FAT TUESDAY!

I am no stranger to Fat Tuesday. When I reigned as President of the Donut Club at work, Fat Tuesday was like a national holiday. Each member would bring in a dozen paczkis. That would be thirteen dozen paczkis (156 to be exact). We had a mountain of paczki boxes. The paczki to person ratio was definitely in my favor. Every time I would walk by, my eyes would sparkle and I’d start drooling. Two years ago I consumed six during work hours. These were real paczkis too, not the fake paczkis from Meijer or Kroger. This was the cream of the crop from the best bakeries in the Metro Detroit area.  

Eating six paczkis in the span of eight hours can change your life. I did okay for the first four, but after that, things started to get weird. I started to feel like my body was buzzing. And then it felt like my mind was really tired, but my body wasn’t. It was like the inside of my body was on overdrive. I could feel the blood moving through my veins extra fast and I started blinking a lot. I started sweating grease and I couldn’t wash the powdered sugar from my hands. And then I ate two more. And then I felt really weird. It was like I drank two pots of coffee and chased it with a bag of sugar. I wasn’t hyper, but my body was. When I got home from work, I skipped dinner and just drank water for the rest of the evening. I even went to the gym, but I just walked on the treadmill very slowly.

I gave up sweets for Lent that year, not because I wanted to, but because I had to. I had enough sugar in my body to last me the whole year. If anyone needed sugar I’d just clap my hands. But that was two years ago. Last year Aya’s parents were in town and we each only had one. One! I thought about giving up sweets for Lent last year too, but Aya was actively nursing. It’s hard to give up sweets when your wife sends you to Dunkin’Donuts at 4:00am. What, I’m not gonna get one for myself while I’m there? But this was a new year and I needed to figure what I was going to do.

I could go to any bakery I wanted to. I had contemplated skipping story time and going to a Hamtramck bakery. I’t be cool to stand in line and feel the excitement and camaraderie of Fat Tuesday. But the more I thought about it, I realized I really prefer my local bakery’s packzis. These were the paczkis I grew up eating every year so maybe that was part of it. But I’ve had the Hamtramck pazkcis before, along with a bunch of other Detroit area bakeries, and I think I like my local Vinewood Bakery best.  

Even though I wanted to push my boundaries again and have a life changing moment, I decided that maybe it wasn’t the best idea. So, I got one dozen for Aya to take to work, and half a dozen for us. We already each had one yesterday. You have to prep your body for it. I’m still undecided if I will give up sweets for Lent, but something tells me I won’t be able to. I’m just too weak and emotionally unstable to handle something like that right now. So I was thinking of maybe doing something positive instead. Not sure what that will be, but I have all day to figure that one out while I eat my packzi.

HAPPY FAT TUESDAY EVERYONE!