I used to exercise because I knew it was the only thing keeping the world from exploding. I would dash onto the trail immediately after work so I would have enough day light to complete my runs. I would lift weights as I watched Good Morning America. I did Pilates so much I found myself able to roll backwards and then leap up off the mat. I did this for months and months after I got my horrible, awful, no-good headache. I did it because I knew if I didn’t the universe would collapse and we would all die, because it was only the force of me exercising five times a week that was preventing total world annihilation.

But after about 8 months of the pain and the pathetic push-ups, I stopped. The running shoes stayed in the closet and my Pilates mat stayed in the corner and my weights just stayed put, period. And the world did not explode. The universe did not end. This was a very bad thing to discover. I needed to believe exercise was non-negotiable, but when it wasn’t, I started negotiating. I began to do what I wanted to do instead of what I needed to do. This usually involved ice cream and prime time television.

I’ve been feeling a lot better now and I’ve been walking regularly, but I am no where near as fit as I used to be. I have known I need to work on working out more, but I’ve lacked the spark I had during my running years to make it happen. Even my behavioral psychologist at the headache clinic has been on me about it, listing all the benefits of regular aerobic exercise, and making me giggle inside my head that someone is giving me weight-loss tips.

Then Kelly emailed me. You might remember Kelly from page 8 of my book, where she appears as Karen, my abs-crunching college roommate. I didn’t know how to contact her for permission, so I changed her name in the book to protect her identity (though I doubt anyone would be embarrassed to appear as the health conscious roommate in a weight-loss memoir). Kelly would work out in our dorm room and I would watch while I ate Twinkies. Like everybody and my father, Kelly is on Facebook, which is where we found each other again and decided that we’d enter the Midsummer Night’s Run, a 5K race held in Lexington, KY on August 15, 2009. Kelly’s wanted to run it for years and I need a clearly defined and measurable fitness goal to work towards, so we have submitted our money and are registered.

The race is 10 weeks away, which gives me enough time to complete the Couch to 5K running program. Developed by the Cool Running web site, Couch to 5K gets you from the couch to a 5K in nine weeks, though in my case it should be “Loveseat to 5K” because I don’t own a full couch. Many people have raved about this program, but I never got to try it because I’d already started running regularly before I’d heard about. Now I can test it for quality assurance!

I downloaded some podcasts linked from this Couch to 5K resource page, loaded up my MP3 player, and completed the first run on Saturday. To my surprise, I didn’t have to scrape my lung off the pavement like dog doody! It was actually…easy. I am not as out of shape as I thought I was! Woot! I was tempted to push harder and longer, but the program specifically tells you not to do that, so I was a good little girl and eased off. I’ve got 10 weeks to go and there’s no sense in burning out or injuring myself.

It felt surprisingly good to run again, making me feel more connected to the planet and to my body and myself. When I was at my most fit, I knew that I could get up and run a 5K whenever I wanted to. Just knowing that made me feel, well, kinda’ badass, oddly enough. Yet I know that at this moment I would not be able to run a 5K, though I could walk one. I’m looking forward to getting back to that level of fitness, and to keeping the world from exploding.

I no longer have to breath deeply and grip the arm rests when the airplane takes off. I do not focus on the flight attendants as if they are explaining the meaning of life when they demonstrate how to put on the oxygen mask. I’ve traveled several times over the past two years and each trip has made me a little more confident and a little less uneasy to take to the skies.

However, I was a bit worried about that middle section of the flight path illustrated above on my most recent flight that crossed the vast Atlantic Ocean. When we took off from Paris, I could gaze out the window below to see ships skating across the water like toys in the bathtub. Then we coasted above the clouds and I was glad because I did not want to see the vast emptiness that would await us if something went wrong, knowing no one would be there to help us but ourselves.

So when Air France flight 447 disappeared and eventually the wreckage was found, I felt so sorry for the passengers and their families because I had feared the same might happen to me only two weeks earlier. I didn’t fear it enough to cancel my trip or take a long sea voyage instead, but I knew it was a remote possibility, just as I know I could die every time I buckle my seatbelt and drive to work. It makes me wonder, which picture of me would they have shown on TV? What would Brian Williams or Charlie Gibson or Katie Couric say about me in my brief two sentence obituary as my face flashed on the screen? Would they dig up archival video footage of me appearing on their morning shows? Would my book sales suddenly sky rocket? And even so, is having a best-selling book really worth dying for?

More importantly, what would I want them to say about me? I’m not sure, but it reminds me that you should not wait to start living the life you want to live. I don’t know how many tomorrows are in my future, but I hope they are all good ones.

“So how was London?” Mr. Grimm asked me.

I blinked for a second as my neurons fired, trying to figure out how the man I had just met knew where I’d recently vacationed. I sat in front of his desk, staring at the computer screen he’d pulled up. Oh, right. It’s in my file. Mr. Grimm was not a purveyor of macabre fairy tales. He was my banker. I’d let them know I was leaving the country so they wouldn’t suspend my account for suspected fraud when I withdrew pounds from a London ATM.

“It was good,” I told him. I had come to the bank to close a savings account because every time I paid bills online the site defaulted to withdraw from my savings account instead of my checking account. A few times I’d forgotten to select the right account in the drop-down box and had even overdrafted once, though they waved the fees when I explained what happened. I have higher yield savings accounts at other banks, so I decided to close the account to solve the problem.

When I walked in to request they close the account, the female teller was all, “What? What? You want to close an account. WHY?! WHY, OH WHY?! Haven’t we been good to you? Haven’t we changed your $20 bills to quarters for the laundry?! Haven’t we given you complimentary coffee and cookies and Diet Pepsi?! Haven’t we greeted you politely every time you enter and wished you a good day when you leave?!” I was then shuffled into the office of a manager and quickly reminded that the tellers are all women, but the managers are mostly men, and something is probably wrong with the system to cause these gender inconsistencies.

Mr. Grimm set about calling four different people until he found someone who could change the default account on my bill pay screen. Then I couldn’t remember my banking password so we had to reset it via the automatic system that calls my cell phone to give me the secret confirmation code. So, I spent about fifteen minutes in Mr. Grimm’s office, sucking on a butterscotch candy from his dish, trying to change one little setting on one little screen, all so they could keep the $150 in my savings account at their bank. Times must really be tough. When I wasn’t thinking about how much time this was taking, I was mildly freaked out by how much information Mr. Grimm knew about me.

“You’ve got a lot of credit card companies in your payees list,” he said. I did. When I got out of college I had a lot of debt but a good credit score, so I played a game of musical chairs with my balance. Every 6-9 months I opened a new account that let me have a 0% APR for the first 6-9 months and transferred the balance. I looked at the rest of my payees and my automatic payments and realized that Mr. Grimm could figure out who my doctors were, where I liked to shop with my store-based rewards credit cards and how much money I made every two weeks through my direct deposit. He could see what company manages my Roth IRA and how much money I make off of my blog. He could see what I have earned in book royalties. All I knew about him was that he mentioned having kids.

“So, how many kids do you have?” I asked as he clicked on screens.

“Two.”

And that’s all I know about Mr. Grimm.

Finally my accounts were fixed and I grabbed a complimentary coffee on the way out, trying not to think about how my naked life had just been on display to a stranger. Next week I’ll be back for some quarters.

Has anyone seen this cereal box?

When the friend I was visiting a few months ago said I could eat whatever I wanted in her kitchen, I took this to heart and ate half a box of her sister’s cereal. I tried the Shredded Wheat with Real Strawberries out of curiosity, and then found myself eating three bowls of it over the course of a day. I left about half a bowl’s worth of shredded wheat and freeze-dried strawberries in the box, just so I didn’t finish the whole thing off.

When I got back home, I put the cereal on my grocery list, but after searching Kroger and Marsh, I cannot find this cereal! I began to wonder if it existed at all, or if I had remembered the name wrong. But there is nutritional information for it at The Daily Plate and a review of the cereal here, so it appears it was real even if it is not listed on the official Shredded Wheat web site.

Does anyone know where I can find this cereal? Has it been discontinued, like Rainbow Brite cereal and other discontinued cereals? I have contacted Post cereal with my question, but I thought you guys might be able to help faster. Thanks!

Last week I finally figured out what causes the grimy residue that occasionally appears in my bathroom sink. It’s from sewage coming up the drain! Oh, how I long for the days I thought it was from the maintenance man changing my air filter and washing his hands in the sink. The urine and little flecks of feces swimming in the basin where I brush my teeth were very warm, emanating heat when my hand hovered above the concoction. I turned on the faucet and forced the icky brew sloooooooowly back down the drain and then closed the stopper until the maintenance man could come fix it.

This was also the same day that my Internet connection died for real. Two days before I left for vacation, the Internet choked, then someone did the Heimlich and it was breathing again for a day. But then it was hit by a bus and died while I was away, only to be carted to the emergency room and resuscitated for another day when I was able to check my email and catch up on a few things. Then it was taken off of life support and finally died for real, at the beginning of Memorial Day weekend when all the technicians were grilling meat in their backyards. This left me without the Internet for three days, before I begged my boss for time off to wait for the cable guy even though I’d just taken two weeks off. The people at Panera were starting to recognize me, the widow of the Internet, leeching “free” wifi for the price of a coffee.

As I pressed the button to turn on my desktop computer for the cable guy, I was shocked by static electricity. While a bolt of lightening gave Frankenstein’s monster life, it killed my desktop’s power unit and now the poor little computer won’t turn on. All my data is safe since it’s preserved on the hard disks, but I’m not sure if I’ll be able to pull out program settings like all my Internet passwords and FTP favorites. I had smelled death on my desktop computer, which is three and a half years old and equivalent to a Mayan relic in computer time. I had planned on moving everything over to my HP laptop (not the mini-laptop) this month in preparation of its inevitable death, but that was evidently 30 days too late.

But at least my Internet works now, even if a light bulb burned out as the technician was fixing it. Why does everything break at once?