Disclosure: Wendy is a friend of mine and she gave me an advanced review copy of this book for free. I’ve done work on her web site. She also let me sleep at her apartment one weekend during a Wordcamp conference and left the unfinished manuscript in the room I slept in, which I was very tempted to read, but I restrained myself from doing because I apparently have ethics. One night that weekend we watched the orangutan episode of Little House on the Prairie. All of which I say to be totally transparent, not to be pretentious or drop names. (Whoops! Could you pick that up for me?)

Sometimes we have nostalgia for a life that wasn’t ours or for things that never happened. I felt this way recently when watching the 90′s TV show My So-Called Life on Netflix streaming and found myself back in the world of introspective Angela Chase who looked like she dyed her hair with Kool-Aid, illiterate Jordan Catalano who really knew how to lean, and openly gay Rickie Vasquez who loved guyliner long before Adam Lambert did. I remembered how much I loved that show and the guilt I felt for only watching it on MTV after it was cancelled, even though I wasn’t a Neilson family and my viewing habits probably had no bearing on the ratings. I started to wonder what happened to those characters. Did Rickie get to stay with Mr. Katimski? Did Angela’s dad sleep with Hallie Lowenthal? Did Brian Krakow ever get laid? Why did we call all these people by their first and last names? Who the hell was Tino?

Then I had to remind myself that, oh, by the way, NONE OF THESE PEOPLE WERE REAL. But I really cared about them, and in some ways they were more real to me than people who really existed that I never met. I found myself longing for something I could not really name. I think this is how Wendy McClure felt about the Little House on the Prairie series by Laura Ingalls Wilder which she writes about in her book The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie. Although Laura Ingalls Wilder really did exist and her books are based on her experiences growing up in the Midwest during the late 19th century, some of it is fictionalized and some parts are smoothed over or edited to leave out inconvenient truths. How much and by whom is one subject of Wendy’s book. Even if the stories aren’t 100% true, Wendy’s love for the books and the seemingly simpler life they portrayed is very real.

The book follows Wendy as she visits the different homes mentioned in the books. She also explores the emotions and questions these trips stir in her. Although I know of the Little House books, I honestly can’t recall if I read any of them. I never watched the TV series because it started before I existed and ended before I had the proper language skills to understand it. (That doesn’t really matter since Wendy’s book focuses on the books, not the show.) Despite all that, I was able to follow Wendy’s book without confusion, though I’m sure people who know the books will understand many of the references better than I did.

I had a meta experience reading this book because I know several of the people and places Wendy talks about. I can imagine her boyfriend Chris speaking the dialogue that’s written. I can visualize the kitchen where she churns butter. I know who the friends are that she mentions in Wisconsin. So, just as Wendy had entered the world of Laura Ingalls Wilder, I too had entered the world of Wendy McClure! I didn’t have any groundbreaking realizations about that though, and I doubt I could sell a book proposal about it. Sorry, Wendy.

I could give you a detailed review of the book, but I thought what was more important was the self-reflection it sparked in me (because really, let’s make this all about me). Even though I enjoyed the book and I recommend it, I also know that I would never take the trip Wendy took for three reasons:

1) The closest I’ve come to caring about prairie life was playing The Oregon Trail on the computer. I believe it sucked to have to churn your own butter, live in fear of Indian raids, and to make your own clothes instead of outsourcing them to China.
Please note that despite all this I liked Wendy’s book because her love of this world comes through, even if she admits it’s somewhat romanticized. Instead, I’ve always preferred fantasy or science fiction that lets you look into the future or imagine magical lands with dragons or hot vampires that are so into you.

2) My grandparents had a farm and visiting it sort of sucked.
My mom’s parents lived in a small town in southern Indiana. My grandfather was a salesman at Sears and my grandmother raised 14 children. A few years after my mother left home, they had saved enough money to buy a farm outside of town. It was their lifelong dream, which goes to show that some people’s dreams are other people’s nightmares. As a kid I assumed that every kid’s grandparents owned a farm, as if this were part of everyday life, like school and church and birthday parties at Chucky Cheese.

My grandparents’ farm was larger and better built than a log cabin, but their life was much closer to Laura Ingalls Wilder’s life than mine ever was. They sold eggs from the front porch. They grew their own green beans and ate chickens they raised. They bailed hay. Also, their house was kinda gross. My grandmother let dirty dishes collect over every square inch of the counter, giving off a wretched smell. The bathroom was ostensibly better than an outhouse, but the toilet was old and smelled weird and I would do my business as quickly as possible and escape before the toilet was done flushing. Oh, and the home-grown green beans and chicken I mentioned? They tasted funky. I hated them. This was either because kids can be finicky eaters or because I’d been raised on frozen green beans and hormone-injected chickens, so my expectations of how these foods should tasted differed from what was served on my plate. I also hated that the farm fields were full of cow pies. My younger brother evidently hated it more, which was demonstrated when he barfed after seeing a cow take a dump. This made my grandfather keel over laughing so hard that I’m surprised it didn’t trigger the stroke that killed him several years later.

There were good things about the farm too. Seeing the box of baby chickens with newborn fuzz made it worth visiting the creepy basement with stairs as steep as a Mayan ruin. I enjoyed picking blackberries by the fence and licking the juice off my sticky fingers. A photo of me sitting on a tractor totally impressed my fourth-grade crush who was evidently into farm implements. My grandmother’s angel-food cake rocked my world of childhood obesity. I thought my grandfather was the most awesome badass before I even knew the word “badass” when he tossed a chicken across the coop to inspect the eggs in her nest. I didn’t know you were allowed to toss chickens! (My grandpa was a total trendsetter because he was doing this long before Angry Birds came out.) There are also many hilarious stories of trauma induced by farm life, like the time my aunt was chased by a chicken with its head cut off, squirting blood everywhere.

All of which is to say, I’ve seen farm life. I haven’t lived it, but I have a general impression of it. That impression has left me with no desire to go on a homesteading tour of the country.

3) I have lived in many houses, gone back to visit them, and similarly felt bittersweet about it, just as Wendy did and that Laura Ingalls Wilder evidently felt herself on a return trip. No need to relive that.
Wendy states in the book that she lived in the same house her whole childhood. There is part of me that wishes I could say the same, but instead I lived in at least six houses during my childhood in four different states. I also resided in an indeterminate number of apartments and one lake house between escrow transactions, one of which had a carpeted stairway that my older brother and I would body surf down despite the rug burns. No, I wasn’t an army brat. If examined, the reason for the multiple moves would resemble cracks in the fuselage of a plane representing our life that signal the impending destruction of the craft which came with the abrupt end of my parents’ marriage, as if we all got sucked out a gaping hole in midair and were left spinning and tumbling toward the earth unexpectedly.

But enough about that! I’ve lived a lot of places and I’ve gone back to visit those houses in Maryland and Indiana and Kentucky, though never the one in Virgina. I too felt that something was missing, like Wendy felt at many of Laura’s old homes. It’s as if I came looking for my eight-year-old self playing in the backyard but instead could only find my twenty-something self idling in the car outside like a stalker. Yeah, the shutters had been painted and they’d put up a fence and some stranger was sleeping in my old bedroom, but that’s not what was really different. What was different was me.

The things that remind me of my childhood are not the buildings I used to live in. It’s seeing spiky gumballs from a Sweetgum tree on my daily walk and remembering how they’d hurt my bare feet when I played in the backyard in Virginia. It’s seeing She-Ra in my DVD queue and remembering the year my parents spent searching for the Flutterina doll (who wasn’t even a major character) that I wanted desperately because her wings REALLY fluttered and that I wanted even more because I’d gifted one at a birthday party for a girl who’s name I can’t remember. It’s making brownies from scratch and remembering how my mom would let me stir in the sugar and flour as I stood on a chair to reach the counter although the flour made the batter so thick my little six-year-old arms could never finish stirring it all the way in.

I think that’s what Wendy was looking for when she set off on this journey and wrote this book. She was looking for a connection to the past that she hadn’t actually lived, but that she had often visited, as if it really did lay across a misty river. She was trying to travel back in time, but you can’t really do that. You can only get messages from the past left behind in books and letters that weren’t addressed to you, though really they were.

But that’s the best part about books, when someone reaches out from the page, grabs your hand, and takes you on a trip to someplace you didn’t know you wanted to go or to someplace you know far too well. It’s when you see yourself in them and become their friend, even if they never had a chance to become yours because of time or distance.

I think it’s ok to have nostalgia for a past that wasn’t yours. I think it’s ok to wonder what Angela Chase is up to or where the little house in the big woods really was. Books and TV and movies are the closest thing we have to a collective memory. You might remember Jordan Catalano too, and we could talk about how pretty his eyes were just as if we’d all really gone to high school together. It’s not that different from reminiscing with people I did go to high school with about that time someone set a fire in the girls’ bathroom on the last day of senior year. We remember it all like it was real, just as I remember Miss Agnes who lived next door and bought me sticker books, and my friend Stacey from two houses down who was allowed to stay up after her parents went to bed and scared the ever living God out of me by screening Gremlins at a sleepover. How do I know that any of it was real except that I remember it?

It’s ok to live in the now but also to know that one day this will be your past and someone else’s period drama. It’s ok to reminisce about something that didn’t really happen to you, but felt like it did. But if you do go digging through the past, be prepared to find out things you don’t really want to know, like learning that the adult you got bored with She-Ra five minutes into an episode. Be prepared to learn things you do want to know, like discovering Gremlins is actually pretty damn funny. Be prepared to wonder if it’s better to selectively remember just the good bits.

Know that those places you visit might seem smaller because you’ve become bigger. Sometimes you have to go there, though. Sometimes you need to know where you came from so you can better see where you are and who you love.

Sometimes you have to live The Wilder Life.

I dashed to the room where my smartphone was blaring a sitar ringtone, and pressed the red button, happy that I’d managed to locate the device before voice mail picked up. Well, I was happy until I realized I’d hung up on the caller, which is what the red button does, which you’d think I would know after having had the phone for three months.

So I opened the call log and returned the call to hear my brother’s voice on the line saying, “Hello?…..Hello?…..Is anyone there?” as I filled in the ellipsis with my own responses that he couldn’t hear with my mute button on. I figured out how to unmute the phone, but only after he hung up. So I tried calling him back again only to get a confused, Spanish-speaking person on the other end of the line, who I knew was not my brother because my brother took German in high school, not Spanish.

Then, finally, I managed to call my brother back at the proper number with the mute setting off, and started to have a conversation with him. But the first words out of my mouth were, “Oh God, this is what it’s like to be Mom.” I love my mother dearly (Hi, Mom!), and she’s the first person I’d ask to sew a hem or bake a lasagna, but she is also the first person who’d acknowledge that her skills with electronics are nothing to envy. I usually take on the role as her tech support, hooking up her TiVo and configuring her wireless phones. I speak gadget and she does not.

Until now. Because I must admit that I still screw up many basic operations on my smartphone, usually when I’m under the pressure of an incoming call, ring, ring, RINGING, away. I don’t do well under a time limit. I am not as fluent in smartphone as I am in DVR or HTML (and now they’re developing HTML5, so I can be not as fluent in that too).

So, less than a week before my birthday today, I realized it—I really am turning 30. As if by official decree, now is the moment when I start to lose my ability to operate electronics and slowly slip into the persona of an old person who wouldn’t be able to stop the VCR clock from flashing if VCRs still existed.

I am thirty years old today, and I’m not old, but I’m not young.

I remember when music came on cassette tapes. I remember when the phrase “world wide web” would have referred to an alien invasion of gigantic spider monsters, not this Internet thingamajig. I remember when a familiar actor appeared on a television show and I’d have to rack my brain for weeks until I spontaneously recalled a part he’d played, instead of just going to the IMDB. I remember when my elementary school teachers would ask me what I was going to be when I grew up, and the correct answer did not yet exist because neither did the Internet. I remember slap bracelets, and jelly shoes, and She-Ra. I remember when the year 2000 seemed far off and was a possible harbinger of the apocalypse.

I am thirty years old today, and I live in the future.

If I were to stand on my personal timeline and wave back at the person I used to be, she would be amazed by everything we have now. My smartphone is more complex than Captain Kirk’s communicator which didn’t do video. I have talked to people in France and Chile on the Internet for free. I can order almost anything I want online without leaving my apartment. I can work without leaving my apartment. I think it’s so strange that kids born today will take all these things for granted, just like I can’t imagine a world without microwaves, televisions, and telephones. A kid born today will view me in the same way as I view someone who was born in 1950. I remember when I thought someone who was born in the 60′s was from a distant era of time where whites and coloreds didn’t drink from the same water fountains, but in retrospect wasn’t that much earlier from when I was born. I remember feeling left out because I didn’t have a story for where I was when Kennedy was shot, and I remember wishing I still felt left out after September 11, 2001.

I remember hearing someone say, “Never trust someone over the age of thirty.” I’m not entirely sure what they meant, but I remember thinking that thirty was the age where people stopped trying to change to world to suit themselves and started changing themselves to suit the world instead. I don’t know if that’s true or not. I do know that 30 is the first birthday when you start getting cards joking about how old you are.

The reality of aging is that more and more of your life exists in the past, and less of it in the future. You convert all your potential tomorrows into a string of yesterdays. You have to concede that eventually your life will consist of only yesterdays and no tomorrows. I can’t say for sure how far along I am on my personal timeline, but hopefully I’m less than halfway done, and even more hopefully less than a third of the way to the end. (Mental note: Exercise more! Eat healthier! Wear sunscreen!)

There are lots of landmarks on my personal timeline. May 1998 was when I graduated from high school. October 2002 was when my dad left. November 2003 was when I had my gallbladder removed. I suppose thirty is just another landmark on my timeline that’s only given significance because of our base-10 numbering system. Sort of random and determined by the speed of the earth’s journey around the sun.

It’s a time to look to the past I’ve had and then look to the future I want and try to figure out how to join those points together. Regardless of what it was or wasn’t, I look back on the past 30 years and think, I’m good with that. Sure, I could have been more outgoing in college, or lost more weight before I got so fat, or parked my brother’s car in a space where it wouldn’t get hit by a drunken, hit-and-run driver while my bro was studying abroad in Italy. But all in all, it’s been pretty sweet, even with my never-ending headache. I don’t have many complaints.

So now I’m looking ahead to the next thirty years and trying to decide what I want to do next. What do I want to achieve? Who do I want to meet? Where do I want to go? And I think I should probably spend less time thinking and thinking myself in circles in my head and just try something whether I succeed or fail. Just do it. Go! Live!

So, I am thirty today and here I am, traveling somewhere between the future and the past, exchanging one for the other like dollars to euros. I’ve still got my She-ra action figures even if I lost my slap bracelet. I’m keeping my smartphone even if I accidentally call back the pizza delivery guy again. But it’s good to take a break, look around and appreciate the journey, to see where I’ve been and look forward to where I’ve still yet to go.

I just hope that when I’m 60, you youngins will teach Granny PastaQueen how to answer the phone.

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?

It is kind of sad knowing these people’s futures, almost as sad as looking at what they’re wearing. Wow, a poncho. Really? But it can be happy too. Look, there’s Uncle Terry before he met his wife and made his beautiful babies. He’s got good times to look forward to. And there is Aunt Kelly the day she found out she had uterine cancer. She’ll be happy to find out they get it all during the hysterectomy. I wish I could tell Aunt Karen she will be so much happier after she divorces that man.

So many pictures. So many ways to remember the past. Take a picture today and remember it the way you want to.

The other 30% of me was glad I did not have to question every life decision I’ve made in the last 10 years, that I didn’t have to wonder what my life could have been like if I’d turned left instead of right, if I’d met a guy or had a baby, if I’d started a business or gotten another job. I’m pretty happy with my life, even with my headache and the recession and the toilet that seems to be breaking again. Yet, everyone can fall victim to that Virus of the Mind as Heather Nova put it. When faced with a decision between entering the past of my reunion or making future relationships with other bloggers, it was easy to chose the future.

I was also glad that I did not have to summarize the past 10 years of my life in a succinct format. Although I did not attend the reunion, I’m sure the most common question there that night was, “So what have you been up to?” I tried to think of what I would have said, which made me try to remember what was going on in my life when I graduated high school. I’ve come so far since then it’s like I’m on a different coast. But if I had to give summary of the landmarks along the way, I would say:

Got fat, got a cat, lost weight, left the state, wrote blog, wrote book, check me out on Facebook.

It’s less than 100 characters and it even rhymes! (I cheated by rhyming “book” with “Facebook,” so I’ll obviously never be the Poet Laureate.) If you had to describe the last 10 years of your life in 100 characters or less, what would you say? Let me know in the comments. You can check your answer’s length in the box below, but remember to actually post it in the comments area. And if you go over a little, I doubt anyone will care.

Then I went back and read some of my blog entries and realized that’s a load of crap.

I’ve always had issues with eating on the weekends. I’ve always eaten too many M&M’s at baby showers. Food has always been an issue for me – when I was fat, when I was losing weight, and now as I am maintaining my loss. Yet, for some reason, I make myself believe that I was more perfect in the past, that I was better back then, when my blog stands as proof otherwise. The human brain is tricky like that, remembering things as we think they were instead of how they actually were.

That’s one of the best things about keeping a journal, it’s immune to the shadings of time. The best way to know what it’s like to go through an experience is to write about it as it’s happening so your brain doesn’t play tricks on you later. When I’ve rooted through boxes in my closets, I’ve occasionally found diaries or old school journals. Usually I find myself reading them as I sit cross-legged on the floor thinking, “Wow, I was a total doofus!” The thoughts I had back then, the things that were important, are not the same as now. But I would never remember how different I was unless I’d written it down to read later. And I’d probably never realize how much the same I am in other ways either. That girl I think I was never really existed.

So, when I’m trying to fight off the urge to eat another granola bar and wondering why I’m so weak-willed lately, I can console myself with the fact that I’ve always been weak-willed. Thank goodness I took the time to write it down.