8 posts tagged “selfportrait”
Unbelievable, I know, but today I'm celebrating 70 days (or ten weeks) since I last had a cigarette, or indeed even a puff of a cigarette. Well, FUCK ME, MAN. And why does this particular attempt at quitting seem to be taking so well, as opposed to the other nine times I've tried quitting and miserably failed? You got me -- just a combination of age, I guess, my rapidly detiorating health my last year as a smoker, and the fact that I used nicotine patches this time as well, the first three weeks of quitting. Whatever the reason, I'm grateful.
For those who are curious, by the way, the temptation to smoke hasn't gone away one bit for me; right now, for example, I'm sitting in the outdoor seating at Lakeview's Intelligentsia Coffeehouse (Broadway and Barry), and there's somebody next to me smoking a cigarette, and to this day the smell of that cigarette smoke is awfully enticing, and reminds me of just how goddamn good that first cigarette of the day used to be. And to admit the pathetic truth, the main way I'm dealing with such temptations is to run away like a little girl -- to simply walk away from smokers when their smoke gets too tempting, or better yet not be around smokers at all, which of course is ridiculously easy to do in Chicago where all indoor smoking is banned except in certain bars. In fact, now that I think about it, that's probably something else that's helped with this particular quitting attempt; the city is more hostile these days towards smokers than during any of my other quit attempts, meaning that I'm not always running into smokers on train platforms and in cafes, and of course and bicycling a lot more this year so am not running into them at bus stops either. That's part of it, to tell you the truth -- to just have cigarettes in general be out of sight, out of mind, and not have any reasons at all to spend even an extra second of my day thinking about them.
Anyway, I'm still slowly counting the days until my 100-day anniversary -- I'm still considering myself in my "dangerous" period of quitting until then, and in fact am not planning on referring to myself as an ex-smoker until my one-year anniversary. Until then, here's hoping I can continue avoiding temptation.
We here in Chicago are just starting to get that front of bad weather that kept Montana and Wyoming so miserable yesterday; the worst of it's coming this weekend, but even today the wind was up in my neighborhood to a good 20 or 30 miles per hour (30 to 50 kph). And I learned something very important today about bicycling in such weather, too; that when such wind was to my back, I was able to cover 2.5 miles (4 km) in 10 minutes, an unheard-of rate for me, while the return trip (with the wind in my face) took an unbelievable 35 minutes, including a half-mile of walking my bike because I was about to throw up from overstressing my system. Man, who knew that the wind could have such a profound, profound effect on how efficient one's bicycling might be? Anyway, lesson learned: don't go bicycling when the wind is whipping around at 30 miles per hour!
It's my 38th birthday! And I don't have much planned for it, truthfully, other than to get out to a coffeehouse for awhile during the day, and see if any birthday presents might or might not show up in the mail later. I wanted a change in the usual view today, so went up to the Starbucks at Lawrence and Broadway; I'm working on a longer entry for my main website [jasonpettus.com] in my paper notebook, which I'll be posting tomorrow, but thought for today would at least get up a photo and a few short thoughts here. Internet is still off at my apartment, by the way -- ten days and counting at this point, which has me so frustrated I could scream. I'm living the vast majority of my life online these days, after all, including it being the sole medium right now by which I make money; so having it off recently has not only been a personal frustration, but really a ten-day forced unpaid vacation as well. Anyway, they're promising it'll be back on tomorrow, so we'll see.
By the way, happy birthday as well to my cousin Rob (a reader of my various online projects), who will be celebrating his 38th himself tomorrow (we were born two hours apart, in fact, with midnight splitting the difference), but who in his case will be celebrating in Baghdad while getting shot at, courtesy Bush's recent little decision for a surge in troops in Iraq. Godspeed, Rob, godspeed.
I've been even more of a shut-in than normal the last couple of weeks (and that's saying a lot), as the cold and snow has many times kept me even from my daily cup of coffee out at a neighborhood cafe, which on many days is the only interaction with the outside physical world I have at all. And now here it is, Saturday night, and I'm bored and feel like going out, and amazingly enough actually have enough extra money right now to do so; but this is the problem with being a shut-in for an extended period of time, that even when you do feel like going out, you can't figure out an activity or destination that seems worth the trouble of going out in the first place.
Go to a bar? I suppose; but I've been heading to bars while bored for almost 20 years now, and know already that most of the time it leads only to a night of me getting drunk by myself and watching all the nauseatingly cute couples who surround me. Maybe a cafe? Better, although ultimately you've really only replaced the alcohol and jukebox with caffeine and pretension. Attend a movie or play? Yeah, although those are ultimately solitary evenings as well, which makes me think I should spare myself the trouble and money and just stay home.
So most likely I'll end up spending Saturday night the way I spend most Saturday nights; get high, watch "Star Trek," go on Second Life, watch "The Shield," jerk off and go to bed. Who said the life of internet rockstars ain't glamorous!?
Actual temperature in my neighborhood right now: -5 degrees (-21 C); wind-chill temperature, -30 (-34 C). Sounds like it's time for my militia gear! See, my parents have bought enough stuff now through mail-order catalogs over the years that they now have hundreds of these catalogs sent to them, including a couple for the survivalist militia member of your family; and it was while looking at some of this survivalist winter gear in one of these catalogs one holiday that it occurred to me that the stuff would work well at battling Chicago winters too, which is how I ended up getting six or eight pieces of it for Christmas a couple of years ago. The stuff works great, but one looks like one of those creepy survivalist "I always dreamed of being a ninja" types when wearing it, which is why I don't usually wear it all at once; if a 30-below day, though, can't inspire such a thing, I don't know what can.
Self-portrait on a cold night here in Uptown, Chicago, wearing the new scarf that my brother and sister-in-law got me for Christmas, patiently waiting for my Chinese food to be ready. Then more work, more work, more work!
P.S. Not really.
P.P.S. No, yeah, really.
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