Wednesday, January 19, 2011

the end of an era.

Sometimes, I am the worst.



Or, as I prefer to look at it, sometimes the winter harrasses me to the point of near workplace panic attacks and complete seasonal bitchiness. To cope, I get wine-drunk on a Monday night, thanks to Lucky Duck reisling and forgetting to eat anything other than a Marie Calender frozen mac'n cheese all day, with my friends when I'm supposed to be studying for the GRE test that happens in less than two weeks and cost a cool $160.



This NEVER would have happened in the summer.



So yeah, that's what's up with me.



I'm wearing a silky shirt right now, begrudingly pulled in desperation this morning from the dwindling supply of clean shirts in my closet. It's at bare minimum two sizes too large for me and a ghastly shade of dark greenish blue. Slim pickings.  It's making me feel like a cross between a circus tent and a goddamn douglas fir. Not pretty.
Pretty much the only truly productive thing I've done today is doodle these creepy little faces into the corner of the schedule I made for myself regarding all things work related this week. 








If you look really hard, you'll find that I'm not very ambitious about my time management skills.


Meh.



However, if today's a bad day due to a hangover riddled with guilt, then yesterday was even worse due to trying to process too much neurotic thinking about the past at once, coming out of an intense fight with Manfriend on Sunday evening, and trying futiley to rationalize to myself why it's perfectly fine that I'm such an asshole and everyone else can fuck right off. I felt dizzy and disoriented all day. Yeahhhhhhh, one of those.



Settle in and let me tell you a little tale of my woes.  



When I was 21 years old I started smoking cigarettes to look cool. I was/am a fucking idiot. I was a bartender living on a white-trash island of drunks in Lake Erie and I wanted to be a part of that community sooooo bad.. because, well, it was fun, really, really fun. I also needed an excuse to spend more time with a boy I thought was cute, and he smoked cigarettes, Camel wides, which is just so fitting. 



I started puffing away when I was drunk and could bum one off of someone. Or when I needed a break at work, I'd go sit out back on the steps and puff away by myself for a blessed few moments of peace. And then I started buying my own packs before too long, and it was allllllll downhill from there. I didn't even know how to inhale for probably three months after this whole ordeal started and I definitely didn't realize what an ass-hat I was about it until I was actually already inhaling and hooked....On the boy, Terry, and the cancer sticks, which are probably honestly the two most unhealthy things I've ever done to myself in my life.  He's a story for another time, or more aptly, never.



What kind of intelligent, relatively healthy, active 21 year old just ::picks up:: smoking like a goddamn hobby? The kind that apparently also likes to tolerate being treated like shit and made to feel worthless!



Whatever, like I said earlier,  I'm an idiot. Chugging forward:



Three years later, Summer of 2010. Now those were times.



At this point, I've matured,  I've moved on, I'm in an alarmingly healthy relationship with my best friend, but yup, you guessed it, I'm still fucking puffing away on those cancer sticks. Which Manfriend despises, causing some serious dissent in otherwise the most blissful of times.



So I was basically on a cigarette diet, I'd shaved it down to about one pack a week. I mostly never smoked around Manfriend- I was half-assedly trying, I'd go two or three days without a smoke break, no big deal.
And then the bottom dropped out.



The way I remember it, I made a few drunken allusions towards trying to inxnay the abithay. Then one day I got an email from Manfriend, saying he was quitting chewing tobacco, hence, I would be expected to stop smoking. Like I mentioned I was going to do anyway... multiple times... without doing so whatsoever.



'FUCK,' I thought to myself, 'I'm not ready!" But I decided despite feeling pushed into this, I would try. For manfriend. Certainly not for my own health, or the way people percieve me, or financial reasons. I was doing it for him and everything was GREAT and it was hearts, stars, and horseshoes, clovers, and blue moons, pots of gold and rainbows, and the red balloon. Peachy fucking keen. For about three weeks.  



And then I got drunk. It was wasn't that big of a deal if one of my friends gave me a cigarette. I wasn't buying them. It was harmless, just one. It's never really just one.



I started slipping up more and more and feeling kind of deceptive and sneaky, but not in the cool Sydney Bristow, spy sense, in the guilty, I'm-a-fucking-liar, letting-my-manfriend-down sense.



And then I started to feel really resentful, which is kind of a scary feeling because it's like a hybrid of feeling angry and guilty and entitled at the same time. I started thinking along the lines of, "Manfriend is trying to change me, and I'm making all these sacrifices like, like smoking! Which is a part of me, OMG I"M LOSING MYSELF!"

This was my thought stream:



OMG I NEED A CIGARETTE-> I can't have one because of Manfriend->  ahhh, smoking-> part of me-> manfriend wants to change me-> OMG I'M LOSING MYSELF-> AW HELL NAW.



And then in my mind I'd have the GIRL POWER head-bob going and dust off the rhetoric from my women's stuides degree and get all  "Ain't no man gonna change me," empowerment shit.



This went on for several months.

And on Sunday, it so happens, I got caught. Without a shadow of a doubt, busted. I rolled home from following my friend Erin to the car dealership to drop off her car and driving her home, and apparently guilt wasn't the only thing I reeked of.



Erin and I had parked in the parking lot of a Japanese Hibachi Grill, GOTTEN OUT OF MY CAR and sat on the curb IN THE MIDDLE OF WINTER so that we wouldn't smell like smoke.



It didn't work because Manfriend is a detective.



Anyway, without going into all the details of our fight in which I honest-to-god started to pack a bag to drive to my house for the night, I've come to one conclusion.



I think I really have to quit now.



HEAVY sigh.



BUTTTTTTTT... I think I've finally figured out a way to justify it to myself. Maybe Manfriend wanted to quit together because we both had/have habits that are going to kill us, make us smell nasty, make us look ugly, and just generally bring our demise. I'm not even being dramatic people, DEMISE. I love Manfriend and he loves me and why shouldn't we try to be our best selves for each other? If you think about it, the prospect of wanting to be around for the person you love for the duration really isn't too much to ask. 



PLUS, Manfriend isn't some The Hamburglar character in a weird striped jumpsuit trying to steal me from myself, Terry was.  And I will be damned if I spend another day doing something that was his in the first place.



So, fine, I'll stop trying to make my lungs look skinnier by filling them with tar until they turn black, even if it's every now and then, on the sly, and maybe I'll get addicted to something healthier, like exercise*. After all, I do need some coping mechanism, I've got an incredibly addictive personality. It's why I don't gamble.



*(but let's not push it, I feel I've made enough leaps in the health and wellness portion of my life for one week).



Cheers to my renewed interest in my own health!



XO Sare

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