regardless of how many I actually needed to eat.  We finally made our way up to the counter, and I plopped down my money and asked for my bucket.  The nice girl in the yellow shirt reached up, pulled down a bucket (that already had some cookies in it), finished off the tray of cookies in front of her, called behind her for another tray, and proceeded to empty it on top of my bucket, too.  The sign said a bucket had roughly four dozen cookies.  I would estimate it closer to eight.  I put my hand on top of my purchase so as to not lose a single precious calorie, and we made our way over to a nearby bench.  You might be having a hard time visualizing all of this, so let me help.

There's enough cookies in that bucket to even make Cookie Monster stop and say, "Wait, this might be a little much."  We ate a couple of cookies before I came to the realization of my biggest impending problem besides the onset of diabetes.  At some point, I had to eat enough cookies to get that lid to close.  I proceeded to eat and eat and eat some more.  With every cookie down, I tried the lid again to see if I could seal it up and move along my way.  I eventually lost count of how many cookies I had eaten as the sugar coma started to settle in and my body gave up on me.  Suffice it to say, I had taken in my daily caloric intake and still had a bucket to take home for later.  As we sat there on the bench and I went in and out of consciousness, we noticed that some rain clouds were moving in.  We decided to wrap up our day at the fair and get me on a bus home before the paramedics needed to get involved.  Thus ended my first official great gathering with other Minnesotans.

I did the smart thing and brought in the cookies to share at work yesterday (sorry to all you people upstairs, but the added weight from the Sunday binge made it nearly impossible to walk up a flight of stairs to come share with you).  At the end of the day, I was left with three cookies, which I'm happy to report are in my belly and soon to be out of my life.  The scale says that there weren't any real negative repercussions, but I have a feeling that once the sugar has a chance to settle, it might be another story.  Still, another Monday has come and gone, and I'm still chugging away with the October 8 deadline in sight.  Besides being a fatass this weekend, I also made some really good decisions, like going on a three mile walk with Molly around Lake Calhoun and ordering the healthy pad thai instead of the unhealthy mac and cheese at dinner.  I'm playing basketball four days a week now, so I'm expecting to see some real results coming in the very near future.  I'm reluctant to post any real numbers because I want to make the October 8 reveal a bit of a surprise, but trust me when I say there isn't any real surprise right now.  I'll get there, though.

Still giving my life a Fair assessment,

Jeff "Horizontal Stripes Mean I'm Walking, Not Rolling" Pool

PS - Happy birthday to one of my biggest supporters, Kacey!

Monday 1552: The Hardest Part is Adding Up The Mondays

Hi there, how are ya?  It's been a long time.  Seems like we've come a long way...

Those aren't just lyrics to one of my favorite Eagles songs, but my mea culpa.  Ooops, I did it again.  I disappeared into thin air when I thought I finally had something cooking.  Well, let's start where we left off.  The wait on the weight is finally over.  I didn't snap a picture of it this morning, so you'll have to take me at my word, but I stepped on the scale today and weighed 257.8, or almost exactly what I've weighed now for the past two months.  I guess the good news is that I've managed to maintain the weight.  The bad news is that this was supposed to be a weight loss challenge, not a "maintain an obese weight and pat yourself on the back for not gaining anything" challenge.  The good news is that my life is just about exactly where I need it to be right now.  For today's post, that's what I'm going to focus on.

Today's post is about freedom.  More specifically, it is about me finally finding the freedom to let myself let go.  It has now been 14 months since I left Iowa and moved to Minnesota to try to tackle the big city dream that I guess I've always had.  When I left Iowa, I figured the worst case scenario was that I'd come up here for a year, try it out, and if I hated it, I'd finally make the inevitable move back to Sioux Falls.  Sioux Falls and I have always had a tricky relationship because I absolutely love it there, but I let it be my safety net.  I was in a co-dependent relationship with a city, which probably explained why I couldn't ever fully start dating a new one.  I went to college in Marshall, MN, which is only about an hour and a half away.  I knew that getting out of the Sioux Falls area was the best thing for me, but I didn't really want to be all that far away in case I needed to rush back into South Dakota's (and at the time, my high school girlfriend's) warm arms.  I took my first job in Mitchell, SD, and while I loved my co-workers there, I never really full committed to the town and often spent time travelling back and forth on that hour long Interstate trip.  After realizing I didn't fit in the Mitchell mold, I packed up the truck and moved to Sheldon, IA.  Again, I was a little more than an hour away from that old lover I couldn't shake.  Sheldon was definitely the town I cheated on the most.  In the five years(really, I lived in Iowa for five years?!) that I lived in Iowa, I not only spent almost every weekend back in South Dakota, but I wholeheartedly rejected the notion of the fact that I even lived in Iowa.  It isn't that Iowa is such a bad place (I mean, yeah, it was pretty bad, but not so bad (shout out to my Iowa peeps!)), but being a South Dakotan was part of my identity.  The public school system in South Dakota evidently did a bang up job on indoctrining me in how important it was to be a South Dakotan and how important it was not to flee the state as soon as I graduated.  I lived most of my time in Iowa illegally with South Dakota license plates and a South Dakota driver's license.  I scoffed at the fact that I'd be called an Iowegian, even though I'd spent the better part of my adult life living across the border.  Better things were always waiting for me at the state line, and at worst, I always had Minnesota as a back-up plan. During that five year span, I put over 50,000 miles on my car just trying to get away.

Well, as everyone knows by now, the fact that I was a round suburban peg trying to fit into a square small town hole finally got the best of me, so I took the leap and moved.  The first seven months of the experiment were severely hindered by the fact that I left a HUGE piece of baggage back in the Siouxs.  Every night was spent wishing I was back down there because of my relationship (that I started AFTER I moved six hours away) and because I missed my family in Sheldon, my family in Sioux Falls, and my family in Blunt.  I lived in Lindstrom with a great friend for the first six months, but it was in a small town about an hour away from the Cities.  I wasn't quite ready to make the leap.  I eventually moved to Coon Rapids and the burbs, which worked because even though I didn't know anyone, I was still living every night back in Sioux City/Sioux Falls via phone and Facebook.  After the events of Presidents Day, I made the long trip back to Coon Rapids debating on whether I should just pack up my stuff and move back to Sioux Falls so that I had my support group to take care of me or if I should even make the utterly ridiculous choice to be 29 and move back in with my parents.  That's not a knock on my family, who I love more than anything in the world, but a knock on the fact that I left Marshall (10,000), Mitchell (15,000), and Sheldon (6,000) because I felt they were too small for me, so moving back to Blunt (350) would have been disastrous.

But a funny thing happened when I got back to Coon Rapids.  Friendships that I took as co-workers being cordial turned out to be something much more.  People came to my rescue, propped me up, and didn't let me run.  I had a great outpouring of support from all of my friends and family from around the world, but these guys were actually here to buy me that beer, look me in the eye, and tell me that everything was going to be okay.  It would have been so easy for me to retreat into my dark, lonely apartment every night and try to find the help I needed from a cold computer screen, but they didn't let that happen.  That started the rebirth of this blog, which for a couple of months was my therapy.  Throwing myself into this weight loss challenge and knowing I still had the love and support of my friends that lived far away, as well as my friends that live next door, kept making me stronger and stronger.  The weight loss goals were mostly a front for the emotional weight I was shedding.  I was down five pounds and felt great, not only because I wasn't carrying so much weight but because I started playing basketball a couple of times a week and forming bonds with guys I barely knew.  I was down ten pounds and feeling fantastic because I started to look better in my clothes, but also because people I cared about cared about the words I was putting on this website.  I realized I was important to a lot of people, so not being important to one pretty much didn't mean squat in the grand scheme of life.

That brings us to June and the end of the blog postings.  I was feeling good enough about Jeff that I decided to really step up the dating game.  However, the blog presented a problem.  Thanks to the modern wonder that is Google, typing in "Jeff Pool" to make sure I'm not an axe murderer pulls up this lovely blog that documents all of the ups and downs of the past year.  I had already had one girl stumble into the engagement news that way and it made things incredibly awkward.  I wanted to enter any new dating situations with a clean slate and not let the other team have my entire playbook before the first whistle.  While Googling and finding this blog isn't all that hard to begin with, me blatantly posting it on my Facebook page makes it even easier.  So, since I was stalling out on my weight loss and since I was starting to get active in the scene (three dates in three straight days!), I kind of just let it go.  It isn't easy to be charming and friendly for three hours a night on a date, so I decided to channel all of my communicative energies into pretending that I'm a guy that a lovely young lady should want to know.  There were so many hilarious stories that came up during this time that you all would have loved to have followed along with, but it just didn't work to provide play-by-play analysis on a medium that the other person could see.  Imagine coming home from a date you thought went really well and seeing a 1,200 word essay on some jackass's Facebook page about how he went on a date with a girl who ate like a horse and had the personality of a house plant (none of which happened).  My words are like daggers, boo.

Anyway, the one thing I can say is that I managed to find one fish in the sea that I somehow fooled into hanging out with me for the past two months (true story, the original sentence read "I managed to find one fish in the sea who liked my worm" before I realized how grossly inappropriate that way), and the skeletons from my closet were able to come out in a healthy pre-Facebook era kind of way that was much more comfortable for both of us.  She's a city native, so she's been a heck of a tour guide for me.  As I was sitting at a table with her and some new friends outside a busy restaurant with the city looming in the skyline, I smiled to myself and realized that I finally put it all together and that this was why I wanted and needed to move.  When I was younger and would close my eyes and try to picture my life at 30, this is what it looked like.  Granted, I was supposed to have two kids, a wife, and wear fancy suits to work, but this was the backdrop that the rest of the dream was painted on.  Regardless of how any of the current situations in my life work out, I'm secure enough in knowing that Sioux Falls did its job and finally was ready for me to stop leaning so hard on it.  None of this is a knock on my friends and family because that's not what I'm leaving behind.  I still talk to my friends back home as regularly as ever, but I don't need to see them every weekend to know they'll always be there for me.  I actually had the gravitas to feel guilty for not going to Sioux Falls because I felt like I was depriving my friends of me and letting the group dynamic that I had been fighting to keep alive for so many years just die.  Well, the life preserver that was this idea of this indestructible group of friends has been deflating for years as people slowly realized that the all-inclusive life boats floating by were much more comfortable and made a lot more sense.  I don't want to be Titanic Jack and freeze to death in the water when there's plenty of room on that floating door that that bitch Rose is hogging (that's right Kate Winslet, I'm on to you).  The "group of friends" idea is so much less important than the individual friendships that I have managed to maintain over the years.  I've been to Sioux Falls once in the past three months, and surprise, surprise, I'm still alive.  I'm finally realizing what my friends figured out a long time ago as they got married, started having kids, buying houses, and breaking away from the group.  YMCA Championships, first "I love you's" on starlit beaches in the middle of nowhere, and all-night wiffle ball tournaments were great times in my life, but I have to stop sitting around letting them continue to be the greatest.  Having your husband's overweight 30 year old laying on your couch, drinking beer and reminding you of that one time isn't necessarily as cool as it sounds.  Ask Jess Kramer.

So, yeah, while I haven't necessarily lost any additional weight from my body in the past two months, I've shed some much needed weight from my mind.  I'm still working on being healthy, but I'm not sure how attainable a 30 lb weight loss goal is.  Still, I'm shooting for the stars in the next month.  I want to get back to blogging because I don't have to blow all of my charming on trying to impress the girl anymore.  She's seen the warts at this point, and she still wants to kiss the frog (not a sexual euphemism).  I'm still trying to get healthy, and I'm going to kick strong to the end.  The most important thing is this:

WE ARE STILL HAVING THE PARTY!!!!!!

That's right, Jeff fans, we are still going to have the rocking party on Saturday, October 8, 2011.  The Chocolate Cowboy Band (who are fantastic and feature a very important friend from my life story rocking the keyboards) will be providing the sweet, sweet music to a night filled with dancing, laughing, and copious amounts of beer.  The American Legion in Hartford, upon hearing my sad-sap story, has decided to reward my plight by donating the space.  I'm still working on finding some transportation between Hartford and Sioux Falls so that we don't have a bunch of drunks making that 8 mile journey at midnight.  I would highly encourage you to book a room at the Quality Inn in Sioux Falls.  Seems to be the easiest to get to and the less stops the bus makes at the end of the night, the better.  There are probably some cheaper rooms on hotels on north Cliff or over by the Arena, so I suppose those would work, too.  If you live in Minnesota and want to go down, let's set up some car pools.  Hell, I'll even be your tour guide around the greater Sioux Falls area so you can see what all the hype is about.  This party is a once in a lifetime hoedown throw down, but I need you there to help make it special.  I'll create a FB group and make sure that everyone gets invited.  It would really mean the world to me to see everyone together celebrating life alongside me!  

Okay, that post got out of hand, but it was a warning shot that I'm back...again...for like the 5th time.  Stay tuned!

Feelin' groovy,

Jeff