Getting ahead of myself.

I'd like to be explicitly clear: I am fed up with smoking. Future posts may suggest the contrary, but I have felt fed up and ready to quit for the better part of a year and a half. I have spent this past year smoking 5-10 cigarettes a day, which equates to at most an hour a day, staring down at the smoking stick of leaves in my fingers and hating myself. Drowning in self loathing because I couldn't find the willpower in myself, couldn't be bothered to not do something. I would go to great lengths to keep myself stocked, and when I ran out I stopped at nothing until I had one in my mouth.

There are a bunch of reasons to stop, and I've repeated each one to myself so many times they're almost second nature to recite: My breath smells. My teeth are getting yellow. Girls hate it. People hate it. You have to go outside in the winter. Non-smokers respect you less. It isn't professional. It's expensive. It's inconvenient. It's rude to excuse yourself from a group of friends, and even ruder when all those friends but one also smoke. You can't smell, reduced taste, and you're stuck with a constant 5 year cough,

Oh, and get this! One of my friends was reading the internet, and that friend told me the other day that cigarettes cause cancer! Good thing she reminded me, otherwise I would never have known.

The biggest downside I've been focusing on lately, however, isn't necessarily a constant side effect. As I've smoked for 5 years, I have built up an immunity to feeling like shit from smoking a cigarette. However, every once in a while, I get swept over by a wave of soul shaking badness. It's really a hard feeling to describe; it's almost as if your insides want to become your outsides, but they're trapped by that damn skin, and you're nauseous. More often than not I'm hung over when this happens, but sometimes I am just not at peace with the smoke and it's a truly awful feeling.

And that's really what motivated me this time more than anything else. On Saturday, after a night of NO DRINKING, I smoked 2 cigarettes within an hour of each other. The first one made me feel like shit. Then, of course, I did it again, and I felt like shit again. I couldn't stop myself, and I knew it. It was then, standing on my back porch playing my ukulele, that I first played around with the idea of quitting and blogging about it. I was out with my roommate but decided not to mention it; too many times I confess my hair-brained schemes in just such a situation only to have them go nowhere.

There was nothing profound about it, I simply looked at my pack like I normally do on my first of the day, to check if I need to go to the nearest gas station. I saw that I was pretty low and thought "you know, I should be hitting my last one when I get to O'Hare." From there, the idea took root. And now we're here: with me rambling to try and forget my cravings and watching Sarah Marshall. Tomorrow is another day.