Well...

Friends are friends, so I have to give a shout-out to those who care about me. Actually I don't, you know who you are. I'm sorry about the previous post (now deleted). To say that my friends don't care about me is complete and utter b.s., and I hope you forgive me for that oversight.

I crashed on the cigarettes. I'm ashamed of myself, but relieved for the moment. As a very good friend made me recognize, I wasn't in a place where I was comfortable enough yet to do it. Maybe once/if this job goes through to permanent and I have a little more security in my life...

I was becoming a stark raving lunatic, for the most part. Even with the lozenges. Cigarettes provide something else besides the nicotine addiction. Something horribly habitual, which is far worse than any addiction itself. I'm going to have to figure out what it is about myself that I deal with by smoking, and learn to cope with it. Once I do, the desire to smoke will go away naturally. It could be as simple as weaning myself off the damn things slowly. We'll see. Either way, I have NOT given up on the idea of quitting them. In fact, I'm more resolved than ever to get it done.

It's about 1 a.m. and I thought I'd do a little ditty of a blog while I wait for this impossibly long file transfer to go through to Shanghai.

It's interesting that I volunteered to do this. I remember when my boss first asked the group "Who wants to come in at midnight for a special install in China?", two things crossed my mind immediately.

1. A chance to stack the deck and show him that I'm a team player, yada yada.
2. I get to go home at 8 a.m.

Those were the initial reasons that caused me to speak up.

But one has to wonder...are those the only reasons? Of course not. There are trade-offs to everything, I suppose. The most obvious being that I'm going to be exhausted and my sleeping schedule is going to screw up. I left my wife to sleep alone at home, something she doesn't like (and I really don't like either now that I think about it). But...selfish as I am...after volunteering I couldn't ignore the interesting idea that I would be basically here, alone, unfettered, for 5 hours of my work day. I can do my job with no interruptions. I can get up and go smoke whenever without being noticed. I can belch and fart as much as I like. Now that I definitely don't have a problem with. Is that selfish of me? Maybe. But there's still the trade offs that I have to deal with.

Also (and this is something very few people know about me), I'm always looking to break the monotony in my life, whatever it may be. Nobody likes to work. I have never met a single person who does, but that's just life. And I always look at things like this working late as a chance to do something different, even if it's some crazy bullshit like working off-the-wall hours of the night. Well, off-the-wall compared to my normal schedule. If a night like this became a habit, I'd hate it. I think that's why I never handled your 'standard' daytime office job very well.

Take my last job before working for this company for example. Law firm. I was a paralegal by title. I did well my first few months there, very well. Well enough to get a $3,000/year raise by my third month. They liked me so much they promoted me to a position and fired the girl in that position the same day. I liked my job. Then my job got more tedious. And actually, tedious isn't a big problem at all for me. Sometimes the more tedious, the better.

But it got monotonous. I dealt with the city and county tax assessors regularly. Once in a blue moon, even the mayor's office. I should have been honored, I suppose. Even my divorce dragged me down, but it wasn't the final reason I quit. I quit because I couldn't stand the monotony of it. I was going nowhere, doing nothing new. Nothing changed. Every day the same pile of affidavits had to be drafted. Every day the same legal documents had to be typed up for the court docket. Every day the same attorney came to my desk and yelled at me in front of everyone for doing the job wrong (it wasn't me, she was just like that to everyone except her personal favorites...I don't play that game with people). Day after day, it was just a long pile of paperwork. I soon realized my job was stagnating like a festering pile of trash, and because of it, I was learning nothing new, in addition to doing the same hellish job every day. So, my current friend/boss told me there were positions available where I'm working now, and I walked out on that job two weeks prior to coming here. Only job I've ever walked out on. There were other things, I suppose. Dishonest supervisors, for one thing. A general tight-assedness in that place that I just couldn't stand.

But what drove me away from it was monotony.

I've always been a very good independent worker once I've figured out whatever system of a job it is I'm doing. Indepedent to the point where I don't like human contact once I get going. I've been told that's an ADD trait. Whatever. I think it's just a me trait. If I'm knee deep in several projects at once, and you come to me asking me to do something else, I'll take it with the most fiendishly conjured 'Sure!' that you will ever hear. But rest assured, when you walk away, I've already pondered a hundred ways to make you pay. :)

Lovely. The site I agreed to come in and do has NO idea what their setup is as far as dial-up or broadband. F**kers. Oh well.

See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil....Or Snap Out of it, Man!

Hmph.

Well, I can't think of anything good to write about, but I promise that I will not write again until I can think of something 'nice'. No, I haven't been myself, and no, I can't think of anything positive, upbeat nor funny like I usually can, but if such an anecdote ever hits me, I'll write about it.

This is due to recent criticism of my work from several friends.

I will say to anyone who thinks I'm being overly melodramatic and too high-strung, you have no idea the things I have been through in recent times. You have no idea what I have to do every night to keep from yanking my hair out by the roots.

Excuse me for baring my soul...guess it was too damn much for most of you to handle. So, there may not be another post for awhile.

"The good, by and large, is an illusion, little fables people tell themselves every morning to keep themselves from screaming." -- Andre Linoge, 'Storm of the Century' by Stephen King

Sunday...the Day to Loathe

Yes, it's true. It's all true. I hate Sundays. Well, now that I'm working again, anyway. I hate them with a passion.

Why? I spend all day dreading Monday. The truth be told, Mondays are just as likely to be stressful as any other day of the work week. But it's an old habit, a habit as old as the first day I set foot into a room of kindergardners at the age of 5. It's a habit I doubt I'll break sometime in the next millenium.

Sometimes when I stress I wake up the next day feeling pretty bad. Leftover soreness from muscle tension due to the stress. I often wonder if that's the key to me feeling like shit on Mondays when I go in.

I don't know what I dread anymore, seriously. Nothing's there on Monday that's going to bite me any harder than any of the other days of the week.

So One Manager Says, Part 2...

This afternoon, after literally busting my cahones to get as much of the client's sites done as I could, my immediate boss, the one who came back and wasn't happy, said to me about an hour before quitting time, "Good job getting those closed, man."

Err, after I picked my jaw up off the floor, I made my usual unassuming remark, I don't take praise well. "Hey, no problem, I'm just glad that blah blah".

Funny, I found out later when he first came in that his foot was swollen badly for some reason.

By the time he complimented me he had taken a certain pain killer I know all too well.

Three cheers for the power of Vicodin!

So one manager says.....

....hold off, and he works with me on it. The problems with the client don't appear to be resolved, so he says to escalate to his boss, which I do. Then the first boss goes on vacation until today.

I escalate to his boss, who sits for two days plus the weekend on it. We finally figure out on Monday that the first boss was right all along.

First boss comes back today, and he seems very unhappy that the issue wasn't resolved, and that it should be my fault. Even though I've been busting my BUTT getting the issue resolved for the entire duration he's been away. But he didn't SEE that part of it, and now my reputation with him has to have been sullied.

God, if you exist, if you're up there, PLEASE give me a shot at redeeming my reputation with this guy. I know this situation wasn't my fault, but still... it's upsetting. My job now rides on his opinion of me, as well as others.

Chronicles of an Ex-Smoker, Part 3

Hmmmmm, interesting.

I'm totally fine, and was totally fine yesterday. For some reason, when I wrote Monday's blog I just felt like someone had gone to work on me with a sledgehammer, as I stated before.

Very strange indeed. But that's as far as I want to question it right now, because to do so might ruin a good thing. So I'll hark back to yesterday instead...

Yesterday I explained this odd shift in physical pain to my oldest friend of 27 years, his response:

"I dunno, maybe you're some kind of stress junkie. I do know you need a vacation, and I'm not talking about some lame drive through Texas. You need to get out of the country for about a week if you can help it."

Now, he knows I don't have the money to spend on that sort of thing, he was just trying to lighten the mood, and get me to dream a bit. Pipe dreaming is a good escape, as long as you don't take the pipe dream too seriously.

I do readily admit that I'm more prone to being inflicted by stress than others. It's something I bottle up, or just whine about from time to time. I really hate that part of myself. If I knew how to shed it, I would have done so by now.

If the old addage "mellow with age" is true, then I guess I have a few things to look forward to.

Chronicles of an Ex-Smoker, Part 2: Losing My Mind

I can't stand these nicotine lozenges. They don't help me much cope with everyday stress. But what can I do? If I go off them, I won't have the willpower just yet to cope with nicotine loss in my system. I'll crash back to the cigarettes.

Plus something else has happened...overall, I feel like utter shit.

Complete and utter shit. I go to bed just fine but wake up feeling like I've been through a train wreck. Body aching in all kinds of places, that sort of thing. In fact, I'm hurting right now. I guess I have some belief that -- if this is just stress -- that writing it down will help make me feel better. Typically, by about 10-11 a.m. (mere hours from quitting time) I feel better.

It doesn't help that someone tried to break into our apartment last weekend while we were away from it.

I don't know if the cigarette quitting has anything to do with how I feel, I just know that I've been far more absent-minded than usual, a lot slower in terms of mental performance overall, and definitely physically slower.

For those that don't know, I became a walrus in the year following my original back injury last year. Doctor's orders not to move for months on end, but it's a long story. But someone my height shouldn't weigh 330 pounds, that's the point. I'd been trying, prior to quitting smoking, a rigorous (rigorous for me) exercise program on my stationary bike, 15 minutes a day, 3 times per week. Since I quit smoking, I've been too exhausted to even force myself up on that bike.

I've noticed notable improvements, but are they improvements considering that I'm quitting smoking? Here are my current cigarette stats, courtesy of a prog I put on my desktop:

Stuart - Free and Healing for Seven Days, 13 Hours and 15 Minutes, while extending my life expectancy 22 Hours, by avoiding the use of 264 nicotine delivery devices that would have cost me $50.77.

All that accomplished in one week. But, I wonder if I shouldn't have tackled my weight first. Cigarette smoking 9 times out of 10 causes weight gain after cessation. My weight is critical right now, I can't afford to gain another pound, much less the typical 10 or 20 that are supposed to come with cigarette loss. And although I feel I'm handling this entire situation admirably overall, I unfortunately do eat a lot, and am eating a little more since I quit to keep myself from crashing. That's why I wonder if I shouldn't have tackled my weight first.

This is a double-ended sword as well. My weight isn't helping my back injury, not one damned bit. I suffered permanent nerve conduction loss in my legs, and they're already working triple-time just to propel my big ass everywhere. Plus the L5/S1 disc that I ruptured and herniated, it's at a place inside my body that just can't handle my monster gut hanging from it.

There's a little jealousy on my end, too, as my wife has lost 17 pounds in the last month. She has Weight Watchers at work, and a healthy support group in there with her. She's encouraged me to join it, but I'm honestly skeptical as hell that I'd do any good on it without the support like she has at work with the weekly meetings. Focusing too hard on a diet right now might drive my cigarette withdrawal to levels of insanity to a point where I crash, too, so I have to keep that in mind. But I am a bit envious of her...she's looking very nice...and I'm looking very Abrams A-1-like.

And all the while, the normal household items that get done by me (dishes, vacuuming, living room, kitchen, laundry) are falling by the wayside and my wife is having to pick up the slack because I'm so damned exhausted.

Maybe this has nothing to do with my quitting smoking. Maybe the stress from quitting smoking is exacerbating my already-existing problems. I distinctly remember telling a friend how effing tired I've been prior to quitting smoking. Yes, I told my doctor too, now that I think about it. That was before I quit.

I wasn't like this before I agreed to move back to an early morning shift. Shit...

...I just don't get it. Maybe all this will iron itself out in a week or so. That's another thing -- still worried about work. Very worried. If I don't get hired permanently in January, my wife and I are going to be fucked, money wise, in spite of our admirable saving in the previous months. I'm being given reassurances that are encouraging, but at the same time, I see things that are discouraging too. I really enjoy the nature of the work I do. But I'm also up against several pretty decent guys, any one of whom are as deserving of a permanent position within this company as I am, imo.

All I know is the longer I go without a cigarette, the harder it actually gets to not pick one up. There's never a 'good' or 'ideal' time to quit. I could have used that excuse NOT to quit if I wanted to, but I didn't.

Maybe the moral to my story is simply this. I have problems and they aren't going away easily nor quickly.

The Chronicles of an Ex-Smoker Begin

So, I'm sitting here at work pondering things again. I'm in a constant state of pondering...maybe that's why Ali's always asking me 'What?'. Anyway...

I quit smoking this week as a part of my fighting back at the stack of cards life has dealt me. And tbh, it's made me a little loopy. And crazy. I have yet to really go off on anyone, but I know the pain of quitting smoking quite well. I've done it before, you see. I suppose the catch is, you don't go back to smoking.

The past two times I did that, obviously.

So, I just sit here, pondering whether to pop a prescription Vicodin in my delirium, give into the precious nicotine lozenges in my lunch bag, or just sit here and get worse and worse until I can't stand it anymore, then do both and then some.

All I know is, I won't give into the madness burning my mind of wanting another cigarette. I will not. My poor singing voice is coming back, I'm not getting winded when I wobble up a flight of stairs like I used to, and I feel overall much better without them. I keep my mind on the person at the end of the tunnel when this psychological and physical withdrawal is all, for the most part, over with.

Oh yeah, that's another thing. I'm at work right now, why in the hell am I writing this blog? I mean, yeah, I'm doing an upload atm at 3.5kbps so it's taking a minute, but I guess that's beside the point. Better go back to my quiet little corner of the corporate world........