Big talks about writing his TWSC story. Also there's an update on the marathon progress and the pending sale of his house.
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Sadly, for a guy like me, forty pounds is not all I had to lose. And there were several others like me who had lost well, but still wanted to lose more. So, we did a second round of the contest immediately following the first. Three months later, I'd lost another ten pounds or so, but this time around, I wasn't the champion. I wasn't upset. After all, I'd still lost some weight, and the prize for winning this time around was much smaller, since there were less people who were participating.
I gauged the interest in people doing a third round of the weight loss contest, and got a very tepid response. "Maybe," everyone said, "after the new year, when we all have weight that we need to lose again."
So, I let it lie. And, sadly, I let myself go a bit. Over the holidays, I gained back about half of the weight that I'd lost throughout the year. Now I really needed a new round of the weight loss contest. I started asking around to see who was interested, and it looked like it would be worth doing again, so we started round three.
Only nine people took part in the contest this time, and from the get go it seemed as though nobody really cared. I tried hard for the first two weeks, and lost about ten pounds, but then my enthusiasm waned, and within a couple of weeks, I'd gained most of it back. Halfway through, I got disgusted with my laziness, and tried hard again. I lost about ten pounds again, but, again, my enthusiasm waned. I gained the most of the weight back.
Then, just the other day, one of the guys who was doing the weight contest told me that it had come to an end. I didn't even realize we'd reached the end. I was bummed, because it was too late to even try. I knew how lame everyone was doing, and if I'd had a week or two, I could have put on some effort and lost ten pounds again like I'd done twice before. But instead, I had until Monday, and it was Friday. So, I didn't even bother.
When Monday came, I stepped onto the scale for my final weigh in. I'd lost something like three pounds altogether in the three months of the contest. If I hadn't taken up training for a marathon, I probably would have gained weight, I'd eaten so poorly. But, at least I had a positive number.
I went back to my desk, and forgot all about it.
An hour later, after everyone had weighed in, the woman who was in charge of the contest showed up at my door with money...for me. It turns out I had won the contest. I was the lead male. When we started the contest, since there were so few participants, we'd decided that there would be a female winner and a male winner, and that was it. No third place or Miss Congeniality or any of that.
Well, it so happened that I was the only man in the whole contest who didn't actually gain weight over the three months. It was a pretty sad state, really. The grand champion, who had lost much more weight than me, apparently lost it because she'd gotten the flu a week and a half before the contest, and had been unable to keep any food down for several days.
I got sixty bucks out of the deal, and like Mr. Potato Head said, "Sixty bucks ain't bad." Oh, wait, he said fifty bucks ain't bad, so sixty must be totally awesome. You could get yourself a rare Sheriff Woody doll and still have ten bucks left over for a dimebag of crack.
I suppose it's time to let the weight loss contests go. Folks around here just aren't interested anymore. I'm going to have to find some sort of internal motivation if I want to lose weight now. But, when it comes down to it, it always has to be internal motivation, doesn't it? Or you can't keep it up for long. I'm going to start looking deep within, reflecting, and meditating and stuff. There's gotta be something left within me that might motivate. Something within in me other than the fat that I've accumulated from drinking so damned much Mountain Dew Code Red in the last few months.
Big talks about his progress towards his goals, which has been almost completely stymied by progress in other matters in his life...as usual.
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If he only knew me like you listeners know me, then he wouldn't have asked at all. He would have just hurried on to the next desk, like people do with my house on Halloween.
"No, no, honey, that's the Anklevich's house. Let's try the next one. No, don't look, they might see you..."
Anyway, I answered, as you might have suspected, "No. I hate cats."
"Oh," he said, and moved on to the next desk. Only then did I see that the photographer had an assistant in tow who was carrying an enormous tabby cat in her arms.
"Do you like cats?" they asked the guy who sits in the desk next to me.
"Oh, hell no," he said, as any reasonable person should, "Why?"
"Oh, well, May 12th is Hug Your Cat day, so were taking pictures of people hugging cats."
Apparently, it's a thing they're going to put on Facebook. They went to the next desk to find its occupant already gone for the day, and they were starting to look crestfallen. I remembered my days of selling things door to door and working as a telemarketer in college, and I felt bad.
"Is it a nice cat at least?" I asked.
"Yeah," said the assistant, "It's really heavy, but it's a nice cat."
"All right, I'll hold it."
They brought it over, and set it on my lap, and they weren't kidding. What an incredibly fat cat. It's hard to tell how big a cat is when someone is holding it. If I'd seen it walking, I might have been able to see just how fat the cat was.
But it was a nice cat too. It sat on my lap quietly as I posed with a fake smile as though I were enjoying this experience. My own cat would have been straining to get away from me, looking for any moment that my grip became loose enough that it might squirt free. It might also have been extending its claws into my thighs as well. It's just that kind of a cat, you know? There's a reason I said I hate cats after all.
So, I sat there, holding this cat, feeling almost as though I was betraying my integrity with such a farce as this. All because I felt bad for the people who couldn't find a cat lover anywhere around. Maybe that says something about cats.
I bet there isn't a national hug your dog day, because you don't have to do something like that to get someone to hug a dog. They just do, all the time. People have to be given special techniques just to lure their cat close enough to be hugged, as evidenced by this blog post I found while searching for the date of the cat hugging day on the internet.
I was saddened later to find that same assistant holding a kitten. When I asked why I didn't get the kitten instead, she didn't have a response for me. "You know, I would have totally held a kitten."
"But you said you hate cats."
"Yeah," I said, "nobody hates kittens. Even people who hate cats like kittens."
If only kittens didn't crawl into a chrysalis and emerge as hateful, lazy, standoffish cats in the end.
Anyway, everyone hug your cat on the 12th, that is if you can manage to get close enough to it without getting scratched for your efforts.
