Photo by juniperberry / by NCND 2.0 CC

“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 [...]

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One of the things I like about the online community is that no one knows if you’re fat or thin, male or female, black or white or purple with pink polka dots, unless you tell them. And even then you could be lying, unless you took a nap in the same room as a toddler with magic markers. However, if you’re an asshole it becomes apparent pretty quickly, which it did when I was reading a TV blog many weeks ago.

On this blog there was a post about an actress donning a fat suit for a made-for-TV movie and one of the first comments was that fat people were outcasts by choice. The argument was that fat people choose not to exercise, choose to eat large portions, and choose to eat unhealthy foods. Thus they choose to be fat and are personally responsible for becoming the type of person that the world generally discriminates against.

Is being fat a choice? I’d have to say yes and no. But reflecting on my own period of being overweight, [...]

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