I understand where you’re comin from. I remember many a cigarette being the “best cigarette of my life.” Don’t take this as a “jump on the bandwagon” post. I don’t want to rub it in, but I want to celebrate my 6th month quitting anniversary by writing a post about pros and cons as I remember them. GO ME! It was tough, I’ll tell you. But it is do-able. If I could quit, anybody could. Write a comment if you need some advice. 

Pros of smoking (as a recall): 

• relieves the need to have a cigarette
• tastes good
• feels good
• looks sexy
• gives your hand something to do 
• gives your mouth something to do (i’m not addicted- my mouth is just bored!)
• no withdrawal!
• gives you a moment to take a break and contemplate things
• alone time
• speeds metabolism and helps lose weight/keep weight off
• helps you concentrate

Cons:

• After-shower smell is gone as soon as you have that after-shower cigarette
• smoke in the eyes
• burn holes on clothes
• hair smells
• breath smells
• get out of breath doing simple things
• COUGH!
• man voice (in women).
• scratchy voice
• clear your throat before you talk
• “Shit, I only have 2 cigarettes left for the night and no money…”
• “Shit, where’s my lighter?”
• “Can I please please please bum a smoke!! I’ll hit you back!”
• feeling isolated 
• not being allowed anywhere inside with your filthy habit
• people looking at you negatively… especially little kids.. and knowing they’re right
• those black lung photos
• strep throat, bronchitis, pneumonia, etc. 
• MONEY! (I have saved over 1,000 dollars in 6 months and counting)
• watching the clock
• dropping your cigarette while driving… SHIT!!!!
• worrying about your next pack
• driving/walking/biking in the snow at 3 a.m. for a pack
• prices going up and up…
• worrying about a quit date
• being controlled by a drug instead of yourself
• worrying about stretches of work, long movies, plane rides, etc. 
• needing to take a break during important things or fun things like poker games. 
• yellow teeth
• yellow fingers
• hating cigarettes and smoking and yourself for losing power. 
• worrying about blowing smoke in people’s faces
• feeling guilty about all those butts on the ground
• feeling guilty about your non-smoker friends getting smoke in their faces. 
• dealing with gross ashtrays. 
• feeling gross when you see a garbage full of empty cigarette packs
• Smoking a half-cigarette that is a day old. 

I could probably go on and on. When I quit (exactly) 6 months ago, I made a pro/con list. I wanted so badly to find that I had much more pros than cons. If I did, there would be no point in quitting, now would there? Well, I was disappointed when I could only come up with a few pros and a seemingly endless amount of cons. Just something to think about, especially since the economy in changing and shit’s getting pricey. I still have moments where I feel like I should be having a cigarette, and I’m still a smoker at heart. But I definitely feel proud for being an ex-smoker! The point of writing this post is basically to reinforce to myself that I am making the write decision. It definitely helped!

So Nintendo Wii has turned Beer Pong into a video game. It will be called “Pong Toss” and mothers are pissed. “My children will start drinking earlier now!”… “This is promoting underage drinking!” [The game is rated T for teen so children as young as 13 can get this game legally.]

First of all, I think the game looks boring. Second, isn’t this pretty much a carnival game- throwing balls into cups? Third, the kids are gonna start drinking at some point when they’re underage anyway. They’ve seen or heard about beer pong before, trust me. Getting all worked up about it is just publicizing and therefore further promoting a game that looks boring. Good job. Chill out. Just don’t buy the keg when they invite their teeny-bopper friends over to play their new Pong Toss game. The parents who are complaining are probably the parents who will watch their children like hawks until they’re 21 anyway.

According to Time on CNN.com, texting while driving is bad. DUH! 

“All of my friends do it,” says Sonalie Patel, 17, who lives in Elk Grove Village, Ill., and admits that she too occasionally sends texts despite a ban on cell phone use for drivers under 19 and adults with learners permits. “It’s like an epidemic.”

Why does Illinois think blowing out 19 birthday candles makes you a suitable candidate to chat on the cell while driving? What’s with the age/multi-tasking correlation?

Would you be more pissed if your partner cheated emotionally? Or sexually? Which one would put you over the edge enough to break-up? A study I found (Forgiveness or breakup: Sex differences in responses to a partner’s infidelity, by Todd K. Shackel, David M. Buss, and Kevin Bennett) says men and women respond differently to their partners’ infidelity. Men think it’s more disturbing when their women cheat sexually than emotionally. Women think it’s more disturbing when their male partners cheat on them emotionally. Men are more likely to break it off with their female partners when they cheat sexually and vice versa for women and their male partners. The authors suggest maybe this difference is based on evolution. When humans began, men wanted to find women who would carry their babies and spread their genes. Women wanted to find men who had the resources to take care of them and their offspring. (Things haven’t changed much, huh?) Now, let’s say a cavewoman cheats on her caveman sexually. If she gets knocked up by this new guy, her caveman now has to wait 9 months to spread his seed. That sucks for him. If she cheats emotionally, that doesn’t really change much for the caveman. On the other hand, let’s say a caveman cheats on his cavewoman sexually. If he gets these other women knocked up, that doesn’t really matter for his wifey. But if he cheats on her emotionally, he may invest more of his time hunting for his new gal, which leaves Mrs. Cavewoman and her babies depleted of resources. What do ya think?

To score my own island in THE WORLD? 

If you don’t know, this photo is of 300 manmade islands off of Dubai in the Middle East. If you click that link, it’ll take you to the wikipedia article about it. This thing cost 14 billion dollars to make. It’s going to be lots of hotels and resorts. It’s (obviously) in the shape of earth (an oblate spheroid?) and you (ha! like “you” will ever go) can swim from country to country to continent. Unfortunately, I don’t think the islands’ millionaire/billionaire owners have the hots for me. There’s a rumor Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are buying Ethiopia. HA!

 

 

 

 

I’m not gonna lie, I miss the days when friends would just show up at my door without the text! I’m guilty of it too though. Ours is a strange generation because we can clearly remember life before cell phones, text messages, caller ID, internet, etc. Now even little kids have cell phones. When was the last time somebody just showed up at your door, unexpectedly?

When I go to a friend’s house, I usually give them a, “I just left my house!” text followed by a, “I am at your house” text. Why are we so afraid to ring the doorbell/knock?

As much as I would love to return to the good ol’ days, I guess I have to accept that times are changin’ and go with it. I have to admit, though, I hate facebook, instant message, and text messages, although I am addicted to this new and strange form of socialization. I especially hate how things get misinterpretted. “Look, Rachel… look at this text message he sent me. He only added one exclaimation mark instead of two. He must not be into me.” Shit like that. Stupid shit like that. Oh, and I hate these kinds of misinterpretation: “this isn’t working.” (Our relationship? Or the phone?) What about this one I got recently on facebook from this DB I haven’t talked to in four years… “Hey baby. I’m drunk. Do you want to hook up?” Ew. Just some advice. Humor doesn’t come out right and neither does flirtation. A question mark is not sexy. 

Okay. Text messages are useful in some situations. When you have just a simple question: “what time is the party,” or statement: “I’ll call you back later. I’m in class.” That works. Sometimes, you just can’t talk. And sometimes, you don’t want to accidentally start a conversation with a chatty person. 

Anyway, just a rant. Maybe I’ll fight the urge and just show up next time. 

I just watched a horrifying episode of the show, Autopsy. A woman went to a medical examiner to prove that she wasn’t the cause of death for three of her children. She lost a baby daughter to SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome) while sleeping with her. Two years later, she had twin boys. She got drunk with a friend one night and went to sleep with the babies. They died of SIDS. Of course, the cops and society interrogated her and made it out like she killed them. The medical examiner did autopsies and found out there is no genetic proof that the babies died in any other way than by her rolling over in her sleep and accidentally suffocating them. I feel horrible for the woman! But I do wonder why she slept with the twins after having lost a child in the same way. The truth it, people just shouldn’t sleep with their babies. Check this out and learn the facts if you have an infant or plan on ever having children. Don’t ever keep stuffed animals or pillows or blankets near the infant’s face while they sleep. And babies should sleep on their backs! Sleeping with your baby can be a bonding/comforting experience, but it’s not worth it! 

We all have psychological disorders on some level. Lots of little kids have weird OCD tendencies but they disappear for most kids as soon as they get older and get made fun of. For others, unfortunately, the disorder is innate (genetically?) and they can’t consciously “quit” their ticks. Some count their steps or tap something with their right hand if they tap that something first with their left hand, to “even it out.” OCD is an anxiety disorder. You can say, “Joe, just stop turning the door knob 15 times! How about once?” or “Allison, just STOP washing your hands! It’s not that hard! Just don’t do it!” It’s not that easy. On the same level, you can’t just tell an anorexic to just “eat something, for god’s sake” or tell somebody who is morbidly obese to just lay off the calories. For some, it’s impossible.

 

Is cracking your knuckles a form of OCD? Biting your nails? OCD is an anxiety disorder. If Joe turns the doorknob 14 times, he feels incredibly anxious. He just has to turn it the 15^th time. What if he doesn’t? He will! Because it’s the only relief for this horribly crippling anxiety! Is smoking an anxiety disorder? Drug addiction? Alcoholism? I think so. Try telling a smoker to just “stop smoking then! If you hate it, then just don’t have another one!” Good luck with that. (Although you may have better luck now since the price of cigarettes in Suffolk County, Long Island just got raised to $6.50 and $8.50 in NYC.) 

 

One of the most strange and fascinating disorders is hoarding. For those of you who don’t know about it, hoarding is a form of OCD where somebody has intense anxiety about their possessions and they collect a ton of shit and never throw any of it out. What many people don’t know about is animal hoarding. When my 7th grade science teacher got busted for having tons of animals (dead, alive, and some barely alive) in his house and living in feces, I thought he was just being cruel to animals. I cannot believe there’s more than one person out there who has that disease! I guess I should have figured there was a relationship between Mr. Balsamo and the crazy cat ladies you see on the news who won’t let the authorities take away their precious cats. 

 

There’s a fine line between abnormal and normal. Check the DSM-IV-TR. It’s a clinical guide to psychological disorders. You’re in there. 

Aww!! I don’t think we’d ever eat a baby chick. But chickens are okay because they’re ugly. Are they really ugly? Or do we just pretend all the animals we eat are the ugly elite so we feel better about ourselves for eating them? Before we started eating chickens, were chicks still naturally inclined to become ugly? Which came first?

Listen. I don’t criticize anybody for eating meat. Eat dog shit for all I care! I feel bad for the environment and for suffering animals that you eat meat, but there’s nothing I can do about it and I can’t judge. I would love to be vegan for the sake of animals and the environment, but I don’t think I could ever, in my life, give up ice cream. Chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream drenched in chocolate syrup and peanut butter sauce with Reese’s Pieces just does the trick for me. Plus, if I were vegan, it would be such a pain in the ass to do anything food-related because I’d have to search the ingredients of everything with a magnifying glass. You’d be surprised how much packaged food has “beef” in the fine print of the ingredients. Especially on Long Island, living vegan would be obnoxious as hell. Restaurants and family parties would be out of the question. I’d be dining alone for every meal and ridiculed for it, I’m sure. Not to mention, healthy food is expensive. 

 

Anyway, like I said, I wouldn’t want to give up chocolate and lots of other goodies that come from eggs and dairy. So I understand that you can’t give up meat, because you think chicken is so damn good. My point is, stop acting like I’m protesting against you just because I turn down a steak! So many people, when they discover I’m vegetarian because I refuse to eat a “vegetarian” salad drenched in bacon bits, think I’m personally attacking them. My theory is that all people feel guilty (especially after seeing those sad videos about chickens being debeaked and other animals being forced into tiny cages and pumped with hormones that allow them to grow abnormally large…) and the guilt causes cognitive dissonance. The ego cannot bear to feel that he or she is doing something morally wrong just because he or she cannot give up that chicken. Instead, the ego justifies immoral actions by thinking things such as: vegetarians are ridiculous, I am right/They are wrong, humans are made to eat meat, vegetarians are unhealthy and pale, you can’t get protein on a vegetarian diet, the animals are going to be conceived and slaughtered anyway- I’ll do my part and eat them so they don’t go to waste. Do you really believe these things, or is your ego playing a trick on you? If you still believe all these statements (and probably more), I encourage you to read this…. Although I know your ego will come up with ways to contradict the statistics.