The procrastinating personality I’ve been cultivating has kept me from actually getting started on this, but last week my doc told me to record all my physical and mental sensations for the next three months or so.

Why, you may ask? Or maybe not, if you know me and my sometimes-sudden (Jen: sometimes?!) mood swings — they may be just intense PMS. Or, my doc thinks, the swings could be related to drinking. I responded “I can stop, I just don’t want to.” She countered: “that’s straight out of the AA book.”

For those of you who don’t know me that well — I’m well-adjusted, totally normal, and only drink about as much as Anne, maybe less. Seriously.

Some of these “symptoms,” though, seem relatively healthy — “Craving for sweets,” for example, is just part of Jen’s personality, as is “Nervous tension,” for Maureen, when she’s driving. And what about “Confusion”? I’d like to think that my quarter-life crisis is actually a healthy response to a world where many, many people suddenly wake up at 40 and realize their lives have no meaning –

But more importantly, this “diary” reminded me of the food diaries dieters are encouraged to keep when losing weight — a practice that not only consumes dieters with guilt and takes up a lot of time that could be used doing more important things, like drinking, but can also color nearly all aspects of life with weird food obsessions.

I left that land of obsession a while back, but the rest of the world has somehow normalized it. Bizarre eating behavior — and efforts that enforce it — is almost de rigeur now. The things I run across in the last couple weeks:

1. Maureen has me reading I’m Not the New Me — written by a somewhat overweight girl doing Weight Watchers, not really losing weight, and blogging about it on pound.
2. On Salon.com today, there’s a girl upset that her parents won’t get her an apartment unless she loses weight.
3. The latest TIME magazine reports on pro-ana and pro-mia sites, which characterize eating disorders as a “decision to pursue perfection.” Curious? visit ceruleanbutterfly.

The girls noted here are all “normal,” in the general sense of the word — I mean, their lives and habits seem like understandable reactions to the society they’re living in — In the sense that Jen’s sudden obsession with cupcake frosting (“food porn,” she calls it) is normal (Jen — can you email me that pic of you hitting on a pink frosted cookie with sprinkles?)

And unrelatedly — it took me a little while, but I’ve now reset my settings to let anyone post comments. Sorry ’bout that — Write me.

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