I want a cigarette so bad I could punch myself in the nuts just to distract myself from the wanting. THE WANTING. God, I wish I had nuts. This is the first time I've ever had penis envy, and it's because I dearly wish for some way to inflict tangible harm on myself, and I'm without my cancer sticks.

I stopped smoking on July 4th.

Notice I said that I stopped, not that I quit. I'm not quite ready to commit myself to a total quitation. I've never quit anything in my life. (Except for ballet, and really, my quitting ballet was for the good of the earth's orbit, because my klutziness fucks with the planet's gravitational pull.)

I wasn't even going to say anything about the sabbatical from smoking, because I'm not into the commitment right now, and I don't want to make promises I don't intend to keep. Also, please don't make any connections between my quit date and Independence Day, because the coincidence between the two was quite accidental. I had purchased 3 packs of cigarettes the previous week during one of those "Buy 2 Get 1 Free" Camel promotions, and I decided that the final cigarette in the third pack would mark the commencement of my Smoking Hiatus. That's it. There is no cosmic rebirth involved.

Stopping on Independence Day. How ironic. I don't feel free. I feel jittery and preoccupied. In fact, the only reason I'm typing this is that I need to do something with my hands and I've already compulsively masturbated so many times that the magic has disappeared and I'm starting to take myself for granted.

Know what's great after an orgasm? A CIGARETTE. Noir movies don't lie. EVER. Dollface.

I'm actually doing well, and don't crave cigarettes most of the time. It's just the nighttimes that gnaw at me. Actually, the last couple of days, the cravings have only been difficult for the 30 minutes after the rest of the world has gone to sleep. I am not a person who meditates, but cigarettes provide me a focal point somehow; a behavioral distraction that urges me out of my head in a puff. I can honestly say that I don't crave the nicotine, but the change in my routine, and the disappearance of my trusty prop, is fucking with me bad enough to rob me of decent similes. Sorry.

I like smoking. I liked smoking even before I smoked. My formative years were spent in coffee shops and backwoods areas, hanging out with moody artists and weight-obsessed actresses, so obviously, most of my friends smoked. After adolescence, I spent most of my time working in theaters with actors and rednecks, or in offices with disgruntled wannabe artists, and, aside from smoking, what is a person supposed to do when the director calls, "Take five!"

?

Huh?

I am shallow. Shallow like a tear duct, shallow. Shallow like the edge of a wave when it dribbles into the perforations of the beach, shallow. Shallow like a chameleon's pore, shallow.

I will tell you, bald faced, that smoking is cool. Yes, I know that "cool" is subjective, and that the smell, teeth yellowing, wrinkles, and CANCER that result from smoking are unattractive to some. Such an opinion, however equally subjectiv, is WRONG. Smoking is cool.

I suppose it doesn't help that when I first started smoking, I received positive reinforcement from significantly attractive men that smoking MADE ME LOOK COOL AND HOT. They said as much.

The first of those men was Pablo, who provided me the first cigarette I ever fully smoked, and gazed at me admirably while I did it. And he told me I looked cool.

Most of you have read about Pablo already. If you didn't pick up on the fact that I wanted him so bad I could have bitten his face off just to have a chunk of him in my mouth, then you are retarded. And he felt the same about me. But there was no face-biting. I instead cultivated a sublimating oral fixation of a different color.

Christ Jesus, if this isn't an after school special/cautionary tale about the ills of libido, then cut my fucking head off and throw it through a television set.

Anyway. The other significantly encouraging male in the summer that I started smoking was Jimmy, who is one of the hottest men I have ever known in real life. Jimmy even rivaled a couple of the men I've met in fantasy, only. He looked like George Clooney, if George Clooney's genes had been spliced with those of Clint Eastwood, and both were significantly hotter than they were during their hottest days of the hot hot. Hot. Hot.

I want a cigarette.

Anyway.

He wasn't interested in me at all, and I knew that, but it didn't stop me from looking forward to our nightly smoke breaks. I worked in the box office, he was an actor, and he would knock on the office door before the show and during intermission. We'd go outside and smoke and gossip, and he said I was cool. I was young and totally fucking lusted after him, so I lived for those breaks.

But that was then.

(I became Jimmy's close friend and confidante, and he proved himself to be freakishly obsessive about the women he dated. His relationships would be great for a while, then he'd call me up to meet in some dark bar, where he'd grouse about the horrible women he loved while getting progressively drunker and more angry. It was very Travis Bickle, and incredibly unattractive.)

Now I'm on Smoking Sabbatical.

The first to return have been my senses of taste and smell. Every meal I prepare, even if it's just a salad or a stir fry, makes me totally freak out and declare myself a fucking culinary genius. I am able to taste each ingredient separately, and discern how the ingredients compliment one another.

As for my sense of smell ... well, even when I was living in Chicago and holed up in my apartment to chain smoke at least a pack a night, my sense of smell was keen and formidable. Now, after just a week of not smoking, my nose is even more awake, and thus confused. I can smell EVERYTHING.

The San Francisco bus, which was never very fragrant to begin with, has become a traitorous olfactory wasteland. I can smell which passengers are drunk and can usually figure out what they've been drinking. I can sense the differences between one passenger and the next, when a different person sits next to me. The contrasts between moth balls, Vietnamese chicken dishes, cheap perfume, and gin and tonics, are almost nauseating. But awesome. I feel a bit like a superhero.

I still want a cigarette, though. Look. People get addicted to things BECAUSE WE LIKE THEM. Why does everything tempting have to be bad for us? That is so fucking Garden of Edeny, I could puke.

I'm mostly just being dramatic. I'm doing well on the not-smoking thing. My goal is to abstain from smoking at least until August, when Dean comes to visit me, and then I go back to Hawaii with him for a week.

That's right. I’m forcing myself to go back to Hawaii. I figure if Dean can fly all the way to the east coast to meet my parents and sit through a Catholic wedding, I can put up with a week of sloth, camping, drinking, and fucking in a gorgeous tropical paradise with someone I love. Relationships are about compromise.

When I'm on vacation, unless I'm totally over it, I'll probably smoke. And yes, that makes me a fake quitter. But I'd rather be a poser of a quitter than a poser of a smoker. Those fucking people who bum cigarettes and then take pussy little sips off of them for a minute before throwing almost 3 inches of a perfectly good butt into the gutter...

I hate those people right now. They represent every cigarette I will never smoke, and every spec of moderation I will never have.

I'm good at smoking. FUUUUUUUUCK.

I'll be better in about 10 minutes. Really. The hiatus has actually been surprisingly drama free, so far.

I'm not spell-checking this. I have to go to bed. I just remembered I have a mid-term tomorrow.

~ Last Five Entries ~

Zooming Around - 01.26.07

Zooming Around - 01.26.07

I Met Courtney Love and Can't Think Of a Good Title - 11.08.06

Metacrap - 10.20.06

7 - 09.12.06

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BUY JEN'S BOOK! BUY IT! DO IT!

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BUY DEAN'S BOOK, TOO! YOU KNOW YOU WANNA! SERIOUSLY.

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