A Security Device, Still Quitting, De-Centralization, On-Line Scrabble, A Good Film, And Victoriana

On the lid of the communal garbage can on my floor of the apartment building is a note. It is neatly typed in all-caps and protected by strip of scotch tape. It reads: “SECURITY DEVICE ENCLOSED.” I lifted up the lid and checked inside, just to make sure, and I could not see this purported security device. Curious.

I bet that after my last entry you thought I fell off the non-smoking wagon, that I caved, that I gave in to my lesser desires, that I was a miserable excuse for a recovering addict. I have decided that I have to be honest here. I did fall off, cave, give in, and was a miserable excuse for a recovering addict – on Friday night. My last entry was on Thursday, and I was as sad as I sounded. When the Fiery One returned home from work, I was not on speaking terms with the world, and so after a few quick pecks on top of my head, he adroitly retreated into the safety of anyplace away from me. Later, when my rage boiled down to a more manageable bitterness, I positioned myself on the couch with a large bowl of popcorn, watched television with a zeal I did not know I had in me, and tried desperately not to allow thoughts to roam around in my head, because they were liable to think of smoking. I feel ridiculous saying this, but Thursday was the most difficult and concerted effort of my recent life. It is now Sunday morning, and I have not had a cigarette since then. Instead of doing what I usually do when I try to quit, I did not immediately start up the habit where I left off as soon as I got a whiff of failure. I picked myself up and resumed the teeth whitening the next morning. And I feel good. After a week of not having cigarette smoke constantly lingering on my clothing, hair, and fingers, the aftermath of thick stench that I woke up to on Saturday morning was enough to put me off again for another while. So, keep cheering for me. I am not the most brilliant quitter, and I am prone to small bouts of failure, but I do have heart (and will continue to if I actually stay quit).

On Friday evening, before I gave in to cigarettes with such ferocity (I must have smoked an entire pack), I went in search of yarn, because I thought that I would give my bus friend’s suggestion a try and knit an I’m-quitting-smoking scarf. I thought that surely there would be a store in our downtown core that sold even a few balls of yarn. No deal. I searched high and low, but to no avail. You see, I don’t own a car, nor do I want to, but at times like that when the nearest ball of yarn is clear across town in some far-flung mall I have never heard of and sweet cigarettes are within five minute's reach, a car would have saved me my terrible, one-night downfall. This town has become so de-centralized that you have to go the farthest reaches south, north, or east in order to find most amenities, and our bus system’s speed could not rival a sloth. Normally, I do not notice this aspect of living where I live, because I am not a big shopper and have a grocery store within walking distance, but on Friday the de-centralization of my fair city nudged me over that edge. Now don’t get me wrong. I am not laying all the blame for my caving on de-centralization and poor public transit, but it sure didn’t freaking help any.

Since I tried to log onto Blogger and cannot seem to be able to, I decided to try a game of internet Scrabble on WordBiz. I haven’t played in a long while, so I was not expecting too much out of myself, when I suddenly played “registry,” which used all of my letters and landed me on a triple-word score. I scored 89 points in one turn! In the world of low-brow Scrabble, that is pretty damn good. I was really starting to get into the game when my opponent, pesh, “lost contact or quit.” You better have lost contact, buddy, because dropping out of a game just because I attained the personally phenomenal score of 89 points in one turn is really, really lame.

We watched “Donnie Darko” last night. It was one of those films that everyone else has seen but you have not, and although everyone talks it up, it sucks, only this movie did not suck. In fact, it was excellent. It also has one of the best web pages. I’m serious about how seriously good this site is. It is seriously good. Seriously.

Apparently, people have been hitting on this blog by googling the phrase “victorian age toilet.” Have I written about such a thing? I don’t recall if I have. Maybe I should. It seems that it would increase my popularity.

Yay! The first part of this entry was written yesterday, and I lamented my lack of yarn. Well, shortly afterward, the Fiery One and I went for breakfast with a couple we know, and they were nice enough to take us along with them to a mall they go to for groceries, and in that mall was.... yarn! So, now I have four balls of brightly coloured yarn with which to make a brightly coloured scarf, and I have already created approximately six to seven inches of said scarf, and I feel fairly accomplished. As a quit-smoking scarf, it has not yet been entirely successful, but I do believe it will fulfill its duties.

I must apologize, at least to myself. I cannot make the effort required for my “Facts and Links” segment, and with my love of facts, I promise to at least myself to make up for it in my next installment.

Malcontent, Hollowed Out, The Sweet Old Life, Trying, An Aside, The Combo, Loneliness, And Quitting Smoking (Again)

Okay, so it is now Thursday, and I hate this quitting-of-the-smoking bit that I have been doing. It is no longer something I want. This does not mean that I am done quitting; this only means that the wanting-to-quit part is over for the time being. It truly, deeply and honestly, sucks stinky feet to be doing this to myself. Until today, I was verily sailing along, quietly patting myself mentally on the back for having made such a fine and mature decision and for following through with it with such decency of attitude in spite of the symptoms of withdrawal. I was an idiot then, and now I am malcontent.

Here is a picture of me sans the popcorn and chips with salsa and whatnot that I use to fill the void that is my physical and psychological addictions.

Surfing about did nothing to improve my poor mood. In fact, I think it helped to worsen it. All I want is a lovely Benson & Hedges Special King Size cigarette and a pint of Sleeman’s Honey Brown. Oh, how sweet such a duo would be, especially on top of a table at my favourite pub next to a copy of some delicious piece of literature.

This isn’t working, this writing out my pain thing. I am really trying. I knew that if I came home and didn’t keep my hands busy, then I would be out smoking in about sixty seconds, so I decided to sit here and blog away. But it is seriously not working.

Here, I am going to turn aside from the main topic and speak to you about something else. It will be much like an aside in a play by Shakespeare, in which a character occasionally turns away from the main action of a scene to relate his or her thoughts to the audience, only my brain will be the main action and my turning around to talk about something else other than smoking will be the aside. You are the audience. Here goes.... I will be starting in a new position at work in a couple of weeks, which is very good news for me. My current position is a term position, which means that it ends in August, so I am quite happy to take a permanent position and not have to worry about unemployment insurance or finding new work for next fall. When I was riding the bus to work this morning, a couple of men sitting across the aisle from me were discussing some research that one of them was doing. It apparently required thousands of miles of travel every few months, pygmies, a lot of camera and video equipment, jungles, and the BBC and National Geographic on a couple of occasions. I found myself growing jealous, and then had to reprimand myself for being overly self-interested and silly, and thankfully had my attention diverted by starting a conversation with the woman next to me, who I have begun talking with in the mornings and who is a welcome alternative to most of the people I have to talk to every day. Anyway, what I am getting at is that while I was feeling all good about experiencing a sense of job security for once and juggling story ideas in my head, these two men were talking about jobs that I can barely fathom but sound brilliant. Maybe quitting smoking causes one to spend extra time re-evaluating one’s life, but I seriously thought to myself that it is about high time I quit thinking so much and started doing. (That’s right, I ended that sentencing with “doing,” and I meant it. Ha). This is not an altogether original thought, and I have thought it before, but it is still important nonetheless.

Still feeling a strong desire, nay lust, for the cigarettes and beer combo. I am imagining myself bellying up to the bar, scanning their backlit menu board, putting an index finger to my lip, and saying:
“I think I will order the Combo #2. Do you accept substitutions? Because I prefer a pint glass over a bottle.”
“Nope, no substitutions. What’ll you have?”
“Then I guess I’ll have a B&H King with bottle of HB, hold the lime. Thanks.”

See, this is getting really pathetic. I am now pretending to order cigarettes and beer in lieu of the real thing, because addiction is desperately sad, and withdrawal is a lonely experience.

Quitting Smoking Links:**
* QuitNet will help you “quit all together.”
* QuitSmokingSupport.com offers free support to help you quit smoking.
* QuitSmoking.com offers information and products to help smokers quit (They rely on people smoking in the first place to make their money, so I doubt that they are really on a rampage to get the world to quit).
* Smoke Away is a complete, three-part standard kit that promises to curb cravings without nicotine or drugs. Nothing like this works. Ask any smoker.
* The Tobacco Information and Prevention homepage offers everything from Surgeon General’s reports to ways to quit smoking to celebrity views on smoking.
*Allen Carr’s The Only Way to Stop Smoking Permanently is supposedly very good and often effective. I own it, it is sitting on my bookshelf right now, and I have not even picked it up. I am in deep denial.

** I have not actually read through any of the above sites regarding the cessation of smoking. I do not care to at this time. As a result, I cannot vouch for their usefulness whatsoever.

Quitting Smoking, Whitening, LFHCS, Vatican Insanity, News, Mr. Picassohead, And Tooth Stains

I have quit smoking. I have been working steadily at this habit for well over fifteen years. Friday night was my last night of smoking. I did not know it at the time, but I smoked much and incessantly for hours on end. On Saturday, due to my overindulgence of the night before, I did not even think of smoking. Well, maybe once or twice, but not all that seriously. On Sunday, I thought about how I had been without a cigarette for a day-and-a-half, and I considered quitting. I gave myself until Monday morning to decide. If I wasn’t dying by then, I would give it a good effort. Monday morning rolled around, and I wasn’t feeling too awful. My mind was in obsessive mode, though. Every morning on my way to the bus, I have a smoke. I have it all timed out perfectly so that I can light my cigarette when I leave my building, finish it at the bus stop, and chug some of my thermosed coffee before the bus comes. Not smoking fucks up the whole routine. So, smoking was my first thought upon waking, it wandered in and out of my scattered shower thoughts, it registered a bit when I was checking the weather (I thought about how my fingers would not freeze without having to hold a smoke and then immediately wanted one), and by the time I was brushing my teeth, the thought of that longed-for morning cigarette was constant and nagging loudly. Thankfully, being the creature of habit that I am, almost as soon as I got on the bus, the thought floated away, because I do not associate being on the bus with smoking. Anyway, now it is Tuesday evening, which means that I have almost gone for four whole days without a cigarette. I haven’t even cried yet, which sounds pitiful, but it is my usual reaction to nicotine withdrawal. I am doing not too bad. Today, though, something really, really, sad and a little distressing hit me about this no-smoking thing: I am going to lack for beer in a big, big way. I love beer, and in return, beer is kind to me; cigarettes and beer are nearly inextricably linked together, and the three of us make a happy if not terribly attractive trio. Without the cigarettes, the beer is going to have to do without me for a while. Oh, woe is me. You see, today is Tuesday, as I have already stated, and on Tuesdays I like to go for a pint and write or read for an hour or two. All day this Tuesday ritual kept popping into my brain, and I had to keep wagging my mental tut-tut finger at it and re-explaining why the beer had to be put on an indefinite hiatus until this nicotine/cigarettes thing was worked out. It is so sad, and now Tuesdays seem so hollow, so emptied of goodness, and future good health just seems so lame. This future-good-health thing sounds like something a substitute teacher would try to make sound exciting, but you know how lame it is, especially since your real teacher will be returning tomorrow, and it doesn’t really matter if you do this lame thing or not. That is how I feel: like I am stuck with my substitute teacher with the pea soup breath circa grade four in perpetuity. Oh, woe is me. (Did I use “in perpetuity” correctly? My dictionary only gave me bare-bones help with this one).

In an effort to keep myself on the no-smoking bit, I have started a home tooth-whitening process. I figure that if I spend the bucks on this whitening stuff and start to see results, I will be less likely to go back to the habit that made my teeth this beautiful shade of piss-yellow in the first place. I also figure that my smelling so much less like an ash tray and having a decently flashy smile will cause the Fiery One to be uncontrollably hot for me eternally.

Little Red Boat put me on to this really funny site. Take a look at the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists. It is too good to miss. Really. Don’t miss it.

Don’t you just think the Pope rocks hard! I do! AIDS for everyone!

The News Butcher isn’t bad for getting the kind of news you don’t usually hear about.

An awesome time-killer, especially when you are trying to look terribly busy and you don’t care how long that damn telephone rings, (or this is mindless enough that you could do this while on the telephone if you really wanted to. It’s like doodling, only without a pen and paper or the ability to make your own self-directed shapes).

Tooth Stain Facts:
* Tea, coffee, red wine, and smoking are common factors in developing stained teeth.
* The use of a certain family of antibiotics, known as tetracyclines, during childhood is also known for causing brown tooth stains.
* Excessive ingestion of fluoride by young children can cause a type of tooth staining which is termed “fluorosis,” which appears as an overly white spot on the tooth. Fluorosis can be masked by bleaching normally coloured teeth to a lighter shade.
* A tooth that has had a root canal treatment will darken more than the surrounding teeth as years pass.
* Teeth that have a history of being traumatized, such as being bumped in an accident, will darken over time.
* If there is a problem with gum recession, the root surface may become visible and appears darker than the rest of the tooth. That is because the root surface is not covered by enamel but by dentin, which is naturally darker than tooth enamel.