In which I write about a topic that is probably only interesting to me.

I really dig smoking.

A lot.

But I’ve done a great deal of it, and for the past year or so it’s been becoming less and less fun. I’m a judgmental bitch, so let me inform you here and now that I’ve always had a big problem with smoker’s coughs because I think they’re just utterly tacky and icky.

Which is why it was Not Good when I realized I was developing one myself. It was mild and inconstant, and thank God I hadn’t begun those nasty daily morning hacking sessions, but still. I was clearing my throat all the time.

And the smell is bad. Period. I don’t smoke in my house or in my car (only because I don’t have one), but that didn’t stop me from smelling like an ashtray. I was always aware during hugs that I was probably offending whoever I was hugging.

The cost was getting absurd, too. Sure, I was only smoking half a pack a day, but that’s still over $120 a month. (I could buy entire Etsy outfits for that!)

And it’s not like I haven’t already smoked enough. I’ve smoked upwards of 180 thousand cigarettes in my life! I’m quite certain I have the whole thing grokked by now, and that further research into the subject would only reveal me to be stupid.

Then there were the stains on my fingers, which I simply never considered. I mean, I knew they were there, and I scrubbed them in the shower, but I just didn’t think about them.

Then there were all those cigarettes I didn’t enjoy. I started noticing when I cut down to half a pack that my first one each day was yucky, and that I was only smoking it for the nicotine: the actual physical experience was one of dizziness, nausea, and mild discomfort.

My hygienist never failed to mention my “smoking habit” and its effects on my oral heath when I went to get my teeth cleaned.

I was still enjoying my before-bed cigarettes quite thoroughly, booyah, but the more of those I had, the worse my mornings felt. Nasty mouth, gummy eyes, hard time waking up. Fucking fuck.

I got laryngitis one weekend and went and read the article about it on WebMD. In the home care section it said, “especially avoid smoking,” which was just about par for the course since every other goddamned illness or symptom I’d looked up on the Internet in the past year had said exactly the same thing. Fucking fuck!

Then there was the really gross stuff. The kind of stuff you do but don’t think about because it’s just so foul. I have, during my smoking career, done all of the following more than once:

• gone through all the ashtrays and garbage cans in the house looking for butts to smoke
• smoked multiple very dirty, stinky, short butts because I didn’t have any whole cigarettes
• smoked butts out of strange or public ashtrays
• chosen to buy a pack of cigarettes instead of a meal
• stolen cigarettes out of unattended packs
• gone to get cigarettes when I would not have left the house for any other reason (like when ill, or practically snowed in, or profoundly lazy and comfortable)
• smoked when I was not only sick, but very sick. Like bronchitis sick.

= = =
The Internet tells me that nicotine is really hard to kick. As in, more addictive than crack, with only 10% of quitters staying quit.

The Internet also tells me that it’s really easy to quit smoking ’cause all you gotta do is, like, quit smoking.

The Internet also also tells me that it only takes three days to get over nicotine (or get it out of your system, I’m not sure which), which means that tomorrow is the first day of the rest of my life.

= = =
I don’t feel any better, but the compulsive throat-clearing has eased. And I’ve already saved fourteen bucks. And I don’t smell like smoke.

I just WANT SOMETHING all the fucking time. Which is really fucking annoying.

Since I’m pretty much always on a diet, I gave myself several days of carte blanche eating while I quit smoking. Instead of caving and buying a pack of smokes on my lunch hour I’ve been buying stupid junk food instead, like cups of Starbucks Signature hot chocolate, or entire bowls of soup from Quizno’s (AFTER I’d already eaten my lunch), or giant cookies. For dinner last night, I ate an entire chile relleno platter from Rosita’s. That’s about 2.5 meals worth of calories, and at least two days worth of sodium.

I’ve been avoiding places I smoked (like the porch on my house), I always have a beverage in my hand, and I can barely even look at an ashtray without being half-disgusted and half-jonsed.

On Monday, the extra calorie shit will stop; I’m just being nice to myself this week. (I would much rather have lung cancer than be obese. I know that makes me shallow, but I’m just sayin’.) I think if someone handed me a cigarette right now, I’d go outside and smoke it even though I know it would be gross and taste bad and make me lightheaded.

Luckily no one is going to hand me a cigarette, so I’m safe for the rest of today.

But tomorrow will be another story, because I’ll be riding with a smoker to and from a gig in Richland. Hopefully remembering all the things I’ve written here will help me resist nicotine’s damned powerful siren call during those two hours.

• smokefree.gov
• lungusa.com
• whyquit.com