Stop Smoking

I made it one year without smoking! Today marks the first anniversary of my last cigarette. Actually, I’m celebrating my first leap year without smoking. It has been a long road, but I’m so glad I decided to quit and am very proud that I stayed smoke-free for this long.

Like I said in my Eleven Month Update, I don’t miss it often. Even those times are few and far between now that I am starting to see the benefits of eating well, exercising, and living a healthier life in general.

I could not have made it this far without a lot of help. The Lady has been instrumental in this journey and I know I couldn’t have done it without her. She acts as both a motivator and supporter in my efforts to kick the habit. Thank you so much.

I think to celebrate my first full year without smoking since high school, I will get my teeth whitened. It has been bothering me lately that the side I always held the cigarette in is stained darker than the other side. I spoke briefly to my dental hygienist about this today (I had a couple cavities filled) and she said she would get more information for me. More updates to come!

It has been eleven months since my last cigarette! I don’t miss it much. There are a few times when it feels like I want one socially. But I don’t miss the smell and the taste at all. I can smell a smoker or a cigarette from a mile away now. Smokers and their clothes just stink.

The produce isle, Italian restaurants, and the lady are so much nicer now that I can smell them completely. I love it.

I went to visit the lady back in her home town on Day Six. She was there recuperating and I figured she could use some company. Plus it got me mad style points with the fam.

We pretty much hung out Saturday, watched the tourney, and ate some great Chinese. Since it was St. Patty’s Day, we had to go out and get plastered. I wasn’t resisting, of course. The local bars around there are great: really worn in and everyone knows everyone else. I was the exclusion to that rule, but it felt like I knew everyone.

Her parents and siblings can hold their own when it comes to drinking. Not wanting to feel left out, I did my best to go 1-for-1 with her dad. Of course, that made for a fun evening. The bars back there look the other way when it comes to smoking. I would guess that 90% of the people in these bars are smokers, so the smoke-to-air ratio was much worse than anything I’ve seen in a really long time. Probably because of this, I didn’t feel like smoking at all. I had the patch on, of course, and I think just knowing that fact helped a lot.

I had a great moment in the bar, too. I was shooting darts with the lady’s dad, uncle, and aunt. The game was Cricket. All of the numbers were filled and her dad and I were down by 13 points or so. The other team had two bulls and we only had one. I stepped up to the line and hit the first bull. Cool, I thought. I threw the second dart. Another bull. I just closed out our bulls on two consecutive throws. Impossible, right? I threw the third dart and it completed an equilateral triangle inside the green bullseye. I couldn’t believe it. It was one of those moments where you realize that you should just quit whatever activity you were just doing and hang it up for good. I can never top that. Never. I shouldn’t even try. But I am sure I will, since I like playing darts a lot.

Anyways, the next morning, I felt like I had smoked an entire pack. It was awful. My nose was stuffed, my throat was raw, and my lungs ached. No hangover, though, so that was nice. We hung out for a while and once we figured out that her rents weren’t going to be getting up anytime soon, we decided to go out to a local Italian restaurant for some lunch. The food was great and helped get rid of the nasty smoke taste lingering in my mouth. After that, we took a drive around the lake and she pointed out a bunch of places from her childhood. It was a great smoke-free time.

Such stress-free days like these really help me forget about smoking. I don’t think I really had any desire to smoke the entire weekend. Being around the lady helps a lot. Like I’ve said before, she’s never nagged me about smoking and always has a word of encouragement when I’m feeling weak. She’s awesome and it an incredible help in my journey to be smoke-free.

Tuesday, 7 November 2006 was voting day in states all across the country. It was a midterm election which turned the U.S. Congress on its collective ear by turning over the control of the House and Senate to the Democrats. Also on the ballot in Ohio were two big issues in the minds of the voters: Issues 4 and 5.

Issue four is to make an amendment to the Ohio Constitution which would allow (among other entities) businesses that generate less than sixty percent of their profit from the sale of food to decide whether they will permit smoking in their establishment, according to this NBC4i.com article. Issue five is a state-wide smoking ban to be added to the Ohio Revised Code. As a smoker, many expected me to be partial to issue four and against issue five. Quite the opposite.

Columbus has had a smoking ban for a couple years and I love it. I don’t mind going outside to smoke for the greater good of society. Plus, the small town I am from in Northwest Ohio would never have a smoking ban of their own. It’s too Red and too small. I voted no on issue four because I don’t want to have to smell like smoke after a night at the bar. Lots of bar owners in Columbus said that the smoking ban hurt their business, but I don’t see it. I am more willing to go there and drink now that I don’t have to wash my jeans after one night out. What is really being hurt by the ban is the Gap. The less I have to wash my jeans, the less they wear out. The less they wear out, the fewer pair I have to buy. See? It’s simple economics.

I voted yes on issue five for all of my friends and loved ones back in Defiance, Akron, and every other small town throughout the state. I really think that this smoking ban will encourage a lot of people to stop smoking, me included. I remember reading an article about year after Columbus’s smoking ban went into effect which said that the medical world was already seeing the benefits of the ban. Fewer cases of lung cancer, heart disease, and respiratory illness were showing up in the hospitals around Columbus. After just one year! Imagine what good will come of this next year, in ten years, and throughout the rest of our lives! My roommate calls it socialism. I call it progress.

There’s a relatively new weblog that I have gotten hooked on ever since I first found it. Dethroner.com. It’s brilliant. The author, Joel Johnson, has an awesome writing style; always includes an interesting outlook, plenty of sarcasm, and amazing wit; is probably the ghost writer of every heterosexual male with an ounce of self-respect (and two ounces of self-loathing); and keeps his page fresh by focusing on a new topic every week.

Why do I mention this? This week’s topic is smoking. Dethroner’s not just covering the bad. Hell, it’s not covering much of the bad. Joel is a smoker, himself. He frequently comments on how much he enjoys a good pipe and cigarette. And I have to agree. I. Enjoy. Smoking. The first cigarette in the morning with a cup of coffee is like Gladiator when Russel Crowe finally dies and he sees his family in the after-life. It’s the moment in Life is Beautiful when Giosué finds his mother as the Allied tanks roll out of the concentration camp. You know it’s about the happiest you will be all day, but you also know that something terrible is going on.
SO, I will probably be linking to his site a lot this week and in the coming weeks as I read and reread everything Joel has to say. I can only think of one other site’s posts that I read multiple times, and that one is so good, I pay for a membership to it. They are both really that good. Check them out and then check back here to see how things are going.

Step one, of course, is taking the first step. Sound redundant? Well, it doesn’t to me. I started setting up this site and making the header image two months ago. I finished that the next day. The hardest part is getting started

I wrote a short history of my addiction when I set up the site originally. It will always be available by clicking “About” at this top of this page, but to make sure everyone reads it, Here it is… with a few updates.

I’ve been an on-again, off-again smoker since 2000. That was the year I began college. At first, I limited myself to one cigarette per day and only when alone. For me, it was still embarrassing to smoke at that time. Sophomore year, I began smoking with a couple people from my dorm. Senior year, my father had a heart attack, which scaled back my smoking dramatically. I finally quit two months after his heart attack, in December 2003. Nine months later, I started smoking again while celebrating a friend’s birthday. In September 2005, one of my best friends got married. Two days later, I started running: for health and for enjoyment. I stopped smoking a few days later, as smoking makes it difficult to run, and running makes it difficult to smoke. Fast forward nine months to May 2006. I was celebrating the wedding of a friend of a friend and I got started again. I haven’t been regularly running for six months.

At this point, I am starting this weblog to give myself some accountability. Every other time I have tried to quit smoking I had great people around me to support me. I have even quit with others, providing plenty of very personal, in-your-face accountability. soangry.net/stopsmoking is meant to force me to be accountable. It also serves as a repository for my experience with smoking, information found by me and others, and tips and strategies for kicking the habit.

This is my struggle.

I hope this site inspires, encourages, and helps you break your own habit, whatever it is. And I hope that this time, I kick my habit, too.