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.”
Posted by Wendy | Thu 01.05.06 02:23 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack | send link
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.
Posted by Wendy | Tue 11.22.05 04:37 PM | TrackBack | send link
being name-checked in the lead story at Salon (okay, just page 4, and wow, thanks, Steve Almond) the night before you leave for a trip on which you’d resolutely decided not to bring your laptop for a change, effectively keeping you from following the various blogospheric reactions and responses and snickering and shitflicking that could ensue as a result of the article (though you don’t imagine any of it will be aimed at you (but if it was, though, you’d prefer to know (which just goes to show how much of a freak you are (which is pretty damn freaky)))). I mean it KILLS YOU to not bring the thing but you know it’s the right thing, philospophically and everything. So despite the temptation to keep logging on to see what everyone has to say about Almond’s article, my honest labor of self-reflection will not involve lugging my iBook and all its cords and attachments through airport security. Not this time, at least.
(But I can check my email, right? If there’s an internet cafe somewhere?)
See you in NJ tonight…
Posted by Wendy | Wed 10.12.05 11:41 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack | send link
Now that the site’s redesigned, the comments feature works a little differently than it used to. It’s set up to prevent huge onslaughts of gibbering robot comment spam, and over the past few months I’ve realized these measures allow me to moderate the incoming comments in other ways, too. My dumb little rules are as follows:
The first thing you need to know about the comments is that they aren't posted to the site right away. They're emailed to me and then I approve them if I think they're okay. And by "okay" I mean anything that's 1.) not junk, 2.) not abusive, and 3.) relevant to the discussion.
This means I'm no longer publishing any comment that reads like an email and/or mentions things that are more appropriate for a private message. I don't mind reading these kinds of posts in themselves, but sometimes the comments section of my site reads more like a guestbook, which isn't what I intended. I know some people feel it's easier and somehow less intrusive to communicate via the comments feature, but thanks to the cool little web form I have on my contact page, you can write me without having to open your email program. I like to read my fan mail but there's no reason why everyone else should have to read it, too. And if you submit a comment with a question, I'm not going to publish it unless I'm willing to follow it with an answer, which, sadly, isn't too often.
I won't publish comments that are posted to the wrong blog entry. I won't approve any attempts to respond to entries where I closed or disabled the comments feature. (Because I do that for a reason.) I will not approve any comments written in all caps. I won't approve comments written without punctuation. I'll forgive a few typos, but if your post gives the impression that you're drunker, crazier, or significantly more careless than other commenters, I'll do you a big fat favor and not publish it.
I'll publish a comment that's posted in response to another comment, and I'll probably publish the subsequent comment in response to that comment, but beyond that, all bets are off, because this isn't a bulletin board.
I might not post your comment if it's really long, or if you comment a lot and I think you might need to get out a little more. No hard feelings. I'm also not going to post your comment about how you wish I'd update my site more often, because, alas, it never has the effect you were hoping it would have on me.
Obviously I won't publish your comment if you're a douchebag, or a troll, or if you have a blatantly fake email address, or a bug up your ass about something I wrote, or if you're a robot, or an online casino enthusiast. Also, please don't hit the "post" button 10,000 times thinking that it'll make me publish your comment faster. I'm afraid it won't.
Really, if you're a reasonable person, I'll likely publish your comment. Mostly I'd love it if you didn't care too much whether I approve your comments or not. People post comments for different reasons, and not all of them fit with my idea of what my site is. Thanks for understanding.
Posted by Wendy | Mon 10.03.05 12:32 PM | Comments (13) | TrackBack | send link
is now fixed. There were a couple of MT database issues that busted the site for a few days, but things seem to be back in order. A few recent comments that were waiting for approval seem to have been eaten in the process, though.
I can’t say I’ve been doing much besides checking NOLA.com about 10,000 times a day. That, and working to finish up a big honking project involving these things. Hang in there.
Posted by Wendy | Mon 09.05.05 11:11 AM | Comments (11) | TrackBack | send link
Oh, wow, the comments still keep trickling in about the Sun-Times editorial. I don’t have much more to say about the Dove ads right now, but I thought I’d bring back a couple of body-image-related entries from my old online journal. They both date back to 2001 and they haven’t been available online for almost two years but they’re in the new (and slowly growing) archives. Since these are four years old now I have to resist a terrible impulse to heavily revise them; I did edit them a little.
Imaginary Fat People is from July 2001. Part of it is about fat suits—that summer the previews for Shallow Hal were running in the theatres, America’s Sweethearts had come out, and Fat Monica was a big fat stereotype-on-a-stick, and it seemed a good time to say something. And Screw Shari is from May 2001. It’s a rant on this dumb survey I read about in Marie Claire, and it’s nowhere near as high-minded.
I liked book touring but I really, really like not touring, too. I know I’m still slightly recovering because there are some days when my routine existence suddenly feels like a big bouquet of retardedly simple pleasures. I get to go places using my own car! When I am done with work I get to come home! After dinner I can take a walk! And in the park by my home there are dogs, and flowers, and the Righteously Outrageous Twirling Corps practicing their routines, and everything. So I’m going to enjoy all that for awhile, if that’s okay with you.
Posted by Wendy | Thu 08.04.05 09:53 AM | Comments (18) | TrackBack | send link