In 20 words or less: I will no longer be updating PastaQueen.com. I will now be blogging at JenFul.com

I used to be Jenny. To some I was even called Jenny Sue. But there were a lot of girls named Jenny in the early 80′s and there was always another one in my class. It made me feel less than special, like I wasn’t the unique snowflake they tell you that you are. I was Jenny F. and the “eff” sounded so harsh, though not quite as harsh as using the first two letters of my last name would have been: Jenny FU.

I’ve been PastaQueen for over six years. Actually, I’ve been PastaQueen since I had to sign up for a Hotmail account during summer camp in 1997. I registered PastaQueen.com several years after that and used it as a portfolio site. Then I set up a blog in its own folder, PastaQueen.com/HalfofMe. Eventually that folder took over the whole domain and that’s where I’ve been writing and talking with y’all for the past 2000+ days in 1207 posts.

I’ve enjoyed being PastaQueen. Jennette was too scared to talk about her fat issues with anyone. Not to her family. Not to her friends. But for some reason PastaQueen could tell the Internet, though no one was listening at first. But the more I wrote, the more confident I became. I started leaving my blog address in comments on other sites. I remember that injection of excitement I felt the first time someone commented on my blog, when someone had read something I wrote. I met lots of cool people. I got to go on trips and stay at fancy hotels and eat lots of oatmeal. I got to write a book and then another book. PastaQueen has done so much more than Jenny Sue ever could have imagined.

I’m at the age when my friends are having babies and then more babies. We don’t go out together as much as we did, and we talk about different things than we did in college. It’s not a bad thing. It just means our lives are changing. Diapers and parenting books have replaced the backpacks and math homework we had in high school. We’re not who we used to be and that’s ok. In fact, it’s natural.

As great as it’s been to be PastaQueen, I realized recently that I’m not PastaQueen anymore. PastaQueen had a lot of issues with her body that she needed to work out through her writing. And she did that. I know she did that because I don’t feel the need to write about my body that much anymore. I’m good, or at least 95% good. Sure, I’d like to lose some weight and it wouldn’t hurt if my skin were tighter, but I can handle all that. It ain’t no thang.

PastaQueen really needed support from her readers. She needed them to tell her she was doing ok and she wrote well and she was valued. And while I’m still grateful for all the support, kind words, and digital love you guys have sent me over the years, I don’t need it anymore, not like I used to. I like it and I appreciate it more than I can say. But you’ve helped nurture me into something stronger, someone who doesn’t need training wheels, someone who knows she can ride on her own.

PastaQueen wrote only about health and fitness on her blog, which was good for pageviews because she had cornered a niche. But in September of 2008 she decided to start blogging about other things, which was probably a sign that she was starting to outgrow the PastaQueen identity, like those baggy clothes stuffed in cardboard boxes she kept at the bottom of her closet to remind her of where she came from. She kept on blogging though, because she liked it. She liked the people. She felt compelled to share her thoughts. She liked being a part of that section of the blogosphere.

People still come to this blog looking for the old PastaQueen and are sort of surprised when they find me here instead. Sometimes I log into PastaQueen.com and I’m surprised to find me here instead. But that’s ok. It’s alright to change into someone new, and it doesn’t mean you have to forget who you were. PastaQueen wouldn’t have been PastaQueen without you. She would have just been some invisible girl chattering to her computer. I don’t want to be an invisible girl, so this isn’t really a good-bye. I’m just ditching my old name, just like Jenny Sue became Jennette. The PastaQueen name has a lot of baggage. It’s baggage I got traveling on one of the most fantastic journeys of my life, collecting nicks and scrapes on my way through the Internet and out a door into the real world. But it’s still baggage, and I’m ready to leave it behind. Buy some new suitcases. Fill them up with new junk.

I’ll still have an online presence at JenFul.com. I decided to shorten my name J-Lo style. Jennette Fulda. See? It’s a blog. I don’t know how often I’ll update it. I don’t know what I’ll talk about. But it will be there if I need it and if you care to listen. And when you go there you won’t be looking for PastaQueen. You’ll be looking for whoever I am right now. I thought about just setting it up at JennetteFulda.com, but only 1% of the population succeeds at spelling my name correctly. So, now I’m Jenful. That’s jenful! It’s my name and an adjective.

I’ve thought about doing this on and off for over a year now. Whenever I mentioned it to someone they’d talk me out of it, telling me not to throw away everything I’ve built here. Sometimes I’d look at my bills and then look at my ad earnings and think I couldn’t leave PastaQueen behind. Really, I was just scared to be something different. I was a hermit crab scared to leave her shell even though she’d outgrown her home. I was scared to lose my visitors and my page ranking and whatever income I feel like I’ve lucked into with every click.

But over the past year I’ve realized that holding onto who I was is stopping me from becoming who I will be. I’ve stopped caring about my stats, how many comments I get, my pagerank, my Technorati rank, my Alexa rank and all that blogging bullshit that it’s so easy to get caught up in. I haven’t logged into my Sitemeter account for months. And while I admit that I like the money, and that the money has helped me be able to freelance full time, I can’t stick around here for the money. I’ve probably stuck around too long as it is. Jerry Seinfeld said there’s a moment in a comedian’s act where you know you have to step off the stage. It’s that moment where everyone’s still happy and laughing. It’s tempting to stay in the lights, but if you keep going you’ll lose your momentum and you’ll lose the crowd. People only remember beginnings and endings anyway, even though most of us live life in the middle. Maybe leaving sooner would have been smarter or more graceful. It would be great if I had a master plan about my career and how to handle all my online shit or if I knew what the hell I’m going to do with the next 30+ years of my life. But I don’t. I’m just muddling along like I always have, discovering who I am going to be and sometimes being as surprised as you are.

So screw the money, the stats, and whatever prestige I might imagine that I have. I just need to do what feels right and this feels soooo right. Making the decision came with a wave of relief as strong as any tsunami, but instead of leaving wreckage behind I’ll leave behind what I created over six fabulous years of my life. Sometimes people email or comment wishing that I still blogged about running and weight loss and the thrill of all that amazing stuff. They wish I were who I used to be. They don’t want me to change, but I have. You change or you die. They want PastaQueen. But what’s great is that she still exists. She’s talking to you in the archives. She’ll cheer you on and maybe inspire you a bit. I’m leaving the site up so you can still visit her. She’ll always be there, frozen in time for you to look upon.

But I’m not frozen in time. Every seven years all the cells in your body replace themselves. Well, I’ve been blogging here for almost seven years, so I am literally not the woman I used to be. All the cells in my body have replaced themselves with copies of themselves. I am a completely different set of atoms that are aligned in the pattern of me.

This decision is mine. It wasn’t made because of any one comment or email. It was made because of the entire gestalt of my life. It’s not really good-bye. I’m not entering witness protection. I’m not going to become the new JD Salinger and do the reclusive author schtick. It’s more like I got a new haircut and went off to college. I’ll still be around, just not in the same way as I used to.

Thank you for everything. Really. You guys are the best. You are awesome. It has been great being PastaQueen. I’m grateful for all she did for me. And I hope that the next time you use her name, it will go something like this:

“Oh yeah, PastaQueen? I used to know her. She was fab.”

So, head over to JenFul.com or subscribe to the feed here. I WON’T be automatically forwarding subscribers of the PastaQueen feed to JenFul because I’d like people to make a conscious decision to follow me over there. I don’t want people who are looking for PastaQueen to find themselves in JenFul’s house instead. But the welcome mat is out and you’re all invited in! (Except if you’re a vampire. No invites for vampires.)

I haven’t posted a new entry for over a week now, which might be a record for me. There were moments in the past week when I thought, “I should post something. People will wonder if that IKEA bookcase I assembled fell over and crushed me dead.” But then my next thought was, “What should I write about?” and the honest answer was, “I don’t have anything I care enough to write about right now.” Sure, I’ve got dozens of little notes saved for post ideas, many of which are worth writing about eventually. But during each moment I thought about posting last week, nothing seemed so immediately important that I had to write a blog entry about it RIGHT NOW.

Certainly, there is something to be said for writing when you don’t feel like it. If you want to be a professional writer, you’ll spend plenty of time writing when you don’t want to. That’s why it’s a job, because it’s actual work. However, I feel that bloggers feel extra pressure to produce something daily, quickly, endlessly, or else we’re told we’ll lose all our visitors and our pagerank will decrease and no one will care about our blogs anymore. There have certainly been times when I have posted entries out of fear of losing everything I’ve worked hard to build. Those quick and dirty entries are sometimes funny and good, but sometimes they’re kinda’ shit. And I don’t want to be shitting on the Internet.

So, for this past week, I decided to keep my mouth closed and my fingers still. And it was good. I didn’t pop in to tell people, “Gee whiz, I haven’t posted for awhile, have I?” because I figured you are observant enough to notice that without me commenting on it. And commenting on it serves no purpose, other than to give into that fear of being un-Google-able, which seems like a silly thing to be afraid of. Spiders? Sure. Low Google search results? Eh, have you ever had a nightmare involving your pagerank? (If yes, you should probably keep that to yourself.)

This attitude towards my blog is something I hope to continue. I want to stress quality over quantity. I stopped checking my web stats several months ago because I got sick of wondering if people were visiting my blog and where they were coming from and all that rigmarole that is so easy to get sucked into. I’ve been blogging for over 5 years now, and I feel like I’m getting too old for that shit. I’ve seen my stats go up, and then down, and then up again, and then down again, and then…you get the picture. There was certainly a time when I chased pageviews and hoped for more visitors, but I feel like I’ve been there, done that. Yeah, having lots of visitors can be fun and it’s got its own advantages, but it’s got disadvantages too. When I think about what I’d like this blog to be, I’d rather that it be well-written, thoughtful and entertaining than it be published daily and have a bazillion readers a month. If I want it to be the former, I can’t really think about the latter.

This type of philosophy has been around for awhile, typically referred to as the “Slow Blogging” movement. The term is partly a reference to Alice Waters’ slow food movement which emphasizes cooking quality meals that take time rather than consuming fast food that is quick but less nutritious. You can read a New York Times article about slow blogging from 2008, and a slow blogging manifesto here, though I prefer the one listed in the sidebar of this blog which says:

1. Slow blogs are well written (the writing would still be considered good had it not been not published on the internet)
2. Slow blogs are focused on content over format
3. Slow blogs celebrate authenticity
4. Slow blog writers don’t feel restrained by formulas
5. Slow blogs posts are sometimes long
6. Slow blogs are original (not composed of mostly recycled material)
7. Slow blogs do not have, as their primary aim, the goal of selling things
8. Slow blogs are not unfairly critical of bloggers with different agendas. It’s still a free world.
9. Slow blogs encourage community building
10. Slow blogs are worth the time

None of this is to say I’m going to try to drive visitors away from my blog either. I’m not going to stop certain posting habits I like that I also know are considered to help increase readership. I’ve been trying to post a picture with most of my posts lately because it makes the entry look more enticing and readable. I think this increases the quality of my posts, so I’m going to still do it, regardless of whether it brings more readers or not.

It also does NOT mean I’m going to write posts weeks and weeks in advance and revise them heavily before posting. Blogs do tend to be in the moment, and I don’t have a problem writing something in the moment like some of the slow bloggers seem to.

I can guarantee there will still be typos.

Overall, I’d just like to blog when I want to and not because I think I have to. So, you might be seeing a little bit less of me. There still might be weeks when I feel a need to post four entries. There might be weeks when I post none. We’ll see. Let’s just take it slow, ok?

Photo by wheelo28 / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

I’ll be getting my geek on and driving to Chicago today for this weekend’s Wordcamp conference. Wordcamp is when you pack up your morphemes and syllables and send them off for the summer to live in bunk houses and—oh wait. That’s a total lie. Wordcamp is a gathering dedicated to the WordPress blogging software, which is responsible for a big chunk of my living these days at Make My Blog Pretty. You know what that means? Tax write-off! I’ll be keeping my receipts.

I expect there to be a high concentration of pasty people and nerd boys at this shindig, so I’ll be highly disappointed if I’m not one of the hottest chicks there. I’m a pretty purty pasty girl. If you’re going and you see me there, say hey!

People have asked me, so I wanted to let everyone know I’m not attending the BlogHer ’10 conference in New York. I’ll make the probably erroneous assumption that anyone cares that I’m not going, and continue on with this entry. (If you don’t care, you can continue not-working and move on to the next blog.)

I’ve met a lot of cool people at the BlogHer conferences, learned a lot of helpful stuff, and even got the attention of the editor of my first book there. BlogHer has been good to me. But I’ve been to BlogHer ’07, BlogHer ’08, and I rode the Megabus from HELL to and from BlogHer ’09, and quite frankly, I’m BlogHer-ed out.

Have fun in New York without me! I’m sure that after the conference I will see some pictures or read some posts about how awesome it was and think, “Oh man, maybe I should have gone!” Thus is life. No matter where I am, I’m worried people are having a better time somewhere else.

However, if they hold BlogHer ’11 in Vegas, I’m totally there.

The night that FitBloggin’ concluded, my room mates and I started talking in our dark hotel room like you do at slumber parties, where you’re just voices without bodies, sort of like how we are on the Internet. We were talking about the bloggers we’d met and the bloggers we read and that’s when I asked, “Does anyone remember Fat Bitch?”

“YES! She used to wear a bag on her head with a face drawn on it to remain anonymous!”

“She was hilarious! Then she just stopped blogging.”

“What about that one blog, Yo Ho Ho or something? There were pirates, remember?”

“Oh yeah, what was that called?”

“You Heave Ho! She was a pirate who wanted to lose her booty.”

“I miss A Dumbbell in a Home Gym.” We all sighed in agreement. “Hopeful Loser, too.”

“I miss The Fat Slayer.”

“How about Fatty McBlog? Remember that time she tripped on the stairs and almost crushed her neighbor?”

“Wait, do you mean Fatty McButterpants?”

“No, Fatty McBlog. There is a Fatty McButterpants, but she doesn’t write Fatty McBlog.”

Silence.

Then we broke into laughter, because how many times do you get to use the phrase “Fatty McButterpants” in conversation, not once, but twice? We were speaking a highly specialized language that only a handful of people in the world might understand. It’s great that new people are taking up blogging all the time, but I bet newbie fitness bloggers don’t remember any of those blogs. I feel like something is being lost, like there will be no one left to remember them.

It’s sad that the people who used to let me peek into their lives have shut their doors and pulled their curtains closed. Missing in action. No forwarding address. It made me think of how fleeting so many relationships are. I would like to have met them, in real life, in person, without bags over their heads. Some of the missing bloggers worry me, like Fat Queen who posted about going in for surgery and was never heard from again. Or Beth from Act Boldly who talked about being depressed, posted that she was fine and then never came back.

I sometimes feel like an old lady of blogging, waving my keyboard at the kiddies, shouting, “I remember when we used Greymatter to run our blogs! I remember when LiveJournal was owned by Americans!” I wonder how many people are left to remember those bloggers who entertained us when our bosses weren’t looking at our computer screens, and wrote posts that made us comment even though we usually lurk. They meant something to me. Did they mean something to you?

Here’s to those that came before us! Which bloggers do you miss? Who do you hope is remembered?

My Paranoid Traveler’s Syndrome made me worry that the glass was going to break and I’d be sucked into the turbines like a bird with bad luck. Thankfully, the plane remained in tact, but this also meant that I spent the flight being taunted by ads in the seat pocket advertising free wifi that was not working on my flight.

When questioned, the stewardess just shrugged her shoulders, which is the universal gesture for, “I’m just a stewardess, not a cable repair man.” While I rather hate to use this cliched phrase, major FAIL, Airtran!

When I arrived in Baltimore, I couldn’t stop singing a very old, obscure, Tori Amos song as I wondered around the concourse.

Eventually I did make it to my hotel, which was located in a prime spot near the happening inner harbor area. I cannot describe how beautiful the weather was. It was like gazing at the face of Helen of Troy, if her facial features consisted of sunshine, blue clouds, and a brisk breeze. There were lots of doggies and ducks (and some joggers too) traipsing around the harbor, all filled with the simple joy of a spring day.

On Saturday, FitBloggin’ began, and a good time was had by all. And here is the “all” I’m talking about:

I wondered off the grounds for two hours in the early afternoon on a secret mission unsanctioned by the FitBloggin’ community. I walked half a mile to the Blue Moon Cafe, where I waited 40 minutes in the street with other breakfast crack seekers, until I was finally rewarded with this:

Yes, Captain Crunch French Toast! How could I not? Do you think I could get this in Indianapolis? No! And I walked there, so I’m sure that totally burned off the 8500 bazillion calories I consumed. I would love to go back to the cafe some time and sample their cinnamon rolls and biscuits that were literally as large as a chihuahua’s head. (Probably bigger, actually, depending on the chihuahua.)

I arrived back in time to sit on the publishing panel, and forced myself to self-promote even though I felt like a total tool by name-dropping the magazines and TV shows I’ve been on. The members on the panel had a wide range of experience, and I thought it went rather well. A video of it should be online next month sometime. One correction though: I mentioned that I was in Self magazine, but I really meant to say Women’s Health. Sorry! I don’t want anyone thinking I’m a compulsive liar. Frankly, all those media promotions are a blur.

That night, I went out to dinner with my roommates, Amy and Rebecca. We tried going to a seafood place, but the wait was 90 minutes. So we ended up at a tapas restaurant and sat at the bar with some Flamenco dancers between sets.

Then it was back home to Indianapolis, where I napped and got bedlag to go with my jetlag. Big props to Roni for organizing this great event. People were already talking about FitBloggin’ 2011, but I’m going to need more nap time before I can commit to that.

I will be flying to Baltimore at the end of March to speak at the first FitBloggin’ conference, the brainchild of Roni of Roni’s Weigh and Green Lite Bites and a zillion other projects that make you and I look like lazy layabouts. Since this is the first conference, attendees and speakers will really get a chance to set the tone and shape the event. It might turn into an annual thing if all goes well.

Registration is open and there are lots of other cool speakers attending. I plan on having a good time and I hope to see you there having fun too!

The 2009 BlogHer Conference is coming up in about a month, which means I need to figure out what the hell my blog is about. This will be my third BlogHer, and I can well remember the question, “So, what do you blog about?” which is repeated over and over in elevators and corridors and frequently at lunch right after you’ve taken a big bite of salad. I can also remember trying to figure out how to give a stranger an impression of the tone, style, and topic of my blog in just 2-3 sentences as I chewed that salad slowly.

At BlogHer 2007, I said, “I’m a weight loss blogger,” which made people give me curious looks because I wasn’t fat anymore and they had no idea how big I used to be because I only wave my fat pants around at special occasions. At BlogHer 2008 I said I wrote about health, fitness and weight loss, trying to place less emphasis on the weight part, since I was personally focused more on fitness and feeling good than being super skinny. Even that felt odd, because I knew I was planning to open up the blog to other topics as soon as I finished all the laborious work on my redesign.

So now I face this question yet again. What is my blog about? What can I say to people who’ve never read this blog that will make them understand the general vibe around here? How can I interest them enough to check out the site even though they’ll have a hundred other blogs hurled at them that weekend? I’m not really sure, so I thought I’d open it up to you guys. You read me. Some of you have been lurking around here for years. What the hell is my blog about, in three sentences or less? Thanks, and I am equally interested and terrified to read your responses.

However, I have learned it’s best not to wallow (or to try not to wallow anyway), so I’m going to continue on blogging about other stuff. So, don’t act too weirded out when I start talking about how to set your goal weight and things like that. I could whine about my headache all the time, but that would get old for all of us very quickly.

ETA: Oh, yesterday some people were getting a 500 error after they left a comment. I don’t know for sure why this was happening, but I would guess it was due to high traffic because it is weight loss resolution season. If it happens to you, just hit the “Back” button and try submitting your comment again and it should hopefully work. I will delete any duplicate comments…someday.

What the hell is wrong with you people?

It appears that people were much more willing to comment on a post when they agreed with the situation. Otherwise, they tended to keep their mouths shut. This only seems polite since the post was about a personal matter. If we were discussing politics or the economy or something where a person and a cat’s feelings weren’t involved, I think people would be more likely to voice a dissenting opinion. You all certainly had a lot to say about natural sweeteners last month. In real life, I am only kindly critical of people I know very well and whom I know will take any advice as coming from a place of true concern. I know when I read personal blogs, I’m unlikely to criticize a personal decision of the blogger because I don’t want to get on their bad side and I find it unlikely a stranger on the Internet will sway their opinion.

I do sometimes worry if blogging encourages an echo chamber, if blogs are only welcoming of people who agree with and support a blogger and make the environment uncomfortable for people who disagree. I don’t want to only hear from people who are like me and think like me. Some of the most interesting discussions on this blog have come when people disagree with what I’ve said and start an intelligent and polite conversation about it. As long as people aren’t nasty or rude, I’m usually ok with dissent. That’s why my commenting policy says “lively discussion is encouraged.” It’s also why I say I’ll delete you if you start talking smack. But, there are also some topics where I am not interested in hearing what other people think. The decisions in my personal life are not up for a vote.

The blogger certainly sets the tone for the conversations that will appear on their blog. I’m not sure how I would have reacted to kind comments encouraging me to keep Krupke when I was intent on giving him away. I’m not sure how I would have reacted to polite comments urging me to send him to Gramma’s when I’d decided to keep him. But it’s interesting that no one seemed to do either. I also have to wonder if I wanted people to agree with me when I was ditching my cat, and similarly wanted people to agree with me when I decided to keep him. When other people say my decision is right, it makes me feel better. It makes me feel more likely that what I am doing is right. But if people only feel comfortable commenting when they agree, I’m just fooling myself, picking out the comments I want to hear to reinforce the idea I already have.

When I first started getting comments on my blog, it was an awesome high. Hearing people say they liked my writing made me literally smile. I’d bounce around in my seat. It made me feel like I might actually be good at this writing thing. When people said, “Hell, yeah!” or said what I’d written really resonated with them, it was better than what I imagine heroin must be like. When someone said something cruel, it hurt me more than I would ever admit and stayed in my thoughts longer than I liked.

But lately I find myself not caring as much what other people think, good or bad. Sometimes I write an entry and wonder if it’s really necessary for me to read the comments. Sometimes I write something because it makes me feel good all on its own, because it helps me think things through, and I don’t feel the need for anyone else to agree or back me up or tell me that yes I am right and yes that was good. I feel more secure and strong in myself. I know who I am, for the most part.

Sometimes I write an entry just for me, not my audience, and I think about turning the comments off. Sometimes I’d like to blog about my headache and not have someone ask if I’ve tried eliminating artificial sweeteners from my diet. But I know if I turn off comments it would only draw attention to the fact that I’ve done it and cause people to email me asking why I did it. I know some of the old-school bloggers didn’t even have comments on their blogs, which they called “online journals.” But I also know blogging is a conversation, and that’s part of the appeal of the medium, that we can talk back and forth and share ideas. Shutting down the conversation is an aggressive and noticeable move. However, even when comments are on, I’m acting as the moderator and can sway the conversation one way or the other by commenting in the thread. I cannot control the conversation, but I can usually steer it where I want it to go.

I have no grand conclusions here. All I know is that a blog is made by us all, though I have more power over my own domain than anyone else. This is my turf and I get to win here. Period. But I hope people aren’t just writing things they know will please me. I like to examine the uncomfortable truths of life, and I can’t always do that myself. All I ask is that you be polite and kindly and speak your own truth.