How I've been

February 17, 2006 by Wendy

It feels like all my habits are different now. Some of this is deliberate. I stopped drinking Diet Coke last month. I expected this to be drastic, like getting my forehead tattooed, and somehow it is not. I did it for lots of reasons, though I think one of the most significant ones is that, well, Diet Coke is heavy. I’m tired of carrying those twelve-packs and cases, which, with those little cardboard handles, feels an awful lot like tying a set of encyclopedias to your fingers and letting them dangle.

And I was sick of the cans, especially all the empty ones in my car. When I drove on bumpy roads my car would sound like a junkie pushing his shopping cart. And just after I started cutting down on Diet Coke I found these videos, which helped my resolve considerably. If Diet Coke does that to Mentos, I wondered, what is it doing to my minty fresh soul?

And then when I stopped drinking so much Diet Coke. I started drinking black coffee. I mean I just stopped putting sweetener in the one cup I have at work in the morning. I haven’t felt this adult since the moment I realized I really actually sort of enjoy hearing Nina Totenberg read aloud Supreme Court transcripts on NPR. (No shit, I like it better than the recorded courtroom audio they’ve had recently. That Nina, she does Scalia’s quotes so snippily!) Anyway, it’s nice to know I can fully function on only a few dozen milligrams of caffeine and that my heart is no longer being pickled in aspartame.

Iâ€™m cooking more. I spend at least three or four hours on the weekend in a chopping/peeling/blender-ing trance. I finally understand why great big heavy knives are so great, though I might throw one at you if you call me a “foodie” because, dear God, that word makes me angry.

And I haven’t been to Target since early November. I wouldn’t call it a boycott, exactly, but I just decided I’d try to see how long I could avoid going there. I don’t imagine this would make any difference with them (and Illinois law overrrules their policies anyway), but I just began to resent how essential that big damn red store had become to my life, and somehow it felt better to just cut it out. I don’t mind if anyone else shops there. I just don’t feel like going there these days, and wandering around trying to find where the hell I left my cart, because I always fucking did that.

Does all this sound like I am living in a cabin in the woods? I hope that’s not the impression I’m giving here. My life isn’t suddenly more meaningful than usual. Though did I mention I’m doing yoga? I’ll tell you more about the yoga sometime. When I do more of it, that is.

My bloggy Valentine

February 14, 2006 by Wendy

Somehow I managed to find the right index.php file I needed to fix this site last night. (If you hadn’t stopped by in the past week or so I’ll spare you the techie details, but last Thursday, after I’d installed WordPress, I started playing ball in the house, so to speak, and I done broke my index page.) But I’m back up, and there’s still more things to be done with the site, but the archives are now all in one place, with old Blogger entries and Moveable Type stuff together at last. Soon I’ll update the links and the FAQs and everything will be peachy.

Hey! Tomorrow night I’ll be reading and stuff at The Book Cellar in Lincoln Square along with Zulkey and Amy K. Rosenthal for their Local Author night. The “and stuff” part will be where I give a talk on getting children’s books published (that’s my day job, don’t you know), and where you learn all my extremely cranky editor opinions. Please come. There will be wine.

And hey! Remember these single girl valentines I made a couple of years ago? I’d taken them down because about a bajillion MySpace readers were hotlinking to them, especially this one, and it was annoying, but I uploaded them to Flickr last night, where you can OMG LOL over them as much as you damn well please without sucking my bandwidth.

Anyway, I’m not as single as I was when I first posted those things, am I? I’m going to make dinner for Chris tonight and then we’re going to go country dancing, and drink some quarter beers, and nine months ago yesterday was our first date, and I’d say more, but–well, I’ll say it to him. And I don’t even have to wait until we’re drunk. Suffice it to say I think he is the guy for me.

But I haven’t forgotten about you, you know. Just because I never post and I’m always “busy” and have “articles to write” and whatnot doesn’t mean you’re not my butterfly. That’s why I wrote you a Valentine’s Day song. I hope you like it!

Although I strongly feel the word "random" is extremely overused in most weblog contexts, I am forced to admit that it's the best word to describe this here entry

January 22, 2006 by Wendy

I’ve felt too scatterbrained to update lately, but I don’t want to just leave that last entry up and continue giving you all the impression that I’m dwelling in some kind of hormonal never-never-land. I am now fully in the present, both with my Estrostep and, well, this site. And I am drinking Three Buck Chuck to wind down after a busy weekend of cooking, cleaning, and also, dodging huge wet blobs of snow. No, really: on Friday night a whole bunch of lovely wet snow descended and stuck to trees, lightposts, overpasses, etc., only to start falling spectacularly in big clumps on streets, cars, children, etc., as soon as the temperature rose Saturday morning. Chris and I ran errands on Saturday and got to see the transition from “Winter Wonderland” to “Slush Apocalypse” firsthand, as massive snow loogies fell all around us and other hapless pedestrians. We thought we’d be safe in the car until we reached a stop sign and dislodged a massive glacier on the roof of my car, which coursed down my windshield in much the way I imagine the melting polar ice caps are going to smear all over Canada and Siberia one day.

Someone emailed me to say they’re doing a research paper on blogs and they “need some research.” And my business address. And… that’s all they said. Could you, er, be a little more specific, Researcher Person? Or maybe you are studying my response to your very vague research request, the sending of which is part of the research process in itself? I don’t mind answering a few questions (well, maybe three), as long as one of them isn’t “What is blogging?” because, dude, we answered that already.

Also, in the past twelve hours or so I have been heralded, via email, as Starbucks Customer #469744876, Target Customer #787288174FGY, Walmart Valued Customer #70718516, Ebay Customer-836A1-836, and JCPenney Customer #975R-VBEC40. It’s true that at one time or another I have either set foot in or clicked upon all these establishments, but if I were to believe that each one dutifullly assigned me a number based on a few instances of buying coffee or Diet Coke or whatever the hell, then by extension I would also have to believe that I am walking around with a subcutaneous microchip somewhere on my person, or else a fiber optic transmitter bio-implant, or even one of those good old-fashioned Mark of The Beast UPC codes. And I’d be able to go up to ATMs and just blink at them to get money. So why would I need your silly gift cards, Starbucks and Target and Walmart?

(When I start thinking like this, it’s time for bed.)

Kontraceptive Question Korner!*

January 9, 2006 by Wendy

For the past week I have been taking my birth control pills one day ahead of schedule. What can I say? I live for the future. I took my Monday pill on Sunday and I took Tuesday’s pill today. I’m trying to figure out how this happened. Possible explanations: a.) took two pills in one day by mistake; b.) traversed a wormhole and then space curved back over on itself; c.) briefly lapsed into an undiagnosed multiple personality, also on the Pill; d.) neglected to calculate variations between menstrual cycle and Gregorian calendar and forgot to take the special Leap Pill that I need to take once every four years, or months, or… something.

But really I think I just took two pills in one day by mistake, most likely sometime over the holidays when I had a lot of days off and the weekends were long. I do remember one day around 10 am where I glanced at my pill card and thought, oh my stars! A pill untook! and popped it, because Heaven knows, I need to keep my skin clear. I’ve checked online and asked around enough to know there isn’t any immediate problem, but now I’m wondering what the hell to do when I get to the end of the pack. Do I just skip a day when I get to the Mystery Pills in the final week? Will my Start Day be henceforth one day ahead? Can I fix all this if I fly west to Japan? Any ideas? Anyone?

And lest you worry that I’m letting a bunch of online strangers tinker with my pharmaceutically-regulated woman-rhythms, I am waiting to hear back from my doctor about this. Just thought I’d share in the meantime.

*Kutesy title spelling intended to evade Google searches by kurious folks, konfused teens, or extremist kooks.

28 Lines About 12-and-a-Quarter Months

January 5, 2006 by Wendy

January I went boot camp crazy:
did way too many lunges, squats.
Thanks to this stupid page in Feb.
you could calculate our mutual hots!
In March I blathered on and on
about horoscopes, Kirstie, and chick lit.
April was big: my book came out.
I met my boyfriend. Holy shit!
All book tour hell broke loose in May:
Seattle! Portland! New York! Boston!
LA in June! And San Francisco!
And the sexiest state of all: Wisconsin.
Hit Durham in July and redesigned;
ranted about those ads for Dove.
In August: half-assed weight loss plans!
Mystery beeps! Hot penguin love!
September I wrote… um, almost nothing.
What else did I do besides get fat?
October: Halloween, obviously;
I wore the most fucked-up ever hat.
I couldn’t shut up in November–
Fat suits! Plan B! Bras with phones!
December: obsessed with gingerbread;
earrings in 99 Luftballons.
It’s January 06! I’ve yet to quit
drinking Jewel brand spiked eggnog.
But my resolutions are already done!
Well, just the one: “Update damn blog.”

Because I'm FIVE. Or this journal is, at least.

November 22, 2005 by Wendy

Five years ago this week I first started writing journal entries and putting them online. At the time, I was posting them to some measly half-acre of free webspace I’d staked out and called “candyboots.homestead.com.” I wrote the entries in Netscape Composer. Every time I wrote a new entry I’d open up the file for the last entry and erase the text and type something new. Then I’d upload the page, again and again and again and again. It felt cumbersome and weird, like trying to play piano with a stick in your teeth.

It was about a week before Thanksgiving. I was in the midst of one of my most Weight Watchful phases and and I didn’t want to lose myself in the holidays. I wrote about going to the gym so that I would keep going to the gym. I wrote about Swiss Colony Dobosh Torte so that I could remember, for future reference, exactly what kicked my ass at Christmas dinner. I think when I wrote these entries I did so with the idea that they were just notes to myself, and I tried to make them funny for the benefit of whoever else might be reading. Which was nobody at first. Just the idea that someone else could be reading was enough.

When I first started, I didn’t disclose my last name or what city I lived in; I was just “Wendy Something-or-Other” and I lived “in the Midwest.” This was considered a perfectly sensible approach and not bugfucking paranoid at all. Usually you had a either a first name or a nickname. And either you almost never posted your own photo, or else you totally did and you had a webcam and maybe sometimes also a hinky sense of personal boundaries. You were either on Diaryland or your own domain. You were either an online journaler or a blogger, and if you were a blogger, you tended to write more about CSS standards than about your inner life.

What else was different: I lived in a studio apartment and I had dial-up access. Some of my friends were different. And this is very hard to measure, but I don’t think I felt quite as part of the world as I do now. I don’t know how much of that had to do with my body and how much is just a matter of becoming settled. I know just that there’s no sense of solitary existence when I write for this site anymore. And I think I’m glad for this, though you might have to be me to understand why. Maybe not.

Anyway, Happy Thanskgiving! That low-point pumpkin pie recipe they give out at the Weight Watchers meetings still tastes like ass. Like hell. Like licking powdered Cremora off a truck tire. Some things never change.