Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Cupcake Eating Competition

It all started with a bet.

Back at the beginning of December, Nick and I were sitting around the Skritter office one evening. He and his girlfriend were using this website Healthmonthly together, and Nick was picking his goals for the next 30 days. After a while, he decided that he was going to go whole hog and created a mega-list of self improvement activities for himself. It read like this:

Read a book for at least 20 minutes 3 days a week.
Walk at least 2 miles a week.
Only eat fried food 1 day a week.
Only eat white flour 2 days a week.
Meditate for 5 minutes at least 6 days a week.
Study Spanish every day.
Go to bed before 11:30pm at least 6 days a week.
Only read hacker news 1 day a week.
Study Chinese every day.
Write 3 pages in a private journal every day.
Exercise for 30 minutes at least 3 days a week.
Only eat white rice 1 day a week.
Only eat pasta 2 days a week.
Get enough Vitamin D every day.
Only eat processed food 1 day a week.
Eat raw nuts, legumes, beans, and seeds every day.
Take a multivitamin every day.
Eat greens every day.
Eat raw fruit every day.

Well, he read it to me and I promptly called bullshit. I mean, look at all that! No way could he maintain all of those goals, especially over Christmas holiday. He said he could do it though and so a bet emerged. The hows and whys of the prizes won't be discussed, but it worked out like this: if he won and completed all the goals for all thirty days without a single exception, I had to compete in a cupcake eating competition with him. If he lost, however, he had to drive up to the candy warehouse up in Cleveland buy me $40 worth of candy.

As the title suggests, he won this bet. Improbably. And so it came to be that I was implicated in the most intense eating challenge I have yet faced. Thinking ahead, Nick sensibly positioned our DSLR on the theater of operations and the following photos were created:

The initial spread. All 6 dozen of the suckers.

Scott has eaten 10 cupcakes and puts on the face to prove it.

Nick hits #10 without slowing.

Scott thinks my nausea is hilarious.

Nick puts on his attractive face for #15.

Scott glories in his fifteenth calorie cake.

I hit critical nausea levels at 15. Nick is unimpressed.

For those of you that don't know Chinese, that's Nick's 20th.

Scott finishes 2nd with 17 cakes. He hides his face in shame behind the guy fawkes mask.

Nick stuff down #25. Good god.

With Scott and I out, Nick just keeps binging. Here he contemplates his incipient fat rolls with #25.

He has suffered dearly, but his efforts yield #30.

Having long since started storing the partially digested cupcakes in his lungs, we see Nick here considering sepuku to end the nausea and shame of his accomplishment: #35.

A stunning success for Nick: 36 cupcakes, 5700 calories, and 36 hours of discomfort are all yours!

I guess we learned a valuable lesson that day: don't challenge Nick to an eating competition.

Monday, January 10, 2011

A New Year's Travel Extravaganza

Christmas and new years have come and gone and much has been done. Here's what has happened:

On the 23rd I traveled from Cleveland to San Antonio to meet Becca's mother's side of the family. Generally things were pretty chill there. I saw True Grit, which was incredible (as I predicted) and much food was consumed. Devin, Rebecca, Kelly (the cousin) and I played a game called Guillotine, which was pretty fun, and Devin and the menfolk (not including myself of course) watched a lot of football and basketball. By the end of the visit I was having trouble determining which sport was which. They all involved overly excited announcers and muscular dudes surrounded by flashy ESPN graphics. I watched a few old movies on my computer in the evening, and all was well.

From San Antonio we traveled to Tampa, and from Tampa to Orlando to visit Universal Studios. I had never been to a Theme park proper, so it was certainly a new experience. Since the only amusement park I've ever frequented is Cedar Point, I had the impression that all theme/amusement parks were essentially an excuse for the owners to build a whole lot of roller coasters. This is wrong. There is an entirely different sort of ride that exists at Theme Parks for which I was unprepared. It's sort of like a combination indoor roller coaster and movie. Universal officially calls them "experiences" not rides, which is somewhat indicative. Some of the rides I believe were engineered solely to cause motion sickness, others were really cool. I liked the Spider Man and MIB rides in particular. I think at heart though I'm a roller coaster fan, so ultimately my favorite ride at the park had to be the newest and biggest steel roller coaster. It was rad.

From Orlando we returned to Tampa where we celebrated New Years in a relaxed fashion and then I flew back to Cleveland after Rebecca's birthday on the 3rd.

Then, on the 8th, I moved out of Oberlin (totally pumped for a change) and put all my belongs into Becca's small apartment down here in Raleigh NC, where I'm going to be based for the predictable future. On Wednesday my brother, father, and I go skiing at Snowshoe in West Virginia (should be good skiing weather) and then on the 20th I head out for 10 weeks in Costa Rica with Nick and Scott via New Yawk. Whoa. So much traveling.

Unfortunately I have very little photographic evidence of all these adventures. I am coming to grips with the fact that the new Nikon D40 is a little less than optimal for situations where I'm on the go. At Orlando, for instance, I would have had to stored it in a locker on each ride (a considerable hassle) and here around NC I find that most of the photos I would like to take are indoors, and the 55mm lens on it only goes down to F4.5, so without a good flash I'm stuck taking 1" exposures which turns everything into artistic-looking blurs. I think I either need a prime lens or a nice flash. Then I can re-evaluate whether the camera is a good.

Anyways, that's a quick update, I'll write a post shortly about Nick, Scott, and my cupcake eating competition when I get some time. We have photos of that!