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 changed my Twitter name from @pastaqueen to @jennettefulda not long ago, and was sort of surprised this didn’t seem like a big deal. Here I was, using my REAL NAME online, something that ten years ago was recommended as much as driving drunk, huffing paint and popping pimples. (And please, don’t try to do all three at once, especially if you’re using your real name.)

Back in those days (the NINETIES) we were warned that the Internet was full of dirty old men pretending to be 16-year-old girls who wanted to molest you or steal your credit card number. We’re still warned about that today, but people don’t seem to be as worried as much as they used to about using their real names online. When did this happen? Why didn’t I notice this sooner? Sometime in the past decade the Internet has become accepted as an extension of our “real lives” and not just an escape where you can pretend to be somebody else. You get to do both now! You can be your real self or your fake self. You be real when being your fake self, or fake when being your real self, you poser, you.

There are now realms of the Internet where it’s considered relatively safe to use your real identity. Twitter. LinkedIn. Facebook. They’re the good neighborhoods. Yes, there are privacy concerns about these social networking sites. Facebook knows far too much about your bad taste in music, and the Google cache and Archive.org will never forget that stupid thing you said on that forum that one time where you compared someone to the Nazis. But millions of people are using their real names in large numbers in these places, suggesting that they don’t deem those risks that serious. It’s like driving a car. Yes, something bad could happen while you’re doing it, but hopefully it won’t.

Plenty of people still use made up handles and fake names, too. They use them in the bad parts of Internet town, where people don’t use their real names. File sharing web sites. Porn portals. Illicit IRC channels. Or they use aliases when they’re doing bad things, as occasional commenter f*%k@you.com surely knows. Even in the good neighborhoods some people stay anonymous so they feel free to talk about sensitive subjects they might not otherwise feel able to (says the weight-loss blogger who kept her name pseudo-secret for years). I still use dummy information whenever I have to sign up for a news site before reading an article. Take that, New York Times online!

Still, we’re using our real names online more and more. It makes me wonder if the next generation will have different ideas about what should be private and not. How much will seem normal to know about each other ten years from now? I hear that in small towns everyone knows what’s going on in everyone else’s lives. It seems like the bigger the Internet grows, the smaller our cyber town is getting.

I did eventually look into these lists thingys, just so I’d know what everyone was talking about, and I can see how they would be useful. A Twitter list is a group of people you have put together under a particular label. Then you can go to the list page and read all the tweets from just those people. It is a good way for you to discover new Twitter folk you might want to follow who have similar interests as you. I’m not sure why they call them Twitter lists instead of Twitter groups. Whatever. I didn’t name them.

What I find most interesting about this new feature is that you can see what public groups lists other people have put you on. Which means you get to see how other people see you and what labels they are slapping on your forehead. As of this moment, I have been but on 45 public lists, which you can see here.

• By far, most people have categorized me as “health” or “weight loss” or “diet” or “food.” (Uh oh, please don’t eat me!)
• Indiana bloggers have put me on a few “locals” or “Hoosiers” lists
• Some people have labeled me as “cool” and “sexy.” (Right back at ya’!)
• I’m also on a few “women” lists or “blogger” lists or just “online” lists.
• Inexplicably, someone also put me on a “political” list, which has got to be an error on their part.
• One person labeled me as an “author” which I find very cool. Thanks!

I’ll probably be checking my lists page in the future just to see how other people see me. It’s interesting how it compares to how I see myself.

More accurately, I ran into someone from college and I forgot that the last time he saw me I weighed twice as much as he does. I was at the local biergarten for an annual alumni association mixer, catching up with my old friend and I totally forgot I looked like a different person than I did four years ago. It was probably shocking for him to see my much skinnier self traipsing amongst the picnic tables, even though he’s read my blog and knew I’d lost weight. I don’t know if I would have said something about it if I had remembered, but it’s weird that the thought didn’t even cross my mind.

I used to wish I would run into old friends, teachers, or mailmen so I could show off my weight loss to them. I fantasized about shocking people I had known and seeing their surprise at my transformation. Now, I don’t really care, and as I said in my last entry, the gasps kind of piss me off. It doesn’t seem like that big of a deal anymore. I suppose this is a sign that I’ve fully integrated my weight loss into my identity. It doesn’t even seem worth mentioning anymore.

——

The alumni association gave me a free drink ticket, which was worth at least six or seven bucks. I headed to the bar to redeem it and asked the bartender for something light. He recommended a draft and I asked, “Is that light?”

“It’s light in color,” he replied.

“Is it light in calories?” I asked. I don’t drink much so I didn’t know. I don’t have anything against alcohol, but if I’m going to spend extra calories on something, I’d prefer it was chocolate instead beer. If they come up with chocolate flavored beer (and they probably have), my dilemma would be over.

“Eh,” he shrugged. “Honey, I don’t think you need to worry,” he said. And that statement alone was enough to make me smile and start thinking about stopping at the Dairy Queen afterwards to eat two dipped cones and a Brownie Earthquake, all because some random guy implied I was skinny. It was nice to be complimented, but it was a weird to realize that the opinions of others can still have a big impact on me, especially when I consider myself to be more self-confident and thick-skinned than ever before.

Later, I told my younger brother about the encounter with pride, and he said, “Yeah, he probably just said that to get a tip.”

“Noooo!” I replied. “He said it because I am svelte and sexy and super-beautiful! Not because he was trying to get one dollar bills out of my wallet!” But I knew that my brother was probably right, and even if the bartender did think I was cute, he also knew saying so would increase the contents of his tip jar. However, I am a doofus who never remembers to tip bartenders and I didn’t even pay for that beer myself, so his plan failed.

If he’d provided me with some chocolate beer, it might have been another story.

Heroes is a show on American television about characters with special powers. A recently introduced character, Candice, has the ability to cast illusions to make people see what she wants them to see. She frequently uses this ability to make herself look like someone else, but when she’s not tricking people she’s played by Missy Peregrym who looks like this:

Last night she was having a conversation with another character while munching on junk food. What follows is not an exact transcription of their dialogue because I can barely remember what I had for lunch yesterday, never mind the exact words of fictional characters on a TV show. He said something like, “I have a cousin who eats like you. He’s really fat.” To which she replied, between bites, “So am I.” At which point my eyes boggled out of my head. Candice is a fat girl and we didn’t even know it!

Which makes me wonder, if you could make everyone else see you as a skinny person while still being a fat person, would you do it? Is the incentive to be thin only so other people will think better of you or do you have other motivations such as your health and feeling fit? I’m at a point now where I am really digging my fitness. I love the ability to run and ride a bike and complete the entire kickboxing aerobics class while other people whimper and whine on their mats. However, if you’d offered me this option 190 pounds ago I’m not sure what I would have said. I certainly would have liked to look thinner even while I was working on making it actually happen. But if I could fool everyone, would I have lost my incentive to make the real thing happen? Back then I doubt you could have ever convinced me that I would someday enjoy running and eating healthy. Maybe I only did it because I had to.

And what does Candice see when she looks in the mirror? Can she fool everyone including herself? I love checking myself out in the mirror these days. It would be a bummer if everyone else saw me as thin but I didn’t get to see it myself.

I don’t think Candice is morbidly obese because there are some things you can’t fake with illusions. She wouldn’t be able to move around as agilely as she does on the show. One of the side affects of my weight loss is that I am now a fast walker. If I’m walking with people fatter or more out of shape than me, I have to noticeably slow down so they can keep up. She also wouldn’t be able to slip through narrow spaces or fit comfortably in small chairs with arms. I can’t imagine she would feel very good either if her diet is composed mostly of refined carbohydrates.

The fact that Candice is a fat girl pretending to be a thin girl brings up some uncomfortable social undertones. What if she’s also a black woman pretending to be white? What if she’s a man? It seems she’s chosen a form that gets the best reaction from other people. I can only think of Mystique, a shape-shifting character from the X-Men movies, whose true form is blue and scaly. When asked why she doesn’t stay in disguise all the time she simply replies, “Because I shouldn’t have to.” If Candice’s character ever gets killed, I hope we get to see what she really looks like. No one should have to spend their whole life in hiding.

I felt like this show should have been called Fat: What Everyone Is Telling Me because after it aired several people asked me if I’d watched it, only I hadn’t. I felt like I’d skipped doing my homework so I could drink Slurpees down at the 7-11 with my friends. I suppose it is now my unofficial duty as a weight-loss blogger to watch all obesity related programming and comment on it. Thank God I don’t have cable and I’m limited to only reviewing PBS specials. The number of loose skin operations covered on the E! Network alone would put me in a backlog until 2009.

The documentary is well-done and doesn’t oversimplify the issue of obesity. They frequently kept the camera on someone for at least a minute without cutting, letting them talk in-depth, which is not something most late-night new magazines would do. However, if you read a lot of dieting and fitness information and keep up with the weight-loss blogs, you probably won’t learn anything you didn’t already know. The only new thing I learned was the theory that the gastric system has its own “mini-brain.” One doctor theorized that part of the reason gastric bypass surgery is successful is not only because of the reduced size of the stomach but because nerves are severed during the process that help regulate hunger. The show was compelling mostly because you got to hear the stories of several people who are trying to lose weight or keep it off.

One woman who had gained over 50 pounds was upset because she thought her body didn’t reflect who she was. Another guy said he wanted to lose weight so people would see him for who he was. Well, yeah, wouldn’t that be lovely? Too bad that’s never going to happen no matter how thin or fat you are. It’s odd that we think that if we become thin or ripped with muscles people will suddenly be able to look directly into our souls. It’s kind of silly that we think our bodies are going to be reflections of who we are. You can certainly choose what image you project – your clothes, your haircut, your make-up, the way you walk, the way you talk – all that sends a message of who you are. But you’re never really going to know what someone is like just by looking at them. It’s like Wednesday said in The Addams Family when she didn’t dress up for Halloween, “I’m a homicidal maniac, they look just like everyone else.”

So I understand why someone thinks being thinner or fatter will better project the idea of who they are. It changes the image other people see, but ultimately “thin” is just another costume you wear over your bones. It’s not you. If there’s anything I learned from being fat it’s that I was a cool person then and I’m still a cool person now. I certainly prefer being thinner, but even if I got fat again it doesn’t reflect negatively on who I am. It just reflects the lifestyle I’m currently living. People see it as a disguise, but it really shouldn’t be. Yet we’re all still kids playing dress-up out of the costume box in the classroom corner.