Category Archives: Life

Quitting Smoking: Day 4

Health, , , ,

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

cigI 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.

Quitter.

Decisions, , , , , ,

In which I bought treeware.

For my birthday, I quit smoking.

On my lunch hour, instead of smoking I went into the bookstore and bought myself The Eyre Affair, a book I’ve been meaning to read since it came out eight years ago.

Birthday book!

I mean, what the hell, right? It is my birthday, after all, and at least in this format G’ma can read it when I’m done.

Then, still wanting something – namely nicotine, which I was not having – I went into Starbucks for a hot chocolate. And they gave it to me for free, since it’s my birthday! Cool, huh?

In other super awesome news, dad’s taking me (and my brother) out for a birthday dinner to T. Mac’s after work tonight. How lucky am I?

The voice, it is not doing so well.

Health, Music, ,

In which I’m a little worried about my instrument.

I’m playing the Rally In The Valley – a biker rally, natch – tomorrow night. Outside. At night. It will most likely be both damp and chilly: not good conditions for a weak voice.

Then I’m supposed to play a chichi benefit gig on Saturday afternoon in the Tri-cities.

Both of which are awesome, of course, except for the fact that my instrument did not respond well to being used during band practice last night. I sang for less than an hour, and not even in full voice, and today woke up sounding like a bullfrog.

I have enough voice to talk on the phone at work, but I (a) don’t think I’m going to make it all the way through the gig tomorrow night and (b) will probably be utterly voiceless on Saturday.

This is bad because I want to do a good job at these gigs and I want the money.

I haven’t had a voice-related problem not concurrent with an upper respitory infection in twenty years, but I have been through it. The only cure is time and liquids and rest; and if I don’t do those things the instrument will just drop out completely and there’s nothing I can do about it. With gigs to do, the whole thing is just bummin’ me out.

In other news, my dad is arriving in town on Friday, and my mom is arriving on Saturday and they’re both going to expect to be able to hang out with me. (They divorced when I was 13 so it’s pretty amusing that they’re both showing up the same week; I haven’t seen either of them in a few years.)

Query: is it possible for your parents to give you laryngitis remotely?

Weekend in review #1,056,408,946,490,562

Life

In which this is what I did with myself on my three-day weekend.

Thursday I went out and, inexplicably, got drunk after band practice. I think the sober dude who was driving me around – to three different bars – might have been hoping I’d get drunk enough to lay him, but I’m old and crafty so his plan (if it fact there even was one) failed! Hah hah!

Friday SUCKED. Talk about a monster headache. Whoo boy. Ouch.

Friday night, I played the Pepsi stage at the Walla Walla county fair with the boys. The gig was meh (we had to compete with the sounds coming from the rodeo, which was about TWELVE FEET AWAY), but there was a consolation and it was falafel (cue angelic choir):

Greek food!

That’s the first falafel and hummus I’ve eaten that I didn’t have to make myself in two years! It was freakin’ delicious!

Saturday, I went and saw my stylist Jolene and she colored my hair. It is now this awesome color… er, these awesome colors:

A Red Door Salon

Since I had a gig at one that afternoon and my coloring went long, I didn’t get a trim. I’m going after work tonight for that.

The gig was playing by the pool at Basel Cellars for stomp (basically, drunk people walking on grapes for no good reason). This was the view from my mic:

Basel Cellars Stomp '09

We played stomp there last year too. Although the hors d’oeuvres are yummy, playing on the opposite side of the pool from the party is bit like being aural wallpaper.

Saturday night, I went with my drummer to Wildhorse casino and saw an R&B act, and then we hung out with the band – a really smokin’ rhythm section – until the wee hours of the morning. There was a lot of really cool discussion about music, family, poverty, the music business, and personal anecdotes. I had a blast.

R&B

I woke up the next day with laryngitis.

Sunday and Monday I read The Magicians. It fucking rocked. So much that I even went to the author’s website and sent him a message telling him so. I’ve been having such crap luck with novels lately that I felt he needed to know that I hadn’t devoured a novel with such one-pointed devotion in a long time, and that I thanked him from the bottom of my reader’s heart to have had a taste of that again. The main character is hard to like (because he’s wholly and unsalvageably emotionally stunted) but it was still a really great story and a wonderful read.

I spent most of Sunday and Monday in silence, so the voice is nearly healed. I’d never really considered before that I make all of my money with my voice; if I were suddenly struck permanently mute I’d have to change jobs and hobbies altogether… how freaky is THAT?

Underdogs are good. Behemoths are bad.

Life

In which I realize something about my generation. We distrust success.

Dear Starbucks,

Back when you were the new guy, we were super into you. We drank your coffee by the gallon. We drove out of our way to stop at your new stores on our way to work.

Then time passed, and you became this giant behemoth with stores on every single goddamned corner in the nation, and we dropped you like you were hot.

You had gone and done the unacceptable: you’d made it. You’d quit being our little local NW business-that-could, and become everybody’s damned coffee shop. You slut!

Now we avoid you because you’re no longer exclusive and hip and we go to local coffee shops instead. We talk shit about you whenever we see your green logo on a quaint downtown Main Street USA because your coffee ain’t like it used to be, back in the day when our love was new.

Well, being that all these truths are self-evident, I just wanted to let you know that I have a friend who recently started working for you and she’s changed my attitude. She overflows with enthusiasm when she talks about your corporate culture and your desire to give back with your ethical sourcing, environmental stewardship, and community involvement.

It occurs to me that you’re actually big enough to make a difference, if you really want to. The fact that you’ve over-saturated your market is our fault as much as yours: we threw money at you for twenty years. What were you supposed to do? Ignore it?

Keep up the good work. Be a good behemoth. I’m proud of you.

Warm regards,
Mush

I shopped at Walmarts because I was young and poor and they were cheap. Then they took over the world and now I loathe and hate Walmart. Same for Starbucks, Body Shop, and even Amazon.

Some of these businesses still get my money because they’re either really good at what they do or they’re the most convenient, but I no longer feel any kind of real emotional loyalty to them, like I did when they were little and new.

As soon as a business reaches a certain level of success, I quit trusting it.

Remember when Amazon deleted books off of people’s Kindles without warning, how outraged we were? Remember when they re-indexed their database and removed GBLT material from easy view, how offended we were? If a small company had made such a blunder, we would have accepted an apology with a grin. “Shit happens,” we’d have said, and kept supporting them. But when a big company does something like that we suddenly all put our conspiracy hats on.

Well, sometimes. Other times we just ignore it and keep shopping there. We know, for instance, that Walmart is a community-killer, but we keep shopping there because we’re brainwashed to think that it’s both cheaper and more convenient (which it isn’t if a store has been open for more than four years). We know, for instance, that Blockbuster censors the films they carry1, but we keep going there too.

We just don’t like it.

What size does a company have to be to earn our disdain? Why is huge success a target of such dislike? Where did I even get this attitude? If I inventory my opinons, I really do loathe big businesses, even if they’re big because I selected them and gave them money for years. Why do I like underdogs? Where did this attitude actually come from?

—
1 Googling this assertion these days comes up with a bunch of carefully-worded spin most likely seeded by Blockbuster itself saying that Blockbuster doesn’t censor films. Well of course they don’t literally censor films, they’re a rental place and not editors. But they do refuse to carry titles until the studios or distributors censor them to the organization’s Christian preferences (for this reason, I have never been a Blockbuster patron) and they got away with it because they were the largest rental channel in the nation for so long and had the clout to make such demands. Now they’re seedy little brick-and-mortars where they still exist at all, so I really don’t care if they demand censored films.

Guess Who's Going to Die Alone? Me!

Admissions, Love & Marriage, , ,

In which I’m not looking, oh HELL no I’m not, but if I were looking there’d be a pretty stringent list.

Apropos of absolutely nothing, here’s what my standard looks like these days (this applies only to mates, and not any other type of relationship):

1. You must not be a goddamned stoner.
2. You must not be an alcoholic.
3. You must not be currently or recently addicted to speed, pills, coke, heroin, or any other street, pharma, or pseudo-pharma drugs.
4. You must be a devotee, preferably of Amma’s.
5. You must not be a slob at home, at work, or in your car.
6. You must not watch more than five hours of television per week on average.
7. You must have a few hobbies or directions of study that interest you so deeply that you occasionally wander off and immerse yourself in them.
8. You must have a broad command of grammar and be able to spell.
9. It would really help if you were a ‘roo.
10. If you smoke cigarettes, it’s less than half a pack a day and you’re thinking about quitting.
11. Your glass is half-full.
12. You must respect the place you live in enough to clean and repair it as needed without being told by an outside source that it needs to be done.
13. You must not be co-dependent or passive-aggressive.
14. You must not be fundamentally angry.
15. You must know or be willing to learn enough about music and computers and my other interests to nod at the right places when I talk about them.
16. You must support yourself financially.
17. You must love to travel and be well-traveled.
18. You must be essentially good-natured.
19. You must not be obsessed with material possessions – actually, you shouldn’t be obsessed with anything.
20. You must be tolerant.
21. You must be contemplative by nature.
22. You must be reasonably healthy and take a certain amount of care of your person.
23. You must consider compassion to be one of your basic personality traits.
24. You must be vegetarian, or very close to it.
25. You must be very, very intelligent.
26. You must read. A lot.
27. You must never have been routinely cruel to persons or animals and you must not be so now.
28. It would really help if you’re not a morning person, but if you are be mellow about it.
29. You must not blame the shape or condition of your life on anyone but yourself.
30. You must be funny, and laugh a lot.

I’m made in such a way that I would genuinely rather be single than put up with things I’ve come to know that I hate: like stoners, for instance. Dear God, if I never find myself attracted to another goddamned pothead I’ll consider it a miracle. (Fat chance, though. Why are so many interesting men hell-bent on retarding themselves with endless bong hits? And DON’T let me hear again that “at least pot’s natural.” Whatever, you dumb stoner. Crude oil’s natural, too, but I don’t see you smoking that. And no, I don’t agree that everybody would be better off if they’d just get stoned, and how utterly unique of you to say so.)

And slobs: Christ! I cannot figure out what makes an adult person want to live like a pig! Pick it up, wash it, and put it away already. Messy rooms smell bad. Your mother doesn’t live here. Whoever let you think that masculinity was synonymous with slovenliness totally did you a disservice.

And unhealth: if there’s something wrong with your body, adjust your lifestyle. Continuing to party like it’s 1999 and eating crap food because you “don’t like vegetables” is suicide, so why not just save us all some time and fucking shoot yourself and quit with the trying to get laid already? What makes you think you have anything to offer if you can’t put your own house in order? And what sort of grown man is too much of a pussy to lay off the fast food? Hello! Are you twelve or what?

I particularly dislike listening to someone say mean shit about people because it’s exhausting to be around. We all have bad days, sure, and I’m all for a good venting session, but if you’re negative and mean all the time I just plain old don’t want to hear it. Your attitude is your problem, not mine.

I’m no longer interested in non-devotees, either, let alone atheists. Clearly I’m too intelligent to believe in the Sistine Chapel ceiling version of god so quit assuming that I do. My philosophy is fundamental to me and I really don’t want to have to hide it, nor do I want to explain it in endless detail. It’d be so much easier if it was understood implicitly.

As much as I wish I could let it go, bad spelling and grammar drive me batshit. I’ve always thought people who sucked at English would at least be good at math, but while probably sixty percent of my lovers couldn’t spell ‘thorough’ if they tried, I have yet to bed a mathematician. Go figure.

I don’t like TV. There are shows on TV that I enjoy, yes, but overall TV is crass and evil and fills your head with shit. It is a waste of time. While I’ve been known to veg in front of the glass teat myself, it’s a diversion for me and not a lifestyle. TV makes you complacent, stupid, and greedy, and while it does so it systematically makes you think you’re cleverer than you really are while simultaneously undermining your self-confidence. Fuck TV. People who watch too much TV are voluntarily crippling themselves.

I’ve tried to be tolerant of FODA, too, but I’m going to just come on out and admit for the first time anywhere that it grosses me out to taste meat in someone’s mouth or smell it in their sweat. It’s been so long since I’ve eaten meat myself that I can no longer perceive it as food: to me, it’s the dead body of a living creature that you just chewed up and swallowed because you’re, well, most likely thoughtless or greedy. Meat-eating is as disturbing to me as eating human flesh would be to you, actually. I just don’t say much about it because I know how statistically insignificant I am in this culture of rampant meat-eating.

Of course, I stink like cigarette smoke, so, yes, I’ll just shut the fuck up now, but the majority of my lovers have been smokers so the comparison isn’t equal.

Oh, and you should have already figured out that you need to have a job. If you’re still working on that one, fine, take your time, but I don’t wanna watch. I’m not a freeloader and no man has ever supported me; the reverse should be true for you. I’ll pay my way, you pay yours, okay?

And please, know what you need to be happy. Don’t expect me to know, because I’m not you. Have your own interests and pursuits and hobbies, and get your various needs met through them on your own. People without interests are both creepy and impossible to satisfy. And please note that buying things then abandoning them untouched in the shed does not qualify as a bona fide hobby.

I don’t care if you’re competitive and aggressive, just don’t take it to the point that you really believe that compassion is for weaklings. That’s just stupid. Compassion is fundamental – I am That, Thou art That, and all of This is That – so man up and volunteer already…

Uh, yeah. I could go on for hours, but I’ll just quit now. Don’t I just sound like a card-carrying bitch? I really do, don’t I.

The good news is that I’m quite prepared to die single, because the bad news is that I obviously will.

Oh, well. Someone has to be the childless old maid in the family, I guess.

What I did.

Blurbs, , ,

In which there are two lists. And pictures. And a lot of colons. I love using colons.

These are the things I DID NOT do over the weekend:

Get laid, get wasted, have an epiphany, knit, buy a bike, eat Mexican food, do yoga.

These are the things I DID do over the weekend:

Friday, I went to a thing out near the airport, and heard some music:

Music

Saturday, I made this purple wrap:

The Wrap 2

It was based on a thing I saw on Etsy, and I made it without a pattern ’cause I’m clever like that. It took a looooong time because I would pin it together, put it on, look at it, take it off, cut it, pin it together, put it back on, and look at it over and over.

I made and ate this delicious Indian food:

Sambar

Sambar, for the record? Is freakin’ nommability squared.

Sunday: I napped, watched three episodes of Mad Men on DVD, and packed a bento. (Seriously. That’s all I did in a whole entire day. You may confer upon me now the Laziest Girl Evar! award, because I totally done did earned it!)

Pray the Devil Back to Hell

PSA, , ,

In which I’m bugging people I don’t even know.

I want to see this film. A lot.

Pray the Devil Back to Hell

Unfortunately, you gotta be an organization to get a copy – DVDs for individuals aren’t for sale yet.

So I bugged Sheila over at the paper, and she gave me the names of some unsuspecting progressive people in the community, and I found their email addresses on the ‘net and fired off a missive asking them to host a screening.

So we’ll see.

The wobbling jowls of irony.

Blurbs, , ,

In which I write a timecapsule missive to my younger self.

Hey, dingbat, remember when you were twenty-something and you saw that disgusting old man in his driveway caring lovingly for his hot little convertable, and you wondered how he could possibly be unaware of how painfully stupid he looked?

Remember how you assumed he had to be aware since he was at least twice your own age, and you decided – because you were still young enough to believe that an adult was a cleverer, more mature creature than you – that he was probably polishing his convertible with more irony than your young little head could possibly perceive?

Remember walking by, not looking at him, not looking at his car, and hoping that he wasn’t stealing inappropriately lusty glances at your hot little bod (because that would just be pathetic and gross) and thinking, That HAS to be irony, a fat old man in a sports car, because there’s just nothing at all attractive about an expensive little fuel-injected COCK EXTENSION in tandem with those jowls and that beer belly! Jesus! Ick!

~+~+~
I walked by that guy again today, eighteen years later.

He had his little red convertible in his driveway with the top down. He was hand-polishing it. It was a cute car, too expensive for a younger man to afford. I sincerely doubted that it was comfortable for him to drive, since the cabin was so small and the bucket seats so narrow. He’d probably lusted after it in the back of his mind for twenty-five years, and had just recently found himself in a position to afford it.

That “old man” is no longer so old to me. He’s essentially my contemporary. I mean, he’s still old and he’s still fat, don’t get me wrong, but not as much as he used to be. In fact, I probably would have been flattered if he’d eyed me, but he didn’t – he only had eyes for his car.

I know now that he never meant for his skin to sag, his waist to disappear, or his belly to stick out. Those things just happened while he was doing what he was supposed to do. For all we know he may have been toned and fine and healthy once, back when his self-image was originally formed. The way he looks now is not necessarily the result of unchecked gluttony after all.

He does what you do, you judgmental little twenty-something. He sleeps, eats, works, and plays. It’s just that he’s been doing it now for fifty years, and this is what he looks like.

He has the little hot rod because he’s been a good dad and and good husband and he’s always wanted it and it’s his turn to have something frivolous. He doesn’t enjoy his toy with irony; he enjoys it with the same innocence and entitlement that you enjoy glitter lip gloss. It makes him happy, and he’s proud of it because it is an expression of who he feels he is. He knows what he looks like, yes, but he also knows that inside he feels just like he did in college.The only difference is that now he can remember more days, and he doesn’t have as much stamina as he once did.

He still expects himself to look, feel, and move like he did when he was twenty-something, but he doesn’t and he knows that he doesn’t. He bought the car for himself, not because he thinks he’s going to win your twenty-something adoration with it. Of course he’d most likely bed you if you asked him to, but he doesn’t think the car will make you want him and that’s not why he bought it.

In fact, the car doesn’t have anything to do with you at all, or women in general. It’s just a cool toy he’s always wanted, and you’re really a nasty little bitch for thinking you’re all that or that you have any idea what the phrase “mid-life crisis” means or feels like.

Continue reading The wobbling jowls of irony. →