My neurologist told me to lose weight and I thought, “So, it has come to this, has it?” The last time a doctor told me to lose weight, I weighed about 350 pounds and was preparing to have my gallbladder removed. To make the day even more perfect, the neurologist’s nurse had weighed me on one of those old scales with big metal counterweights that slide left to right. I thought the digital revolution had rid us of those scales and the drawn out torture of watching the nurse politely start at a lower number and then slide, slide, slide, slide you up to a much bigger number.

I know people have various reactions to a doctor telling them they’re fat, but my first thought was, “Yeah, of course I need to lose weight.” Let us not forget the pant-splitting incident in January precipitated by the 50-pounds of headache weight gain (which I actually had forgotten until I was searching the archives for something else and found that entry). And losing weight has been on my mind for at least two years, ever since the headache screwed up so many of my routines. I do find it bizarrely twisted that I gained so much weight because of the headache, and without it I would have no reason to be at a neurologist’s office nor on his ancient scale to begin with. My life is a real-world logic problem.

So, this August I have been making changes, which was another reason I decided to move to Chapel Hill. It is easier to be healthy here. People ride bikes, not just for fun, but to get places. There are walking trails. There are sidewalks. There are trees and creeks and butterflies flitting about all over the place. It is effing idyllic. I fully expect an animated deer to follow me to the grocery store any day now. And now that it’s not 100-freakin-degrees every afternoon, it’s quite lovely to walk around town.

I have been walking daily for almost two weeks now, and I swear to God I try to talk myself out of it every morning. After I roll out of bed and dispense cat food, I sit on the couch for about an hour watching TV and then sit at my laptop going through emails until I eventually put my head down on my desk. Why? Because my doctor also made me give up caffeine and I do not know how human beings remained conscious before noon without it. Actually, I do know—by walking. Going for a 40-minute walk is the only thing that wakes me up now that I can’t suck down coffee. Last Friday I was going to give myself a day off for recovery, but eventually pushed myself out the door because I knew I’d flop on my bed and go back to sleep if I didn’t. And since I haven’t mastered the art of doing work in my sleep, consciousness is required for my continuing financial solvency.

Along with the caffeine killing, my doctor has made me give up artificial sweeteners and preservatives. My neurologist is a whole lot of fun, isn’t he? At my next appointment I suspect he’ll ban dancing and I’ll have to form a secret underground dance club for migraineurs. The diet changes mean I have to eat real food, which means I’ve had to start cooking again. I’ve also had to use real sugar or real honey as sweeteners, which I’ll admit FREAKED ME OUT. I have a sweet tooth, and I was concerned about how I was going to make my food palatable without drizzling it in 50 billion calories. However, as much as I hate to admit this, and I really do hate to admit it because I don’t want it to be true, I think my cravings have decreased now that I’m eating more real food and less Lean Cuisines and Diet Dr. Pepper. (I still love you, Dr. P! Come back to me!) So Goddamn this diet for being good for me. I hate you healthy eating!!

Reflecting on the past month and comparing it to my big weight loss between 2005-2007, I notice one big difference. I am much more resentful about healthy living than I was five years ago. The first time was a happy, fun adventure of self-discovery and change. This time, it’s been a drag-me-by-my-pony-tail-down the trail, begrudging return to healthy habits. I’ve haven’t been doing it because I particularly want to, but because I know I NEED to. And I do know it’s good for me, and I honestly do feel better because of these changes, but Dear Lord I miss my coffee and my sodas and sitting on the couch all day. I suppose this is how people who give up smoking must feel. They know it’s for the best, but they’d still kill a hobo for one last cigarette.

All of which reminds me of the time I saw the film Prince Caspian a while back, and the lion Aslan is talking with Lucy, and according to the Internet she says “Aslan, why didn’t you come roaring in and save us like last time?” and he say “Things never happen the same way twice, dear one.” And when I watched that I paused for a moment and thought, Damn, that stupid fucking lion, but he’s right. Things don’t happen the same way twice. The way I lose weight today is not the same way I lost weight five years ago. I can’t just repeat the things I did before. I’m a different person now, who got a headache, traveled to Europe, and moved to another state. What worked for 25-year-old Jennette is not necessarily what will work for 58-days-until-she’s-30-years-old Jennette. I don’t feel the same way about it all as I did then.

That is the challenge of it all. What works now won’t work forever. You have to keep changing and adapting, because life keeps changing whether you like it or not. So I will take my morning walks and cook food on a stove instead of in the microwave. I don’t like it in the same way that I did five years ago, but I’m starting not to loathe it with the intensity of my back gas burner. I might even start to like it again. Who knows? And if I see that damn talking lion on one of my walks, I’ll tell him thanks.

Back in the year 2000, I started watching a TV show called The West Wing and loved it. That was the good. The bad? I started watching from the second season premiere and we had no Hulu, no Netflix, and no BitTorrent for me to watch the first season. It was the dark times, younglings. (We did have IRC sharing channels, newsgroups and FTP queues, but we also had dial-up*. Oh, dial-up.)

So, what was a girl to do? Well, she got on the interwebs and got a fan to send her ten VHS tapes containing copies of copies of the episodes. Shipping cost at least twenty dollars and thirty seconds of one episode was overridden by a California emergency weather alert, but they were watchable and that’s what we had, so we made do.

But now, now we have DVDs and Netflix streaming and life is good! Life is fantastic! Now entire seasons of television shows are available to watch in binge marathons on the weekends. It has transformed the way I watch TV, no longer parceled out in bite-size pieces every week, but watched as a detailed season-long story arc. You don’t want to read a chapter of a book every week. You want to read the whole book at once, and that’s what is possible now, which is what’s great. And I love it, because I think the televised season-long story arc is one of my favorite forms of storytelling, if not the most favorite. (So says the book author who reminds you to love books and buy books, especially my books!)

A season of a television show gives you more time to meet the characters, tell the stories and flesh things out. When I compare Friday Night Lights the movie and Friday Night Lights the television show’s first season, the TV show wins. Both have excellent production values and great acting, but you can tell so much more story with umpteen hours of TV than you can in two hours of movie. And you can tell it’s good because I do not care an iota about football and still love that show.

It seems like TV is looked down on as inferior to movies, but I don’t think that’s a valid stereotype. The quality of TV shows has gotten so good in the past few decades that they’re just as good if not better than many movies. You’ve got accomplished actors of stage and screen appearing in shows, like Laura Linney in “The C Word” or Anna Paquin in the hit “True Blood.” And now with our smartphones and media players, it is becoming less important where you watch a show. You can watch it almost anywhere.

I love good TV shows. I love that I can watch them in my house and not at a theatre with chatty couples and the distracting light of someone texting in the second row. I love that there is so much more to devour and enjoy than in movies. I love that the characters continue to change and grow more than they typically have space to do in films. I love talking about TV shows with my friends. I love TV!

And I love that TV comes on DVD, so I don’t have to wait through commercials. I love that it’s available online, legally, so I don’t really have to pay for cable if I don’t want to. I particularly love it when I discover a great show after it’s been on the air for five years. Then I get to watch seasons of it back to back, not waiting long summers for the resolution to cliffhangers. So thank you DVD and the Internet. And thank you TV!

* If you don’t know what any of that means, don’t worry. You don’t need to and it probably means you actually interacted with human beings as a teenager.

“So, why did you move to North Carolina?”

This is a question I’ve gotten a lot since I moved to Chapel Hill six weeks ago. Yet every time it is asked—by the mail man or the insurance agent or the bank teller or the sofa delivery man—I hesitate. I’d like to say something simple, like “for work” or “for school,” which is easy to understand. People move because of work and school all the time. I could make up a boyfriend and say I moved here because of him, or pretend I moved for a job, only these lies would then mandate follow-up lies. I don’t want to have to discuss my fake job and my fake boyfriend every time I deposit a check. Also, I am bad at lying. It takes far too much energy to keep track of two separate realities in my mind.

Despite all the self-promotion I’ve had to do for my books and my blog, I’ve never quite gotten over the uncomfortableness I feel talking about myself. Uh, yes, I realize this sounds bizarre coming from a woman who has written two memoirs and blogged about her life for over five years. But with blogging, if I’m boring you can click away and I never know about it. Bub-bye! Thanks for the pageviews! Whereas in a conversation with a living person, I get instant feedback and feel some sort of responsibility to be entertaining and charming and interesting and to give coherent answers. I can’t get over how stupid I feel telling someone I moved because of the weather or just because I liked this city and no, I don’t have a job here. But why the hell shouldn’t I move?

The most compact version of the real answer is, “I felt an existential need for change.” But I would feel weird and insecure saying something like that even in a liberal, hippy, college town like this. I suspect an answer like that would be greeted with confusing and a general “huh?” look on someone’s face. It changes small talk into weird talk. You mean you moved here because you wanted to? How BIZARRE.

It’s made me realize that most people end up where they do because of their job, school or family. Moving because you feel like it *is* rather odd. But isn’t it odd that it’s odd? I’d never thought about it before, but millions of people in the world must live where they do just because that’s where they’ve always lived. It makes me question how much control we actually have over our lives and how much power we give up by simply believing we don’t have any power.

I suppose the real thing to do is answer the question with confidence and moxy, no matter what I say. If you’ve got the right attitude you can get away with saying most anything. Next time I’ll say, “I had to escape the epicenter of the upcoming alien invasion!” or “I’m studying the mating habits of wasps!” Or not. I’ll probably just say I moved because I felt like it and leave it at that.

This is Tiger:

Tiger is the neighborhood cuddle whore. Tiger does not care who you are or what you’re doing, he just wants to cuddle. Now. CUDDLE HIM, NOW! He does not care if you and your brother are carrying a heavy piece of furniture up the steps. He will fling himself directly in your path on the stairwell because he knows no one would step on a kitty so cute and lovable. So please put down the IKEA and cuddle him. NOW.

The first time I met Tiger, he followed me up the front steps and lodged himself between me and my front door, begging for cuddles. He did not have a collar, so I did not know if he had an owner he was cheating on for lovin’. I petted his pretty orange furs, told him he was pretty, and then dashed in my front door and washed my hands immediately. I didn’t want the feline contingent of the Fulda family to be jealous or to get fleas.

This week, Tiger stopped by for some cuddling as I was unloading my groceries. This was when I saw he’d gotten a collar, which had his name on it. It also said, “While I like to roam, I have a home” with the telephone number included. This made me smile, because I am a sucker for a good couplet. I was not surprised that such a cuddle whore had found a home, but I was glad to learn his name. And now if I ever need some good kitty cuddling, I know what phone number to call. (Don’t tell my kitties!)

This is the last Diet Dr. Pepper I had. The photo is date-stamped for August 5th, which means I’ve been off of sodas for…hmmm…let’s see…FAR TOO LONG!

I’ve had an on-again, off-again relationship with soda dating all the way back to our first break-up in 2004. If diet soda were a person, all my friends would be telling me to ditch that guy for real this time because he’s no good for me or my teeth. Then I’d reply, “But he can be so sweet and bubbly! You don’t know him like I do!” I know in my head that he’s no good for me, but my heart (or my tongue) just can’t say no.

This time around the dissolution of our partnership was ordered by my new headache doctor. New state, new neurologist. He’s making me avoid artificial sweeteners and preservatives because they can inflame your nervous system and___________ (fill in the blank with the bazillion reasons I know fake foods aren’t good for you, but that I don’t want to hear).

Anyway, I have no reasonable counterargument to convince either my doctor or myself that TV dinners and Nutrasweet are headache reducers, so I’ve been enforcing the diet restrictions as he prescribed…mostly. He wants me to go off coffee too and I haven’t yet sit down with Mr. Coffee to serve him our divorce papers.

Do you know what I’ve been drinking? Water. Just water! For days and days and days! It’s been AWFUL. I have to get up and pee in the middle of the night because of all the water I’m drinking.

Even though I know these diet changes are probably good for me, I miss my fake foods! Plus, preservatives and artificial flavorings are in everything! When you read the labels, you discover they add them to yogurt, ketchup, bread, soup and practically everything at the grocery. Eating only “real” foods is hard, and much more labor intensive. And even though I know diet changes like this help some headache sufferers, I went through this song and dance two years ago and saw no results, so I get the feeling all this work and suffering is going to do nothing for my suffering.

I figure, I will try this for a month and when it doesn’t do anything for my headache I shall schedule a consultation with my favorite doctor: Dr. Pepper.